director benchmarking

Rating: 7/10 (20 June 2006)

There are very few occasions for us viewers to compare different movie directors' talents. X men: The last stand is one of those. Benchmarking is a slightly geeky practice that consists of running the same program on different computers to evaluate and compare their performance. In this case, the program deals with X men fighting ordinary human beings that are trying to exploit a new kind of substance taken out of a particular X man. (In the previous installment the drug allowed for total control over an X man who received it, this time the drug apparently eliminates X powers). The computers we're comparing are Bryan Singer and Brett Ratner. This new movie reflects Brett Ratner's basically larger-than-life, hyper-muscled, thick-minded way to direct movies. You get a gazillion different characters (each of them expressing themselves for er...5 milliseconds) doing a gazillion very scenic but ultimately meaningless things (I'm especially referring to the way Magneto gets to the Alcatraz research center). What made the X men movies a bit different from the other superhero movies was the everlasting mind games about being different from the rest (which director Singer was really good at showing in a very discreet but effective way). Now it's all a super power show-off. This is not a bad movie. But! It could have been so much better.