While our X-Men 3 special hits half-time, we’ve got canadian actress Anna Paquin sharing her thoughts on the latest X-Men film and her character Rogue. Paquin was one of the youngest actresses ever to win an Oscar (at the age of twelve in 1994 for her supporting role in Jane Campion’s The Piano) and has been central to the X-Men series since the first movie. She has also appeared in films like Fly Away Home, A Walk On The Moon, Almost Famous, Finding Forrester, 25th Hour and The Squid And The Whale.

Anna Paquin (Marie/Rogue)

…on the return to the X-Men
I’ve loved being a part of this saga of the X-Men since the first one. And just the idea of getting to come back and revisit these characters again and pick up where we left off and take them further - it’s just really exciting.

…on her role
Rogue is pretty much coming into her own more as an adult, as far as trying to figure out how she really feels about her mutation -about her abilities or limitations, however one might see them, and is in a place where she feels more confident to make decisions for herself as to how she’s going to handle her life.

…on the relationship between Rogue and Bobby
Obviously because Rogue can’t ever touch anyone, it makes things a little bit complicated with her boyfriend, Bobby, whose attentions are starting to perhaps wander towards Kitty Pryde, who, as far as her mutation, is able to have physical contact with people. And being as how we’re all young and that’s a rather significant part of any young relationship, or any relationship, it’s a source of conflict between them. Because I think as she’s getting to have more feelings about herself, I think she knows that she can understand why someone would really, really love her and really want to be with her if they can’t have this one thing. And I think because she’s so insecure about it, she starts questioning his motives and questioning whether or not he’s really going to be continuing to be faithful to her. And so there’s kind of a lot of tension going on there.

…on the deeper meaning of X-Men
The reason these movies connect with so many people is that everyone’s felt different at some point and everyone’s struggled with that, and in whatever way, big or small, in their own lives. And I think everyone’s had to make decisions about how they want to treat other people that they may perceive as different.

…on Rogue’s personal battle with the cure
Rogue is constantly struggling with self-acceptance. I mean, is she going to choose to live her life as a mutant, and with her abilities be basically segregated into a very tiny minority of people who never get to have relationships. And is she going to let that eat her alive, or is she going to accept herself? And in this case she’s actually being offered an option, she can either be cured and change her life forever, or accept who she is and continue living with this struggle. And it’s a really huge decision that she ultimately has to make.

Be sure to check back daily to find out what the likes of Ben Foster (Angel), Kelsey Grammer (Beast), James Marsden (Cyclops), Patrick Stewart (Professor X) and director Brett Ratner have to share about X-Men 3.

Official film synopsis: In X-MEN: THE LAST STAND, the final chapter in the “X-Men” motion picture trilogy, a “cure” for mutancy threatens to alter the course of history. For the first time, mutants have a choice: retain their uniqueness, though it isolates and alienates them, or give up their powers and become human. The opposing viewpoints of mutant leaders Charles Xavier, who preaches tolerance, and Magneto, who believes in the survival of the fittest, are put to the ultimate test - triggering the war to end all wars.

Posted in Commentary, Movies •

The relationship between Mutants and Humans has reached a fragile stability, with the US President (Josef Sommer) and the Secretary for Mutant Affairs, Dr. Hank McCoy (Kelsey Grammer), together coordinating a widespread search for the militant mutant Magneto (Ian McKellen). But when the biopharmaceutical company Worthington Labs announces it has found a ‘cure’ that can suppress all mutations, Magneto starts recruiting an army to go to war with the humans. Meanwhile, Professor Xavier’s (Patrick Stewart) diplomatic endevours are distracted when Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), believed to have died at Alkali Lake, makes a miraculous return. But a seemingly limitless destructive force has been unlocked inside her.

The making of the third X-Men film has the potential to be turned into a movie itself. Throughout production, the project went through significant overhauls, restarts and release date shifts, most noticeably every time a new director came on board - there were a few. Bryan Singer, who directed the first two films to great critical acclaim, looked all set to take the reigns on part three, but abandoned the X-Men in favor of fixing a problematic Superman franchise that had just parted ways with Brett Ratner. Singer, who took most of his production crew onto Superman, was open to returning to the X-Men after completing his Superman film, but 20th Century Fox decided against waiting, contracting Layer Cake helmer Matthew Vaughn to direct X-Men 3 instead. Vaughn oversaw several script treatments and a big bulk of preproduction, only to bail out nine weeks prior to principal photography, unable to commit to a long term production schedule for family reasons.

In an ironic twist, Fox brought Brett Ratner on as the next replacement, and the Rush Hour and Red Dragon director saw-through the shoot and post-production in what little time was left to meet the studio’s scheduled summer 2006 release date. To say that Ratner wasn’t on the top of the X-Men fanbase’s wishlist would be an understatement, fans and many critics regarded his involvement with skepticism and often even contempt, sentiments caused by the director’s lack of pedigree and experience with character-driven films. The fact that the first two X-Men films were so character-centric made for much of the franchise’s appeal (at least amongst critics and less blockbuster-oriented audiences), so there was a current of unease over whether or not Ratner would desecrate the series by shifting the focus from character to action.

After finally having the chance to judge whether or not my own fears would be confirmed, I’ve come to the following conclusion: the film has some strong points, but I left the theatre fuming nonetheless. Let me elaborate. On the one hand, the film looks gorgeous and polished, and certainly ups the ante on the first two action-wise. Some of the set-pieces are mezmerizing to behold (Magneto doing his thing on, or rather with, the Golden Gate Bridge), and the magnitude of new characters makes way for plenty cool new powers to be showcased (Kitty Pride unsubstantiating herself, Multiple Man creating copies of himself, Stacey X producing her Shockwaves, Spike going hedgehock). It’s especially refreshing to see Magneto’s brotherhood finally equipped with Mutants who look to be more than simple cannon-fodder (Pyro, Callisto, Stacey X, Spike, Multiple Man, Dark Phoenix), although there are still some who fit that mold (Juggernaut, Arclight, Psylocke).

But on the other hand, the film has its downside, and it’s huge. The more action-heavy direction makes for a higher pace, yes, but the editing is horrendous. Not only does the film not flow well at all (one of the main strengths of movie one), the movement of the characters from one location to the other is often triggered by circumstancial scenes (mostly manifest in unconvincing lines of dialogue) that feel like nothing more than excuses to move the characters around. Example, and you might want to skip this part and continue with the next paragraph if you’d prefer to avoid spoilers: A grieving Cyclops has travelled up to Alkali Lake, the location where his fiancée Jean seemingly drowned at the end of X2. He screams his lungs out and shoots laser beams into the water, which unexpectedly causes Jean to reemerge from a whirl and lots of bright light. After some hugging and kissing the film cuts back to Professor X at the mansion, who tells Storm and Wolverine they must travel to Alkali Lake quickly, as something terrible has happened. They find Jean (and Cyclops’ shades), and return her to the mansion. A few scenes later, we learn that Cyclops is dead - sort of as an afterthought.

Which brings me to my next point of criticism: almost all of the characters are functionless, feeling like they are only there to be there (I wrote that line to mirror one of Storm’s great bits of dialogue in the film: “If you want to be with us, than be with us”). Having the film filled with so many characters makes it even worse, as it leaves no room for any proper focus and grants none of the characters a proper arc. Ratner spends a considerable amount of time establishing certain characters, only to drop them almost completely halfway in. Angel (a forgettable performance by Ben Foster) is the most prominent casualty: the cure storyline is introduced through him (his father is the scientist who’s behind the remedy) as we see him first (in the second introductory sequence of the film) trying to clip his wings off in shame as a boy and later ‘volunteering’ to be the first to take the cure, but after that all we get to see of him is Angel batting his wings in the air in three scenes and showing up at the mansion in another. Ben Foster has probably three or four lines in the entire film.

Jean Grey fares hardly any better. The Dark Phoenix plot is supposed to be the film’s other main storyline (at least that’s how Ratner establishes it: the film’s opening scene is a 20 year flashback of how Xavier and Magneto visit a young Jean Grey at her family’s house), but after having explained how she’s not only a more powerful mutant than both Xavier and Magneto, but also schizophrenic (the other half of her consciousness, tagged Phoenix, represents pure lust, joy, and violence, recreating Famke Janssen’s role as the Bond Girl Xenia Onatopp in GoldenEye), she’s got not much more to do than kill a whole lot of people (humans and mutants alike) and stand around at Magneto’s.

Hank McCoy (Kelsey Grammer), alias Beast, is the most prominent new addition to the rank of mutants, and he suffers the reverse effect, which isn’t any better. While he is privy to a lot of screentime, plenty to do and a considerable amount of dialogue, his character isn’t established at all beyond being the Secretary for Mutant affairs. There’s some backstory that’s heavily alluded to - he seems to be great friends with Xavier and Storm, as is evident in a scene in which he arrives at the mansion, and he’s got an old uniform which barely fits him anymore stowed away there - but that’s all the information we are treated to.

A further problem is that a fair amount of characters (if the film still permits the use of that expression) feel completely inconsistent with how they were depicted in X-Men 1 and 2. In a pointless teenage love triangle subplot, Bobby/Iceman (Shawn Ashmore) pursues his growing attraction towards Kitty (Ellen Page) in plain view of his girlfriend Rogue (Anna Paquin), losing any and all sensibility and consideration he used to show (especially towards Rogue), while Rogue herself goes from being shy and solemn to angry and downright bitchy. Rogue is marginalized to near invisibility in this film, but Ratner and his screenwriter crew still found just enough space to annihilate the character’s integrity by the end of the film, my personal highlight on the negative side of X-Men 3. John/Pyro (Aaron Stanford) is both inconsistent - he’s literally unbelievably bloodthirsty - and useless, mostly standing in as Magneto’s secretary. At least his tandem force display with Magneto is pretty neat.

On a less character-specific level (for that is the plain Ratner is operating on), I must say that most of the emotional scenes were completely off-beat. The film features three major deaths, evenly spread, and only one manages to capture a bit of sympathy, in spite of the fact that all three of them are characters we care for. The first death, as mentioned earlier, we even only hear about after the plot has already progressed quite a bit further, the second one is the one that works (thanks to its spectacular choreography and some unexpected sympathy from another character), and the third one seems absolutely pointless, because not thought-through: the problem isn’t solved, it’s gotten rid of, and that’s weak storytelling. This coincides with the dazzling resolution of the cure storyline, when after a bit of action (okay, quite a lot actually) and lots of destruction absolutely everything seems to be - miracously - back in order. And you can’t help but wonder why, because other than Magneto being immobilized and the Worthington Labs’ access to the source of the cure being removed, not much else has changed. To cap it off, the closing scene is a speculative trick at trying to force a cheap plot twist down our throats.

X-Men: The Last Stand is a spectacular affiche because its a monumental failure: a few brilliantly executed action sequences cannot hide the fact that the film has almost zero emotional resonance and lacks any depth that would keep it clear from being shallow. The intriguing ideas behind the plot are revealed as nothing more than promises not kept, and following the first two film’s innovative approach of combining superhero action with character-driven stories to critical and financial success this is a bitter pill to swallow.

Posted in Reviews •