X-Men: Days of Future Past

The seventh X-men related film to hit our screens since X1 back in 2000, Days of Future Past features an odd mesh of faces from both the old and new films.

In true X-men fashion the plot is about as complicated as a M. Night Shyamalan film (yes I have been playing Cards Against Humanity) so I’ll do a quick run down and let you work out the rest. It starts quite a while after X-men: The Last Stand, and the world has turned into a desolate wasteland. Sentinels fill the skies, killing or arresting any mutants and any humans that try to help them, resulting in a massive war that has destroyed a large chunk of the human race. A pocket of resistance consisting of Xavier, Magneto, Wolverine, Kitty Pryde, Iceman, Blink, Bishop, Storm, Colossus, Toad and Sunspot have one last chance to completely stop this future from happening. Kitty send Wolverine back in time, to his own body back in the 70s, and he must convince Xavier and Magneto to work together to stop Mystique from killing scientist and creator of the Sentinels Bolivar Trask. Aside from reuniting Magneto and Xavier (Xavier is still kinda sore from being shot in the spine and, you know, paralysed), he must convince Xavier to stop taking his medicine and regain his mutant powers – some potion created by Beast that Xavier has been using to recover the movement in his legs. We meet Quicksilver, get the gang back together, track Mystique, blow a lot of things up, nearly kill the President etc. I won’t spoil the end.

First things first. How the fuck can Kitty Pryde send people’s consciousness back in time? When did she gain this power? In the comics it’s Kitty that sends herself back (similar but not quite the same as sending someone else back) and in the comics it’s Bishop who is sent back by a machine. I get why they had Wolverine go back (more on that later) but the mechanic by which they sent him back was flawed.

Okay, Wolverine. There has been a squeak of complaint from one corner of the Internet about why Wolverine was sent back and not Kitty, crying about sexism and feminism and all that crap. Guys, think about it. In 1973 Kitty wouldn’t be alive. The writers wanted to link First Class and this film in plot, exploring and repairing Xavier’s and Magneto’s relationship, and the timeline demanded and older character has to be sent back and it couldn’t be Professor X or Magneto. Another thing – around 50 years are meant to have passed between the two events, who could they send back who would look pretty much the same? Anyone else would have to be recast, then made up to look like their older counterpart, and the dialogue would be odd and confusing for the audience. Wolverine, who ages about 5 years for our 50, is the perfect candidate to send back. I’ll be honest, I was kinda hoping they would send Bishop back (a fantastic character, and one we haven’t met before so they could just make up a backstory for him) but they would have to have the X-Men as a predefined team working together if they wanted to do it that way. Wolverine, all in all, was the simplest choice.

So in general, what’s the film like? Well, in general, it’s not a bad film, especially when you consider instalments such as The Wolverine which was godawful. It was funny in places, lots of action, lots of mutants, and the plot didn’t have quite a many glaring holes as the X films usually do.

For me, it was definitely Quicksilver who stole the show. Evan Peters, who I first saw in American Horror Story, plays the slightly neurotic very well, and he played this character beautifully. The scenes where he slows time, puts on music and dances around the screen are mesmerising and he successfully upstaged all of the other more seasoned actors.

Peter Dinklage is another actor who I am so glad is getting recognised more and more. Games of Thrones has obviously pitched him right into the limelight, but it is the focus on his stature that makes the character. In Days of Future Past not one reference is made to his height, it is just a given fact, like another character having blonde hair say. It’s refreshing, but I suppose the fact that I still noticed and felt the need to point it out reflects that there’s still some way to go.

There is one niggling issue that isn’t really a big problem with the film, but instead something I just noticed. A lot of focus is given to Xavier, but all of the other characters are just sort of there. Even Wolverine, the person given arguably the most screentime, is just sort of there – yes we’ve seen and heard a lot from Wolverine throughout all of the films but he was there solely as a time travel device. Magneto and Beast don’t fare much better, seemingly there simply to facilitate Xavier’s rehabilitation. Mystique sort of gets a look in, and could have had a very interesting foray into her character, but she is quickly overlooked to allow Xavier some more soul searching. Again, this isn’t really a negative – they need Xavier to be ‘up and running’ again if they want to do more films with McAvoy/Fassbender as the stars – but maybe more care could have been given to the other characters.

The secondary characters are treated even worse – most you don’t even get to hear the names of (though who would willing choose Sunspot as their mutant name?), and those that you recognise barely get any lines or screentime. Bobby (Iceman) is a very interesting character, but all he does is stand and fret by Kitty before doing a bit of fighting. The desperation this group feels over being slaughtered by Sentinels is lost because we either don’t know or don’t care about them.

Going back to Xavier and Magneto, the older versions. Considering they are meant to be some of the most powerful mutants around at level 4 (Phoenix was level 5, Wolverine is level 2 I believe) yet when the sentinels come they seemingly do nothing to help. Magneto finally does something at the end but honestly, I expected massive displays of mutant power. I mean, we don’t want to make it too easy for our heroes, but come on!

Others have asked for an explanation on Xavier, Magento and Wolverine so here you are:

• Xavier did die at Phoenix’s hands in The Last Stand but his consciousness then inhabited the braindead body of his identical twin, who resides in the hospital run by Moira. This is the explanation given by the director at the end of the film anyway. I don’t like this, it’s a bit too neat and not particularly clever. Considering Xavier’s penchant for faking his own death in the comics, I prefer a more clever explanation. Even a ‘this person is braindead, but I’m so powerful I’m just making you think that he looks like Xavier’ would be preferable.
• Magneto loses his powers in The Last Stand thanks to the mutant cure. He is seen at the end of the film playing chess in a park and just before the scene cuts you see one of the pieces move a millimetre. The implication is that the ‘cure’ was temporary, similar to the potion that Beast used in First Class.
• Wolverine is a little more difficult to explain. In The Wolverine he loses his adamantium claws to the Silver Samurai, and they regrow as bone. In the 1970s segments he still has bone claws, but in the future section he has metal coated ones once more and no explanation is given. Now in the comics, Magento at one point strips the adamantium from his bones so presumably he could also do the reverse. This is a guess, I’m assuming they’ll crank out another film that explains it because Hugh Jackman + Wolverine = big money.

I’ve not really talked much about the film because I don’t want to ruin it. I will ruin it in the next paragraph, so stop reading it you haven’t seen it. I really enjoyed it, it has some flaws but not as bad as some of the previous films. Go and see it just for Quicksilver, he’s amazing.

SPOILERS

The ending. Jesus Christ the ending. Let’s just get everyone that was dead and make them not dead again! Poof there’s Jean Grey. Poof there’s Scott Summers with his stupid face. Poof there’s Rogue. Thankfully they cut all of her lines from the film so we didn’t have to suffer any simpering. But seriously, why was everything from The Last Stand suddenly reversed? Nothing that happens in Days of Future Past would prevent Jean Grey from becoming the Phoenix and being killed by Wolverine. I know a lot of us didn’t like what happened in Last Stand but at least try to pretend there’s some link between all of the films. Don’t go “you know what happened there? Yeh ignore that, we’ve changed our minds.” Even though they were done by different directors, the point still stands.

Also, the post-credits scene. Hell yes. Bring it on!

Lego Marvel Superheroes

After the roaring success that was Lego Lord of the Rings, we were all dreadfully excited when we heard about about Lego’s newest game based on the heroes and villains of Marvel. Released in October last year, we got it just after Christmas and I finished it (well the main storyline anyway) around a week ago.

I must say, I am very very conflicted when it comes to this game. It is entertaining? Well, yes, for a certain amount of time for a certain kind of person. Is it good? In some respects, but nowhere near as good as the LOTR game and in general has some pretty big flaws.

Okay, so you play through as numerous good guys (such as Iron Man, Wolverine, Mr Fantastic etc) trying to defeat bad guys. This all starts when the Silver Surfer appears to herald the coming of Galactus, but his board is destroyed by Doctor Doom and cosmic bricks are scattered across the world. Doom and Loki want to gather the bricks to create a Doom Ray to destroy Galactus, but Nick Fury gathers together all the good guys to try and stop them.

So the plot line isn’t exactly based on a comic of anything, it’s just as many well known Marvel characters as possible in one game. The levels themselves are pretty standard, the sort of stuff we’ve come to expect from any Lego game, with a couple of amusing moments in between. In each level you have the usual objectives; ‘true believer’ for collecting a certain amount of coins, 10 minikits for completing little challenges during free play, red ‘deadpool’ bricks for unlocking extras in the wider world and the Marvel specific ‘Stan Lee in peril’ where in every level Marvel creator Stan Lee will be in some sort of trouble and you need to save him. So there’s a lot to be doing in each level, and because you need various different powers it prompts you to play through in free play so you can unlock everything. And you see, that is what made LOTR such a great game, I wanted to get that 100% complete badge shining on the screen and I didn’t mind having to walk Middle Earth or do levels two or three times to get it.

But my Marvel completion currently stands at around 34% – and I really couldn’t care less about increasing it. I’ve done the main story and a bit of wandering about in New York collecting a few things but it has become utterly boring now that the story is complete. There are quite a few things that have caused this, so I’ll try to work through them quickly.

First off is the fact that everything becomes the same. Yes the first time you have to pull a series of levers to open a door to get a brick is very interesting but by the 50th time (there are 250 golden bricks in total) it begins to get tedious. Finding everything in New York would take someone who really doesn’t mind repetitive actions, because there are very limited actions that you can do to obtain these bricks. I get the creators wanted to make the game as fulfilling as possible, hence there being so many bricks, but 150 would easily have been enough.

Something that links into this is also the sheer amount of characters that they’ve tried to include.There are 155 playable characters (in LOTR there were only 84) and this was really pushed as a fantastic thing when it came to this new Lego game. Imagine the possibilities when it comes to all those characters – we’re talking a pretty hefty chunk of the Marvel universe and some of them even I hadn’t heard of before. But, in reality, there are only about ten abilities that the characters have, just repeated across the entire group. One or two have unique abilities (such as Ant Man who can shrink down), but on the whole there are these ten main abilities and each character has around two. This means that once you unlock the main cast (who you naturally unlock as you play the main story) you can pretty much do everything you need to without needing to unlock the secondary characters. Also once you unlock the flying characters, you can simply skip the majority of the puzzles by simply flying to the top of the building.

The mechanisms for flying are another big problem for me, they are so damn clunky and bizarre that winning races is nearly impossible in some cases. With the vehicles they don’t fly like an aeroplane would, but they don’t fly like a helicopter either. You have to point straight up to go up, there’s not really just a happy glide at any point. The flying characters are just as difficult to manoeuvre, with A making them soar straight up and B having them plummet to the ground. The forced perspective with the camera also doesn’t help, as sometimes you end up inside buildings desperately trying to navigate someone who’s still outside of the building.

The way you change characters is also infuriating, because they have decided to put the main characters first, followed by the secondary characters in alphabetical order. Okay, so far so good. But most of the main characters and a few secondary have more than one outfit or incarnation, so for example Tony Stark, Iron Man, Mark 42 or Jean Grey, Phoenix etc. Each of these usually do slightly different things, so if you want to use the Mark 42 suit you have to wait for the computer to scroll itself through seven different iterations of Iron Man before reaching the one you want. Considering how many times you have to change character, this can get real boring, real quick. Add into this the fact that if you’re Hulk or Spiderman, when you press Y you change into your alter ego and go through that whole animation, and then the character screen opens. The LOTR way of doing this of having a wheel of your favourites would’ve made this process a lot less painful, because you just have the main abilities that you need to complete a task and pretty much ignore the rest of the characters. I honestly don’t understand why they felt the need to include so many characters, especially when the majority of the wider world won’t know (or care) who they are.

Something they’ve taken out from the LOTR game was the Mithril bricks which you could then use to forge interesting or funny items, such as the Mithril Disco Vial which made everyone boogie round the place. These really added another dimension into the whole game, and there is nothing like this whatsoever in the Marvel game. It wouldn’t be difficult to come up with some cool items that you could create, and it’d break up the monotony of the game.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, this just isn’t as funny. It has a few amusing moments (usually provided by Deadpool) but past that it’s just dull, considering the running joke is Nick Fury constantly eating, the humour doesn’t exactly come thick and fast. Mix this with voices that sound almost right and the whole game just falls a bit flat, which is a shame considering how good it could have been.

So, what to do. If you can give it a go then do but I wouldn’t spend money on it (especially not the full whack of £35) because it’s simply not worth it.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Considering I seem to spend most of my time nurturing my very nerdy obsession with the X-Men in its main incarnations, I should probably get round to reviewing the many films that have sprung up within the past few years. Among these films is X-Men Origins: Wolverine, intended as a prequel to the three earlier films directed by Bryan Singer (X1,X2) and Brett Ratner (X3), and focusing on the life of mutant Logan (aka Wolverine), with particular focus on his adamantium claws and relationship to fellow mutant Victor Creed. When first released in 2009, the film grossed over $373 million worldwide, riding mainly off the success of actor Hugh Jackman as angry outcast Wolverine.

I must say, out of all five recently released films, Origins is definitely my favourite. I am over course biased because Wolverine has always been my favourite X-Man even before Hugh Jackman grew out his sideburns and donned a leather biker jacket for the role. In general however, the film is a lot darker and emotional than the previous three, with less silly one liners and a lot more fighting, and better mutations all round. There is also the introduction of Liev Schreiber as Logan’s half brother Victor Creed, who has very similar mutations to Wolverine, but instead of claws protruding from his hands his nails and teeth elongate. They both have fantastic screen presences and scenes featuring both of them can be funny, violent, brotherly or all three at the same time. Add Danny Huston as Major William Stryker into the mix and you have a recipe for a fantastic film.

There is a question that has plagued the message boards of Origins: are Victor Creed and Sabertooth the same character? Of course the Victor Creed of Origins looks and acts nothing like the creature in X1, and if we rely on the comics there is no way they can be the same person. Sabertooth (actually known previously by the name Creed) comes across Logan in the 1910s in a small Canadian community, they know nothing of each other’s childhoods and are certainly not half brothers. Sabertooth proceeds to rape and murder Logan’s girlfriend (Silverfox), sparking their lifetime feud. They are reunited in the 1960s within Team X as Sabertooth and Wolverine, once again not correlating with the Origins storyline. It is possible that these are meant to be two different characters, with similar names and mutations, or that the writers of Origins simply decided to fuck with the story line so much that Sabertooth does appear all over the place. Truth is, no one knows if Liev Schreiber’s Creed *is* the later character of Sabertooth, Marvel obviously have no idea about the film’s intentions and Benioff & Woods have no idea about the comics. The cartoons increase the confusion even further.

Personally, I’m willing to have them as two separate characters – the Sabertooth of X1 is so embarrassingly bad and the Victor Creed of Origins is so fantastically awesome that some distinction needs to be made. In all honesty, the plotlines have been so messed up by the writers that a clear answer will never be given – also, at no point in Origins is Creed referred to as Sabertooth. It also seems a bit odd that the writers would mess up the Marvel storylines so completely but, then again, just take a look at First Class. They can’t seem to be able to touch a part of X-Men without fucking up some aspect of it.

Back to the film – basically we are first introduced to Logan (then known as Jimmy Howlett) as a young teenage boy, just starting to go through his mutation, who watches his father die at the hands of Thomas Logan, who he then kills with his bone claws, the man revealing with his dying breaths that he is in fact Logan’s father. Logan and half brother Victor then run and the opening credits shows them growing up, fighting through numerous wars and discovering their rapid healing abilities. Creed is shown to get more bloodthirsty and violent throughout the wars, culminating in an attempted rape and murder of a senior officer. Logan, after defending his brother, and Creed are put in front of a firing squad, making it common knowledge that they cannot die. Enter William Stryker, creator of Team X, who offers to give the brothers a job, working alongside other mutants towards certain goals. Logan ends up leaving the team and we fast forward six years, Logan lives in a little community out of the way with girlfriend  Kayla when suddenly Stryker appears, saying that Creed has gone crazy and is hunting down the old team to kill them. Stryker offers to bond adamantium to his skeleton, making Logan nigh on indestructible. Logan turns him down, only for Creed to murder his girlfriend, sending Logan on an angry rampage.

I’m not going to reveal the rest of the film, but there are plot twists galore and it is revealed how Logan lost his memory, leading on to the events of X1. The aspect that makes me really respect Hugh Jackman and Liev Shreiber is the workout they both undertook in order to get the physique appropriate for such roles. Initially Schreiber was going to simply wear a muscle suit but, once he saw Jackman’s fitness regime and its results, joined in with the muscling up. It is pretty ridiculous though, with a shit tonne of working out and a diet of protein, check out this for a full lowdown.

But check out that picture – those muscles are not photoshopped or anything. Phwoar galore.

Don’t get me wrong, I do have issues with this film, just like every film I review. Specifically, the characters of Wade Wilson (Deadpool), Fred Dukes and Gambit. Dukes was just laughable, the fat suit actor Kevin Durand had to wear looked terrible and in general the character has always been a bit of a ridiculous one. My problem with Deadpool and Gambit however, is how completely different they are compared to the comics and cartoons. Gambit is meant to have a thick Cajun accent, be a professional thief and extremely talented with cards and his Bo staff. Not to mention very suave and a ladies man- I mean have you seen the cartoon version of him? His short cameo in Origins however came nowhere near close to his original character. The same is true of Deadpool, who has a fantastic backstory that wasn’t even touched upon in Origins.

Origins had a mixed reception upon its release, many believing that Hugh Jackman’s fantastic performance is not enough to drag this film up from its cliche ridden plot. But… it’s a Marvel superhero film – of course it’s going to be bad! Have you seen the new versions of Captain America or The Incredible Hulk recently? They’re terrible! It seems that most people dislike a main character that cannot be empathised with – he is basically invulnerable to harm and is a “device for the action sequences”. Well, yes, it’s X-Men! What more do you want from them? If the writers had followed the original storyline from the comics, he would have been easier to empathise with because of some of the stuff he goes through that is cut out of the film.

So, regardless of the messed up storyline and characters, Origins is definitely worth checking out. Another Wolverine-centred movie is making its way onto our screens next year, focusing on Wolverine’s time spent in Japan. I get the feeling the producers are now just milking Wolverine’s success for all it’s worth, and I wonder if Hugh Jackman will ever actually be free to pursue another role with the character of Wolverine hanging over his head.