X-Men

Doesn't the tagline "Trust a Few, Fear the Rest" kind of go against the movie's message?

As the release of the X-Men franchise reboot/re-imagining/origin story, X-Men: First Class, rapidly approaches, I thought it would be interesting to re-watch X-Men and see how the ball got rolling.

To understand this movie, you have to accept that there has been a genetic trend in human births over the last sixty or so years that has allowed a tiny minority of people to be born with genetic mutations.  I'm not talking about your normal defects or abnormalities, though.

Ugly is not a super-power.

These mutations give extraordinary powers to otherwise normal people.  The powers range quite a bit, from the ability to control weather or magnetism to fast healing or being irresistible to women.

Hell-lloooo, ladies!

Can you buy into all that?  If not, this movie is going to seem a little silly.  Well, mutants (as the super-powered-by-birth are called) have apparently been trying to live normal lives, safe in their anonymity from the lynchings that can occur when people find something new to hate.  Seeing this as a dangerous status quo, Senator Kelly (Bruce Davidson) proposes legislation that will require all mutants to register themselves and their abilities with the US Government, essentially treating them as weapons.  Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) believes that Senator Kelly is frightened of what he doesn't understand, but that the general public will see the legislation as the bigoted mess it is.  His take on the situation is to protect humanity from angry mutants and things will get better.  Magneto (Ian McKellan), who survived German concentration camps, sees this as another attempt to wipe "his people" off the face of the planet.  Understandably, he decides to take a more offensive approach to this problem.  Both men have followers willing to fight for these two opposing ideologies, but the first steps toward a genetic war come when a runaway teen, Rogue (Anna Paquin), and a metal-boned and -clawed tough guy, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), suddenly pop up on the radars of Xavier and Magneto.

Man, the cast of X-Men is good!  Mostly.  Well, Hugh Jackman is perfect in the lead role as Wolverine, at the very least.  Angry and tough, yet confused and surprisingly caring, Jackman brought the iconic character to life.  Ian McKellan was great as the villainous Magneto, but it wasn't his nastiness that made him so appealing; McKellan succeeded in the always difficult task of making a bad guy sympathetic.  Patrick Stewart was also good as Xavier, and not just because he looks exactly like the comic character.  Stewart's eloquence and British accent helped make the almost saintly nature of Xavier plausible --- if only the screenwriters could have found a way for his character to not get sidelined in the movie, then we could have seen his kindness tested.

The rest of the cast was definitely supporting, when compared to those three.  Anna Paquin was solid as Rogue, and she managed to not be annoying or whiny in a role that could have easily swung that way.  I think James Marsden doesn't get enough credit for his work as Cyclops; yes, playing the uptight guy is pretty easy, but he and Jackman had a lot of chemistry with their verbal barbs.  Famke Janssen was completely acceptable as Jean Grey, even if the love triangle that formed around her was pretty underdeveloped.  Halle Berry, on the other hand, was truly wretched as Storm.  Pick an accent, already, lady!  It doesn't help matters that she delivered the absolute worst line in the whole movie: "Do you know what happens when a toad is struck by lightning?  The same thing that happens to everything else."  That's just terrible.

Two non-masturbation things that make you go blind: bad acting and bangs.

On the other hand, I liked Shawn Ashmore's performance as Iceman, even if it was steeped a little too heavily in teen melodrama.  As for the bad guys, Ray Park was pretty cool as Toad, even if he's just a green-painted stuntman.  I thought Rebecca Romijn looked pretty hot in her ridiculously naked "costume," and the special effects made her character seem awesome.  When you look a little closer, though, you realize that she almost never spoke and most of her "acting" involved her looking sexy.  Well, that's good enough for most people, I guess.

Not the most attractive "O" face, but I'll take it.

I was pretty disappointed in Tyler Mane's Sabretooth, though.  A lack of interesting dialogue, an over-reliance on wires to show off his super-strength and super-jumping (?) abilities, and a generally awful character design combined to make Sabretooth pretty lame.  And that's a shame, since --- in the comics, which are obviously not the movies --- he's basically Wolverine minus the conscience. 

Plucking and threading aren't enough...grab a mower to tame those brows!

Bryan Singer did a great job directing this film, with the exception of letting Halle Berry use a terrible accent (sometimes).  This is a character-driven movie, where these potentially silly and melodramatic mutants are seen as people instead of excuses for special effects.  That is what makes this movie so important.  Keep in mind that the last major super-hero movies before this were the too-violent-for-kids Blade and the awful Batman & Robin; if X-Men didn't deliver to a wide audience, you can be sure that Spider-Man and Batman Begins would not have been made (at least not in this decade).  I appreciated a lot of the choices made by Singer and his production team, too.  The black leather costumes keep the guffaws of implausibility away much longer than comic book costumes would have.  Making Wolverine the main character and leaving a lot of his history unexplained/under-explained gave his character (who is otherwise kind of un-invested in Xavier's team) motivation and a character arc.  The tone of the film is perhaps Singer's greatest legacy on this movie, as well as for all post-2000 comic book movies.  This feels like a science fiction film instead of an adaptation of a childish medium.

Hugh Jackman always has time to entertain with a Tonys-related tale.

The movie is not perfect, though.  Magneto's secret hideout is located in an island prison with no walkways between the cells?  Exactly where would that be?  The pace is a little slow, and nothing truly thrilling ever happens; it does an admirable job of setting up the premise with a fairly interesting story, so the sequel could be awesome.  The special effects are solid, but not spectacular.  What makes this movie seem more impressive is the awful development hell it went through before being made this way.  There were several script rewrites, many directors, and Hugh Jackman was cast as Wolverine after the movie had been filming for three weeks already; the actor originally signed to play the part was the awful Dougray Scott, who backed out to film Mission: Impossible II.  The film also had Joss Whedon do a dialogue-fixing rewrite for one of the older, stupider scripts; his script allegedly only had two lines make the final movie --- Storm's lightning and toads line and the one where Wolverine calls Cyclops a dick, the worst and best (respectively) lines of the movie.  When you think of the other Marvel Comics movies that had been made before this (the Dolph Lungren Punisher and the rubber-eared Captain America) and how easily this film could have been made into something like them, I think X-Men deserves some respect.  And it helps that it's a good movie.

I should also point out that I am a ridiculously big X-Men comics fan (like, 30+ solid years of collecting big), so I know good and bad X-Men stories when I see them.  Writing this review also reminded me of the awesomely cheesy (but still awesome for its time) X-Men cartoon and its cool theme music.  Adapting that theme into a symphonic film score would have made this movie near perfect for my nerdy tastes.

Dune

Have you ever heard of Alan Smithee?  For a little over thirty years, it was the credit given to directors that wanted to disavow their work in a particular film due to the final version of the film not meeting their creative vision.  In other words, if the star or studio re-cut the movie, the director could protest by crediting the work to Smithee.  It's happened many times over the years, and Eric Idle made a terrible movie that joked about the process, so you may have heard of Smithee by now.  What I didn't know until I researched it for two or three minutes (I love the internet!) was that directors sometimes requested a Smithee credit for re-edited versions of their movies, like those shown in airplanes or on television.  Why do I bring this up?  I knew that one of the many versions of Dune that was aired on television had David Lynch's name removed from both the directing and writing credits.  While I haven't seen the Smithee version of the film (also known as the "Extended Version" on DVD), it can't be much worse than this approved version.

Dune is a high-concept science fiction yarn based on the excellent book of the same name by Frank Herbert.  Dune tackles a lot of serious themes and has an intricate plot that was thought, for many years, to be unworkable as a movie, and they may have been right.  This is a movie that delves into politics on a grand scale, ecology, Zen Buddhism, and revolution, all in two-and-a-half hours.  If that seems like a long movie, you're right.  It's still not enough time to develop all of those concepts simultaneously.  On the bright side, the movie soundtrack was done by Toto! They rawk!

Okay, now a quick quiz... What's the best part of this video?
A) The sweatbands on the keyboardist's wrists.
B) The singer finding Africa: The Book! and giving himself a satisfied nod.
C) The band singing a song allegedly about Africa and the video taking place on a large book.
D) That it manages to devalue an entire continent (54 countries!) in under five minutes.

The film begins with Princess Irulan (Virginia Madsen) explaining the state of the universe to the camera.  In the distant future, the universe is ruled by Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV (Jose Ferrer) and the most valuable resource in the universe is the spice melange.  Melange is kind of like a cosmic LSD, only useful; it expands the mind, prolongs the user's life, and is essential to space travel.  The Spacing Guild's Navigators use the drug to see the future and fold space, which makes space travel faster and safer.  The problem with melange is that is only grows on one stinking planet, Arrakis AKA Dune.  With this explanation, the Princess is not seen again until the last ten minutes of the film, where she might not have had any dialogue.

Are you with me so far?  Well, in an effort to smash a political rival, Emperor Shaddam is giving control of Arrakis to, um, his rival, Duke Leto Atreides (Jurgen Prochnow).  That doesn't make much sense, does it?  Well, the Emperor is arranging to have the Atreides' longtime rival, the Harkonnens, ambush Atriedes on Arrakis.  When the Spacing Guild's Navigators foresee these events, they demand that the Emperor kill not only Duke Leo, but also his son, Paul (Kyle MacLachlan).  These future-seers think that Paul is a danger to their melange supply.  So, the Emperor agrees to off the kid.  And with that, we are about five minutes into the movie!

From here on out, things pretty much fall into place.  The Atreides go to Arrakis and they get ambushed.  Paul and his mother escape into the desert and encounter the native Fremen, who manage to live in the desert and have learned how to live with the incredibly destructive sand worms that are a danger to everybody else.  But why should the Fremen help these strangers?  And, even if Paul and his mother get help, what is next for them?  Revenge?  That seems a little petty.  How about a step toward universal domination via guns that are powered by special words?  That seems a little ridiculous.  It's a little of both.

Legend has it that David Lynch's final script called for this film to be a little over three hours long, but the movie studio forced it to be whittled down to a trim two-and-a-quarter hours.  I cannot find a way to suitably express my condolences to anyone who had to watch a three-hour version of this movie.  Two hours was all I could take, and that is only because I stopped questioning the plot.  This movie positively drags.  Well over half of the movie is pure exposition, with the ambush of the Atreides serving as a mid-movie huge action scene.  The odd thing about that battle is that very little of it is shown.  Then there is more exposition, and a whole boatload of weird stuff shoved into the last half hour.

The biggest problem I have with this film is its use of voice-overs.  Sometimes, they are used to explain plot.  Sometimes, they seem to indicate telepathy.  Whatever.  They are all just awful.  I don't need to hear Kyle MacLachlan's voice explaining more than his dialogue does --- I need the scenes to explain the plot, instead.  Voice-overs that explain plot are a lazy, cut-corner trick to salvage a movie that has become too expensive to re-shoot scenes, and the fact that this movie is full of them should indicate the quality of the movie.

Speaking of Kyle, I have to admit that I am not a big fan of his work.  He's actually not too bad here, but the things that the script forces his to say often sound really, really stupid.  Do you remember the Fatboy Slim song, "Weapon of Choice?"  It borrows one of Kyle's lines: "If we walk without rhythm, we won't attract the worm;" of course, Kyle then proceeds to walk normally.  Actually, I don't particularly dislike any of the actors in this film, with the possible exception of Kenneth McMillan who, as the evil Harkonnen leader, couldn't have been more comically evil if he had a six-pound handlebar mustache to twirl.  Brad Douriff, Sean Young, Linda Hunt, Freddie Jones, Richard Jordan, Dean Stockwell, Max von Sydow, and the already mentioned Jurgen Prochnow all played their small roles capably.  They looked and sounded silly doing so, but they took their jobs seriously and did the best they could in difficult circumstances.  Patrick Stewart has a small role in the film, too, but the aspect of his performance that struck me the most was the fact that he apparently grew a skullet as the movie progressed.  I can't say that I was particularly pleased by the young Alicia Witt (in her film debut) and her bizarre voice, but her character was pretty weird and the voice may have been changed in post-production.  Now, Sting gets a lot of attention on the various DVD covers for this film, and I'm not sure why.  Maybe because of this:

Umm...is that a bird...servicing him?

Whatever the case, Sting gets to overact and has an anticlimactic fight scene with Kyle.  I would critique his work, but I can't look at those weird fiberglass undies and keep a serious thought in my head.

So, at least the acting's not bad.  There's no great work, but it all fits the film.  For this movie to even come close to succeeding, though, it needs to look awesome.  As George Lucas has shown, if your movie is visually spectacular, nobody cares about the plot.  Sadly, Dune couldn't get that right, even with a large budget.  Problem #1: the stillsuit.

It's like they have Hitler 'staches, with a left sideburn connection

Everyone on Arrakis has to wear these things to survive; they recycle your body's moisture and fluids to prevent dehydration on the desert planet.  Unfortunately, that means that everybody spends substantial time wearing nose plugs.
Problem #2: the special effects looked bad, even by 1984 standards.

An actual frame from the movie.  No joke.

In the beginning of the movie, young Paul turns on his "bodyshield" for a sparring match; it is blocky, sometimes opaque, and it made Star Wars-inspired noises.  Awful.  Thankfully, this suit is never seen again after the half-hour mark.  The sets in general looked cheap, the costumes were lame, and the special effects were often not done to scale; when you see a human and a worm in the same frame, it's hard to tell how close they are supposed to be to each other.  For being a science fiction epic tale, there is surprisingly little imagination or innovation in the visual effects.
Problem #3: the story is damn near incomprehensible.

An actual page of script from Dune

I read several Dune books as a young whipper-snapper, and I was clueless when watching the movie.  I can only pity someone who approaches this movie out of pure curiosity or, worse, a devotion to David Lynch.  I choose my words carefully here, because I want there to be no misunderstanding: this movie is confusing, even by David Lynch standards.  That's right; it is easier to decode his movies where actors switch characters in the middle of the film than to follow this plot.

I'm not even going to go into Lynch's direction, except to say that this film looks awful, and that's usually his strong point.  Did you know that Lynch was considered as a director for Return of the Jedi?  He opted to make this mess instead.  I suppose that's a good thing, because his fondness for strange dwarf characters would only have lead to some bizarre scenes with the Ewoks.

The one good thing I can say about this movie is that it approaches the source material with respect.  The final product may resemble the diarrhea of someone who digested the book, but the intent to honor it was there.  I don't even want to blame anyone in particular for this monstrosity.  I just want to forget about it.