About That Blasted X3 Trailer...

Hey guys, it's Donnie... X3: Last Stand. Okay, they may not flash it up there on the screen, but Xavier says it quite clearly in the voiceover at the end, so I'm taking that as a sign that it's the full title. Then again, I also have a feeling that it's gonna be given all the weight that the second movie's full title was given. Fox may have called it X2: X-Men United, but in reality everyone just refers to it as X2.

So what's the verdict? The verdict is...eh.

Click it here to swing by Apple and check this sucker out, then come back for my more in-depth commenatry.

Back? Alright. First of all, what is this "Announcement Teaser" bullshit? How pretentious can Fox be? It's not like it was a big secret that there was gonna be another X-Men film. Secondly, I'm greatly bothered by how hard they seem to be trying to make it look "cool" and yet still kind of fail to do so. That music seems very out of place, and I'd say that the teaser gives too much away, but half the time I have no idea what the hell is going on. I had to pause it and go through frame by frame just to be able to look at some of the shots and see who it is that's standing there and what they're doing. Here are a few things I picked up though:

Angel does look much better in motion, although we don't see much of him other than those stills from yesterday. I'm not sold on the look of Juggernaut yet, nor on Beast, but then again we rarely get a shot of them doing anything active that lasts more than 4/5ths of a second. Besides, there's alot more to beast than just how he looks. I wanna hear him talking. Then we can really talk about Beast.

We get a few good looks at Shadowcat and Iceman, which is a bit confusing, especially since Rogue is still around and Daniel Cudmore's Colossus seems to have been promoted to full fledged X-Man. We also get intimations of the much discussed Wolverine/Storm sexfest, leading me to believe that they're just gonna pick up like 6 months after X2 left off and suddenly everyone's relationships have changed and we're just gonna have to accept it.

We catch a brief glimpse of Olivia Williams during the scene in the trailer which infuriates me most of all, although for some bizarre reason I didn't recognize her at first.

If my intuition is correct, I think there's also a bit of the danger room on display. That's the only explanation I can come up with for Wolverine standing around smoking a cigar amidst lazer beams and massive explosions.

If you freeze frame the scene with Magento rallying mutants in the woods, you can see Stacy X, a.k.a. The Mutant Whore. And yes, she still looks like a 16 year old boy.

All told, here's what I think about the trailer. I think that they basically just got footage of all the most exciting, most emotional, and "coolest" moments that they have finished so far, found some "cool" music and a little bit of Patrick Stewart voiceover, and threw it all in a blender and this is what came out. It's a total mish mash of moments that don't tell any kind of a story, don't have any sort of emotional resonance, and don't do anything to get me really excited for this movie.

My real fear is that the movie is going to take a similar approach. Fox seems intent on killing the franchise with this picture, and so it seems to me that they basically decided to throw in every mutant character they could think of while they still had the chance. Then they made a movie that is spectacularly huge and probably more than a little confusing and full of "big emotional moments". My fear is that it's going to be missing out on the simple plot and character foundations in between the big set pieces that give those "big moments" the clarity and emotional punch they need. Otherwise it's just mutant porn. It's just, "Look at this guy's powers! Look at these mutants fight! Watch all these buildings and stuff blow up!"

I PRAY TO GOD that I'm wrong, because if by some miracle I am, then this movie might, JUST MIGHT, be a hell of an end to the franchise. Unfortunately, I still have my doubts, and those doubts are rather sizeable.