Summermovies: X-men Colon Last Gasp

If there is one thing Hollywood loves more than raping and humiliating women, it is hobbling beloved heroes and villains alike with totally schematic back stories that explain in grotesquely uninteresting detail just how wut wuz became wut iz.  What made Star Trek so wonderful was that it had at its core a great trio of old friends and comrades who served as believable foils to one another.  Kirk, Spock, and Bones!  That shit was great.  They were characters.  Then fucking J.J. Abrams got his hands on it, and while sure, he made a skillful scifi action flick, it completely lacked human drama because there were no human relations.  Kirk and Spock fucking hated each other and Bones was just some fucking afterthought who lost all his money and possessions in a divorce even though he lives in a future where there is no fucking money.  NO ONE GOES TO SEE WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF TO WATCH GEORGE AND MARTHA'S TENDER EARLY COURTSHIP.  Or look at Batman.  Batman is this dark, fascinating, powerfully mysterious, obsessive creature of the night.  Oh, uh, no he's not; he's Christopher Nolan's exercise in crackpot Jungian archetypalism or some shit; look, here's how Liam Neeson trained him as a ninja or whatever.  Fucking boring.  George Lucas needless to say pissed all over everything good about Star Wars.  All these simple, beloved, enjoyable stories and characters are utterly and forever ruined by showing us how losing the class election in Mrs. Breon's third-grade class turned a person into a ranting cocaine-fueled anarcho-nihilist a cool character became what he is.  "Origin" stories are bad for individuals and ensembles alike.  Imagine if instead of putting Bruno Ganz in the bunker in Downfall they'd, I don't know, set him up with a little easel and plein air kit and let you watch him make lousy architectural watercolors for a couple of hours.  Exactly.  Fucking boring.

So anyway, in X-men Colon Colonoscopy, we learn a whole bunch of shit about Chuck X and Magneto that we already knew from one swift scene and a few moments of dialogue in Bryan Singer's original film.  Xavier was a total pratt, I believe is the term; he only becomes wise after he gets fucking crippled, which is just amazingly lame, part and parcel with Hollywood's penchant for turning retards and cripples into saints because of course they couldn't simply be ordinary, complex people despite their different abilities and capacities; no, sunshine has to shine out of their assholes.  Now Captain Picard as Charles Xavier is interesting; a wise, sagelike figure whose extraordinary powers are really only hinted at and seem therefore all the more extraordinary.  He and Ian McKellan have known each other forever; were once friends; I do not have to tell you this.  The point is, they have a relationship; it is interesting.  In the origin story, they don't, and while you can certainly make a film in which the slow development of an intense human relationship is explored in all its nuance and ambiguity, you can't do it in a goddamn summer blockbuster where half the film is given over to poorly-done CGI action scenes.  So anyway, Chuck and Eric: they're strangers, they're friends, then they're enemies.  Along the way, Hank McCoy is so ashamed of his big feet that he turns himself into a monster, and Kevin Bacon is the villain.

Now, the reason that so many origin stories are written by Hollywood hack assholes is that origin stories are incredibly easy to write.  No one knows anyone else, and therefore the difficult part of writing a story, which is crafting believable relationships between believable characters, is completely unnecesary.  A truly talented schlock director like Micahel Bay could do all of X-men Xposition far better and faster in one of those Introduce-the-Team sequences he so loves.  The fucking title sequence of the Captain Planet cartoon better accomplishes what X-men tried to do and does so in about 25 seconds.  The only thing worse than Michael Fassbender's French is Kevin Bacon's German, and the only thing worse was every single effects shot, which were better done by Konami.  Assholes.