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Movie Reviews: X-Men Origins and Star Trek
As a comic book fan, and especially an X-Men fan, I've been relatively happy with the job that's been done with the movie franchise. Liberties were taken, but still, I've been happy enough. X-Men Origins: Wolverine, however, fell completely flat for me.
It had potential, but for me it neither lived up to its comic-book predecessor nor made a very satisfying film in its own right. In both cases, one big problem with the film was that nothing ever seemed to be--really--at stake. The big conflict here was, one would guess by some of the movie's lines, ultimately Wolverine vs. himself, deciding whether to give in to his animal side. As portrayed here, though, there's never the slightest doubt that Hugh Jackman's Wolverine is going to be a good guy. And not just a good guy, but morally irreproachable.
That's never been the comic book Wolverine, and it also doesn't work on its own terms. With the exception of one bad guy at a crucial moment, we never see Wolverine kill anyone (except in passing during the opening montage, and that's in a time of war). For this to work, we need to see a Wolverine who's an on-the-edge killing machine. A Wolverine who, once he gets going, probably can't stop himself, at least not early on in the movie. If he's going to achieve control, it needs to come late in the movie. Better yet, don't let it come at all: he's still supposed to be wrestling these demons by the time the first X-Men movie came out, so why the need to successfully resolve the issues that he barely seemed to have in this film?
The rest of the movie is, I suppose not surprisingly given the clunkiness at the heart of the film, a bit heavy-handed. The decision to include Gambit in the script must have been a ploy to draw in even more comic fans, as Gambit's a popular character, but let's get real here: you don't need to add another popular character when you're already dealing with the most popular X-Man ever! And as much as I liked the work Taylor Kitsch did in Friday Night Lights (the TV series), he didn't fit the part (and, again, I'll assert that it's a part that shouldn't have been in the film anyway). There were other details I didn't like, but I don't want to spoil the movie for anyone who still feels a need to go see it.
While I'm the bigger X-Men nerd, my wife is definitely the bigger Trekker (though I have seen large portions of the original series, TNG, and the film franchise, at least up through The Undiscovered Country--which I saw in the theather). In the case of both X-Men Origins and the re-imagining of Star Trek, however, we both agreed in our opinions of the movies. In the case of J.J. Abram's Star Trek, however, we both solidly endorse it.
If you don't want anything like a spoiler, just stop reading and go see the movie now. I'll try not to give too much away, but some things want to be said. Although we aren't told the premise up front, what's essentially happened is that sometime in the future, all the original crew of the Enterprise except the long-lived Spock are dead, when circumstances conspire to create a black hole through which our villain, Nero (Eric Bana) travels back in time almost to the instant of James T. Kirk's birth, in the process killing Kirk's father and otherwise changing the course of history. In other words, this film takes place in an alternate reality that has branched off from the mainline Star Trek continuum.
The concept, to our minds, worked pretty well, giving the writers a good deal of freedom to play with the Star Trek universe. We recognize the characters, we laugh at the in-jokes, but anything could happen. I won't give more than that away, but I will finish by saying that we had a great time watching this film. We laughed, we tensed up, we sighed with relief, we might even have been a bit moved. Even if the science did seem a bit hokey at times, when has that ever been a huge problem in the Star Trek universe, anyway?
Oh, and the score by Michael Giaccino was great.