The Uncanny X-Men Cop Out

One of the things I appreciate about Costa Rica is the cost of going to the theater. I went to the nicest one around and only paid about $3 for my ticked and another $3 for the popcorn, and that's expensive by the standards here. Taking advantage of a lazy Saturday I caught the third X-Men installment The Last Stand. I enjoyed it while watching, but the end left me disappointed, and I wanted to unpack why. (Warning: Spoilers follow)

The film begins with a flashback of Professor Xavier and Magneto before they have become opponents visting a young Jean Grey. She is a powerful adolescent out of control and we see the mutal desire of Xavier and Magneto to free her. Back in the present Jean has lost control of herself again and kills Xavier as a distressed Magneto can only watch. Later the upstart Pyro brags to Magneto that he would've killed the Professor himself. Magneto stops him and rebukes him saying that the Xavier did more for mutants than he would ever know. Here we see the inner conflict in Magneto between his stated goal of mutant domination, and the real price of this goal. This is the making of good drama.

By the end of the film the Magneto has lost his power and we see him a mere old man sitting alone at a chess board in a park. The image recalls him playing chess with the Professor in an earlier movie, but now Magento is without his identity and even worse, it feels, without his friend Xavier. This is a strong statement of loss that ends the movie on a somber note appropriate to the many deaths (three major characters) . Unfortunately, the director cannot resist one last moment of action that undoes the drama he must not have known he had. Magento reaches out his hand and taps a chess piece at a distance, a sign that his powers are returning, and the renunciation of every emotion the scene had just created.

The preceding scene tied off the characters back at the school. We found Iceman visting Rogue's room to discover that she's returned. She had left to be "cured" from being a mutant. She reaches out her hand to his and instead of stealing his life and power, it is a simple human touch. Rogue alone of all the mutants saw a mutant cure as a good thing. Even though she can have a normal relationship with Iceman she has lost her uniqueness and it doesn't feel like victory. It feels like a cop out, and it is, one of many that this film makes.

It simply cannot live with dramatic conflict. It can handle mutants and humans raining firepower on each other, but not internal and interpersonal conflict that can't be solved with a violent special effect. The characters serve the action rather than the other way around. The success of the previous two movies and similar films like the first Matrix lies in the service of action to character development.

The first cop out of the film occurs when Cyclops is called by his wife Jean to the lake where she was thought to have died. He leaves the school in a rush and has a brief confrontation with Wolverine. In the last two films Wolverine and Jean struggled with controlling their attraction in the face of her marriage to Scott. They do restrain themselves and a bittersweet relationship lingers.

How does the film address this complexity? Jean, transformed into the brutal Phoenix embraces then annihilates Cyclops. Later in a moment of lucidity she begs Wolverine to kill her before she does more harm. She goes on to murder Xavier, and in the final battle Wolverine confesses his love and mercifully kills her. She never has to come to grips with her unleashed identity, and finishes the film exactly as she began it, a monster overpowering a woman. Wolverine becomes convinced of the necessity of killing Phonenix, but he doesn't undergo any dramatic tranformation either.

The heart of a good film (including the last two X-Men films) is character development, but no one changes this entire film. Nothing has to be resolved, only destoyed (including Rogue's powers). There is some fun action, and at moments it seems to reach at something bigger, but in the end only the violence remains.