thank goodness it's the last one!

Rating: 6/10 (8 June 2006)

I saw X-Men 3 the other night, and it doesn't really merit a long comment here, so this will be brief.
I went for action and entertainment, and I guess that's what I got. But I find that it's hard to separate a desire for entertainment from a desire for a quality story. I mean, I'm not thoroughly entertained by a massive display of special effects and rapid movement. X-Men 3, therefore, is only partly satisfying. Overall, I think it succumbed to the same flaw that damned all the Batman movies after Tim Burton's original one: too many characters. I guess this would be a challenge for any superhero movie about teams of heroes and villains, but it's especially evident in this third X-Man movie. For me, and I'm no comic book aficionado, the potential of modern comic stories is in the depth of their characters. Frank Miller's Batman, for instance, is not just an all-around good American guy in tights--he's a real, aging, conflicted man who fights crime for a host of sometimes-contradictory reasons. In X-Men 3, all the complexity of the characters is stripped down to a couple of chin-quivering moments for an otherwise under-written and disappointingly lame Rogue, a few seconds of epic indecision for Wolverine, and an almost completely unbelievable flash of remorse by Magneto. I didn't care about any of the major characters, and there were so many nameless and personality-less minor characters that I didn't really care about them either after their first couple special-effects laden stunts.
Maybe this kind of ensemble cast demands a comic book format that can unfold over time and across hundreds of pages (say, Grant Morrison's run writing for The New X-Men). Or, maybe it demands a deliberately designed series of movies, written as a series and not a sequence of more-or-less stand-alone sequels. I'm thinking something like the Lord of the Rings trilogy or the the Samurai trilogy, or even the (less successful) Matrix trilogy. The makers of these movie epics realized that their visions could only be realized over the course of several films, and they were wise enough not to try to cram the visions into a single 2-hour blockbuster.
I would love to see a comic book movie with that kind of conviction. Can comic book movies, like the comics themselves, rise above the mediocrity imposed by the 120 minute time limit of most mainstream popcorn-crunching movies? We have yet to see it happen, in my opinion, but the best examples made the difficult decision to focus on a very limited cast of characters (the Burton Batman, for instance, cared only about Batman and the Joker--everyone else was peripheral).
Big old spoiler coming up here, so don't read if you want to preserve the mystery of the movie (and, comics fans, please don't jump all over me if this is a stupid question for whatever comic-book lover's reason): why did Wolverine have to kill Jean Grey at the end? Why didn't he just de-mutant her, like he did to Magneto? She might have grieved over her lost power, but might that have been better than dying completely? Hmmm...this just wasn't given enough play in the movie.