Whee, I'd forgotten how fun it was posting back and forth to each other's journals while we're sittting in the same room! :-)
Total agreement on the Phoenix issues. The writers essentially took a story about Jean's internal struggle and subsumed it into the Xavier/Magneto debate, turning Jean herself into little more than an object lesson for the men in question. I think they did it with tremendous skill, but that's still what they did, and I wonder what it might have been like if they'd used a different character as the centerpiece of the Xavier/Magneto clash - Proteus, AKA "Mutant X," would have been ideal in this role - and then given Jean a movie all to herself.
It's complicated, I suppose, by the way they "killed" Jean in X-Men 2, which pretty much ruled out the cosmic power aspect which was such a huge part of the comics storyline. Once that's removed from the equation, the Dark Phoenix story becomes a parable about a woman who simply can't control her own power, rather than somebody who's playing host to divine forces beyond human comprehension. I really wonder how much of this, if any, was planned ahead of time... but whether or not it was deliberate foreshadowing, rewatching the first movie with the events of X-Men 3 in mind is seriously creepy.
and the Angel story he's been talking about for about a month now
I thought the virtual season/King of Hell thing was being conceived of as a kind of group project. If you've been waiting patiently for me to write it myself, then heck, I'll start today. :-)
no subject
Total agreement on the Phoenix issues. The writers essentially took a story about Jean's internal struggle and subsumed it into the Xavier/Magneto debate, turning Jean herself into little more than an object lesson for the men in question. I think they did it with tremendous skill, but that's still what they did, and I wonder what it might have been like if they'd used a different character as the centerpiece of the Xavier/Magneto clash - Proteus, AKA "Mutant X," would have been ideal in this role - and then given Jean a movie all to herself.
It's complicated, I suppose, by the way they "killed" Jean in X-Men 2, which pretty much ruled out the cosmic power aspect which was such a huge part of the comics storyline. Once that's removed from the equation, the Dark Phoenix story becomes a parable about a woman who simply can't control her own power, rather than somebody who's playing host to divine forces beyond human comprehension. I really wonder how much of this, if any, was planned ahead of time... but whether or not it was deliberate foreshadowing, rewatching the first movie with the events of X-Men 3 in mind is seriously creepy.
and the Angel story he's been talking about for about a month now
I thought the virtual season/King of Hell thing was being conceived of as a kind of group project. If you've been waiting patiently for me to write it myself, then heck, I'll start today. :-)