Always one to pursue useless knowledge wherever he can find it in a seemingly never-ending quest to achieve the improbable and downright unlikely status of modern-day Renaissance man, Mark Bittmann has indulged his desire to never be lost in any conversation, by developing an arcane understanding of things of little consequence or import while maintaining his alleged status as a small fish in a small pond.
As long as his self-indulgent whim is catered to, he manages to sustain the facade of someone under the misperception that others care about what he thinks. With a ubiquity normally reserved for greenhouse gasses, he chases his random and inconsequential thoughts with all the tenacity of a banana peel. This is his life, his curse, and his twisted and maniacal way of impressing the ladies.
Like just about every other comic book fan on the planet, I managed to wade through a considerable queue and obtain a ticket to X2, the years latest, but not last comic book based cinematic interpretation, and loved every minute of it. There are elements to Bryan Singer’s latest foray into the world of the Children of the Atom that I found so cool, I cannot wait to see it again on DVD with a fellow geek, so that we can pause the film and discuss the things we notice that those uninitiated to the world of the X-Men through the comic books do not.
However, before I start in on what was so cool about X-Men, how much does the accompanying new trailer for Ang Lee’s Hulk movie rock?
“Wow!” was just about all I was able to muster after finally seeing a full-length preview for Hulk on the silver screen as a preview before X2. My computer monitor does not do this latest preview justice. It looks killer! From the sheer mass of the Green Goliath to the heft they managed to convincingly imbue him with, he looks every bit the thousand pound bruiser, with a mass of muscle on stout legs each as big as a linebacker and the ability to use them for spanning great distances at a leap. He topples parked cars like dominoes and throws tanks around the desert like whirling, Olympic-level practitioner of the hammer-throw. Except one isn’t exactly sure where his considerably more massive projectiles land…or if they even re-enter the stratosphere. Evidently Ang Lee with a budget is something to be reckoned with. From what comparatively little the public has seen so far, it appears as though every bit of the studios considerable cash (rumored to be in the 100 million plus range) is right up there on screen. The scale of the film matches the scale of the Hulk. There is the requisite, big government laboratory where Hulk is born, plenty of metropolitan locales for him to rampage through and create general havoc in, and the standard large-scale military effort to contain him as well. The weaponry looks formidable enough to demolish your average Middle Eastern regime for kicks and the size of the battlefield looks as though it were limited to an entire desert for us to witness him unleash his power on outclassed military troops in a theatre befitting the scope his rage. From the lack of a discernable neck to the purple pants, it looks like our Hulk up there, the one that fans of the comic book want to see. But I digress…
Now, onward with my thoughts of X2 and we may as well start with the quibbles, as they are both minute and few.
How come Wolverine was able to sense the military presence in the mansion, but we weren’t shown how in the form of his sniffing the air and smelling gun oil, boot polish and camouflage face paint? Likewise when Mystique slinks into his tent as Jean to steal a quickie with him? He doesn’t sense that it isn’t Jean until he feels the hat trick of scars on her oh-so-sexy tummy? What’s up with that? He should have smelled her coming and had his claws popped as soon the zipper was pulled on the tent he was, ahem…still pitching, just as his nose should have done the Bewitched twitch the moment he began to sense the mansion’s intruders. The animal side of Logan was handled better in this latest installment, in that we did get to see him kill many of Stryker’s Gestapo without thinking twice about it and other snatches of his feral nature. However, there is still room for improvement in playing up the use of his animal senses as well as all they are capable of. Some have accused this movie of not being particularly subtle and Wolverine using his nose and hearing to demonstrate his acute awareness of his surroundings is a subtle touch missing from the character. Other than that, Hugh Jackman has Logan nailed. So he’s a little tall for literally interpreting the physicality of Logan as seen between the pages of Marvel’s mutant monthlies, but the fact that he “gets” the character and understands his motives and nuances is what really matters. He shows no remorse or indication of a second-guessing of his own decision to eliminate Stryker’s minions with six adamantium claws to the chest and seems every bit the loner-in-a-crowd we fans of his comic book exploits expect Wolvie to act. He’s one tough customer, an adamantium-laced killing machine of barely-contained fury, tempered with a survivors discipline and ability and wrapped up in a relentless hunters drive and natural urge to track and kill anything he feels he needs to…and he feels it a lot.
Other than the lack of Wolverine overtly displaying his canine-like senses, I really didn’t find much else for the fanboy inside me to dislike about this movie. So much so that during the scene where the Blackbird suffers tailgate problems and Rogue takes a header out the back, I was sitting there in my seat and as soon as I saw her predicament, found myself saying out loud and to no one in particular, “Go Kurt.” And go he did. “Bamf” he took off like a shot into both freefall and Rogues assistance, teleporting her back to the safety of the Blackbird. It’s a treat when the movie version so resembles the dynamic we comic book fans are privy to that we know what action by what player we’ll be treated to as means to extract themselves from various predicaments. Such insight also grants us a greater ability to sense foreshadowing and understand a character’s motives. Who else besides we comic geeks know that Pyro’s destiny is at Magneto’s side? How many in any given movie theater knew what was happening to Jean at the end? Readers of the source material, that’s who. And the more Singer does to placate us and live up to our expectations the better the movies will be. We have been right about just what it is that makes the X-Men so compelling for nearly four decades and it is a relief to see a movie that reflects the director’s understanding of this.
The most refreshing thing about Bryan Singer’s X-Men movies is that, despite being a novice in X-Men lore when he was originally chosen as director, it is apparent that he takes the material and its themes as seriously as the fans do. For lack of a better analogy his X-Men do not come off as “comic booky” (a derogative term used by many an ignorant film critic to describe facile and empty action movies and employed here as more a literal observation). No spandex or melodrama. No preachy, agenda-spouting villains and plenty of sex and violence in a PG-13 sense. These X-Men are set in the real world and they wear it well. Now, if only they’d make a rated R Wolverine solo film…
