If you’ve hung around here at BSR! for a few years and if you’ve listened to the podcast you’ve probably heard me defend “X-Men: The Last Stand.” Mostly I’ve defended it as better than “Spider-Man 3” which isn’t hard because that movie is all kinds of awful. Now I don’t want you to misunderstand me, I’m not trying to say X3 is a great movie. When we decided to do a rundown of everything X-Men to get even more excited for “X-Men: Days of Future Past” I volunteered for X3 because I have no problem watching that movie.
I know it has problems but there is also a good reason it has problems. First, Bryan Singer left to make “Superman Returns” so instead of getting three films by the same director with a similar feel and look we got two with Singer and a third with Brett Ratner. Second, Singer took James Marsden with him. Singer didn’t do this maliciously, he had a movie to make and the studio was rushing X3 into production. Marsden had already committed to being in “Superman Returns” so instead we got Mopey Cyclops and Dead Cyclops. They had already gone through 2 directors, Matthew Vaughn being the other, and had done a bunch of rewrites and were rushing things. Has that ever been successful? Along with rushing things, the studio also changed their mind about “ending” the trilogy. X3 was supposed to end things, kill people off, take Magneto’s powers, all tied up in a nice bundle. Until Fox decided “Maybe we can keep this going.” Due to that decision, we got those two end scenes, which were supposed to be filmed as one where we see Magneto playing chess with a guy who turns out to be Xavier in a new body. However, they had already finished filming meaning they had to bring the magnificent men in to shoot their scenes separately. They spent 103 minutes telling a story only to undo it in the final minute., buncha bastards.
I know those are not the only problems but they give an idea about why this movie was going to have issues from the start. Now let’s look at just the story. We have two events that they attempted to cram into one movie, again a bad idea. We get hints at a Dark Phoenix story but not enough to really dig into the character at all. Doing a Phoenix Saga film sounds damn near impossible to me, it would need to be a Marvel Cinematic Universe style film where there were multiple other films building a lead up to it. Instead, Fox made it just a small part of a single film under 2 hours, and a lot of it Jean Grey spends standing next to Magneto with a strange look on her face. Along with this story, they tried to add in the Joss Whedon storyline “Gifted.” Both of these stories would need their own films but they got crowded into one. Fox also made changes to characters people love and that rarely ends with acceptance. Leach became an average looking boy, many mutants were combined and few got the screen time we thought they deserved.
I think the changes to the stories are the biggest reason people hate X3. I completely understand that, and the reason I think that I can watch this movie and not get angry or hate it is due to my limited exposure to them. I didn’t grow up reading X-Men comics. I watched the cartoon in the 90’s but I was 7 when it first aired. The cartoon sparked my later interest in the comics and the characters but I treated the movies as their own beast entirely. I think this is a problem a lot of people run into. We have something we love, something we grew up on, and then we get a brand new big budget version of it and we build anticipation waiting to sit in the theater and watch things we’ve loved for years play out. But they don’t play out how we want them to. I’m not saying you need to go into movies and turn your brain off, I’m saying you need to turn off that part of your brain that says “That’s not how it happened!” Because I didn’t have the exposure to these stories I was able to sit back and take in this movie that was supposed to wrap up the events of two other films I’d watched and loved.
I don’t expect you to agree with me, we all have our own biases. Mostly I just want you to give X3 another chance. Maybe this week while you’re getting ready for your “X-Men: Days of Future Past” viewing rewatch the films and don’t skip X3. Try to look at it in a different light and not a bastardization of your favorite comic stories. Maybe you’ll get a little more out of it.