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Sunday, May 3, 2015

X-Men: Days of Future Past and Specific Comic Adaptation?

My dirty little secret when it comes to movies is that since I'm broke I don't tend to catch them until way, way, way, after the fact. Which bums me out because yeah it means I don't get to see Avengers 2 this weekend and because it means that when it comes to movie reviews I am almost never topical.

But there is a freedom in that. It means that rather than worrying about telling people if I think a movie is good or worth thier money I can take a much more lackadaisical approach and talk about any interesting ideas I had while watching a movie or letting them percalate for a while.

In this case I had an epiphany about a recent shift in comic book movies after watching X-men: Days of Future Past.

While I enjoyed it I couldn't help but feel the movie was a bit of fan wank. Almost every narrative flaw the film has can be explained by it bending over backwards to position itself for moments and characters the fans have wanted to see for years.

Once it becomes clear that dealing with Mystique in the past is a golden snitch why do we keep cutting to the future? Because realistically it's the only chance to see future characters like Bishop the fans have been clamoring for since the first one.

Why does young prof-ex seem so out of character? So we can have Patrick Stewart give one of "his" speeches to James McAvoy, both of whom are two of the best actors of their respective generations.

Why is Quick Silver in the movie even though his presence raises a million questions and breaks the narrative?  Well because he's a fan favorite and everybody's been asking for him to show up even though the rights are nutty for while now.

That got me thinking. What should I have expected with Days of Future Past. The movie fans have been asking for that they never thought they would get since the first one of these.

Why when I was a young warthog the point of a comic book movie was to distill the characters and essence  of half  a century into something a mainstream audience could understand. Sure there might be elements from the bigger story lines but it was rare for a movie to straight up admit, "Hey this is an adaptation of say Civil War.  If you're a fan of that this is for you.

If you wanted that you had to go to cartoons.



 And I'm not talking all that long ago. Even the first Avengers was more about that distillation than a specific story. But with Age of Ultron (which again I haven't seen) and the crop of movies over the last year and a half I see a new paradigm on the horizon.

It's just something to think on.

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