Although I haven’t seen the new X-Men movie yet, I don’t have an incredible desire at this point. From most reviews, it’s pretty much a meh movie. I wasn’t impressed with most of the cast choices when they were on the previous year’s Comic Con panel (Jubilee and Cyclops by far were the worst). But for the most part as long as Bryan Singer is in charge, I feel that this movie will continue to strike out as nothing more than a popcorn flick and a failure as a franchise in the hearts of X-Men fans.
The biggest problem I’ve seen thus far with the series is that each movie attempts to be incredibly ambitious in shrinking down the series into a few hours at best. The X-Men is all about the characters to me and with only a few hours, you cannot do enough justice to develop each person into something meaningful. The only character thus far that received enough attention has been Wolverine. Obviously, Hugh Jackman had done a wonderful job with the role but he pretty much overshadowed virtually everyone else on the franchise.
The reboot seems to have the desire to cast new actors but just having a new face isn’t enough to breathe fresh life into a dying series. For X-Men to succeed, you need ample screen time to develop each character. Right now, there’s anywhere between 8-10+ main characters with tons of minor characters. But take Cyclops and Storm in the last two X-Men (prior to the reboot); both practically were non-existent. Yet those two are two of the most important characters to the story! It’s insulting just because the producer/writer has a biased towards particular actors/actresses that cause this schism in screen time.
Some people may have pointed out that the actors/actresses given the roles weren’t good fits. Honestly, it won’t matter who plays the part if the story is bad and the script is awful. In the case of Storm, I don’t want to blame Halle Berry and I feel that the original Cyclops got a bad shake because they gave him poor writing. The real problem is that they gave all the meaty stuff to Hugh Jackman.
With the rebooted series, all the good stuff is going to Jennifer Lawrence. Although she’s a pretty face, let’s face facts: she’s not good for the role. But again this is the producer/writer/director’s bias towards a top name star as opposed to making the role and script work.
I want to contrast X-Men with the way the Avengers had been handled. The great thing about the Avengers is that they built up towards the group meeting each other. So each hero had their own movie to build up their characters individually and create a bond with their audience. By the time we get to the first Avengers movie the focus becomes how these personalities interact with each other.
In the case of the X-Men, there’s just too many characters, most of who have little to no personality in the movies. X-Men Evolution did a far better job in executing on character development just because they would focus on one character at a time, giving everyone, even minor characters, a chance to shine.
I think for the X-Men movie franchise, they need to cut the main group down to four people just like the original comic and slowly add heroes in. Take Days of Future Past as exactly what not to do. We get tons of new X-Men, but so what? Fans can recognize which person is which. But to the mainstream audience there is no meaning between one mutant to another beyond the power. So why even bother wasting screen time? It’s just fan service at that point but it’s a complete disservice to the movie.
Now, the positive news that I read recently about the franchise is that Fox supposedly will produce a TV series. We already had Heroes and we have Agents of Shield for a mutant-type of TV series. I’m hoping that if this series is true to form for the X-Men, they use the main characters but develop them slowly. Don’t rush and introduce 30 characters in a single episode. Give people time to digest a few at a time and build up towards something.
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