![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI watched the first X Men movie.
It's sort of lifeless.
It's very earnest, and serious, and angsty, and then there's a bunch of fighting.
I'm not much impressed with the fighting. The first time the team actually seems capable and effective is also the last fight in the film. Like, after they've been captured by Magneto. Up until then they get kicked a lot and individually. They don't seem like they deserve the win, really.
But the other guys aren't exactly engaging. Magneto gets some speeches that would be sympathetic if he didn't respond by killing random dudes, but the others don't so much talk as make growl noises or whatever. It's sort of boring.
Plus the pretty vs ugly problem.
If you're going to have one actual enemy and some henchmen, okay, that makes sense. But the thing with X Men is showing it's a bad thing when mutants are being treated like things, like alien, other, incomprehensible, animal. So when the film presents Magneto's lot that way that's a problem.
When the X Men are that boring that also is a bit of a problem. There's little sense of what and why. Like, people are running away but it's from their own powers, so mutants are in fact a threat. What are they running from? People accidentally dying on them? People responding poorly to them drawing really big knives?
So choosing sides is a mess.
I don't know, I keep poking at it to find whichever bit needed fixing, because it's just a big Could Do Better.
I realise The Avengers raised the bar, and with all the lead in movies changed the paradigm, there will be things possible now that wouldn't have worked for X Men, but it's just... unsatisfying, this movie.
I think if it was meant to be a chess match between Xavier and Magneto it almost worked but not quite, and if it was meant to be anything else it didn't work by a lot more. And I kept getting the feeling we were meant to care because they're the X Men and we're expected to know what that means. Like the movie didn't sell it because it doesn't think it has to. Not as cool as it could be.
Eh, still don't know which bit I weren't happy with.
I'll watch the second one.
It's sort of lifeless.
It's very earnest, and serious, and angsty, and then there's a bunch of fighting.
I'm not much impressed with the fighting. The first time the team actually seems capable and effective is also the last fight in the film. Like, after they've been captured by Magneto. Up until then they get kicked a lot and individually. They don't seem like they deserve the win, really.
But the other guys aren't exactly engaging. Magneto gets some speeches that would be sympathetic if he didn't respond by killing random dudes, but the others don't so much talk as make growl noises or whatever. It's sort of boring.
Plus the pretty vs ugly problem.
If you're going to have one actual enemy and some henchmen, okay, that makes sense. But the thing with X Men is showing it's a bad thing when mutants are being treated like things, like alien, other, incomprehensible, animal. So when the film presents Magneto's lot that way that's a problem.
When the X Men are that boring that also is a bit of a problem. There's little sense of what and why. Like, people are running away but it's from their own powers, so mutants are in fact a threat. What are they running from? People accidentally dying on them? People responding poorly to them drawing really big knives?
So choosing sides is a mess.
I don't know, I keep poking at it to find whichever bit needed fixing, because it's just a big Could Do Better.
I realise The Avengers raised the bar, and with all the lead in movies changed the paradigm, there will be things possible now that wouldn't have worked for X Men, but it's just... unsatisfying, this movie.
I think if it was meant to be a chess match between Xavier and Magneto it almost worked but not quite, and if it was meant to be anything else it didn't work by a lot more. And I kept getting the feeling we were meant to care because they're the X Men and we're expected to know what that means. Like the movie didn't sell it because it doesn't think it has to. Not as cool as it could be.
Eh, still don't know which bit I weren't happy with.
I'll watch the second one.