Hanno's blog

Recently, a new X-Men movie made it to the cinemas. I quite liked the first three X-Men movies. I wasn't very impressed by the prequel-movie Wolverine, which tells the story of one of the characters.

Now there's X-Men first class. Again a prequel, but from a different perspective. Wolverine only has a very short cameo appearance, this time the movie telling the story of many other X-Men characters. Prequels are difficult. They must tell a story that already has some fixed points and a fixed outcome that's already known my most viewers. The new X-Men film suffers exactly from that problems.

The movie does a very brave task - it tries not only to tell a prequel story to the other movies, it also involves a whole bunch of historic events. From the nazi concentration camps to nuclear weapons and the cuba crisis. This sounds like too much for a science fiction movie, but surprisingly it handles this part not so bad. It even motivated me to improve my history knowledge and read something about Argentinia's role in hiding nazis after the second world war (some german information here). It seems the movie is pretty close to real history in that respect.

But there's another problem in this movie. I found the main plot just doesn't fit. And that's due to the fact its a prequel where the outcome is already decided:

(please stop reading here if you haven't seen the movie and still want to see it - spoilers ahead)

The development of the charakter Erik Lensherr alias Magneto. As the victim of some cruel experiments by a mad Nazi scientist, his life is one of anger and revenge. But his opponent - and all viewers of the other X-Men movies already know that - has a role which is exactly what Magneto's role will be later. So in the end, he kills him - and then just replaces him. All allies of his biggest enemy just become allies of him. That just doesn't make sense.

(now you can read again)

All in all, it's still a pretty good movie. If you like such movies, it has its moments. But the in my opinion illogical story destroys a lot.

Final word: We had two X-Men prequels now. But X-Men 3 ended with a perfect cliffhanger. It should be resolved at some point - I'd like to see X-Men 4.

Before I start my review about the movie, I'd like to give some preface about my connection to Star Trek. Although I occasionally watched the series for a long time, I really started getting interested at the worst possible moment - shortly after it was announced that the last series »Enterprise« was stopped (although there were petitions and rallies - I just noted a bit too late to take part).
So with the last series stopped and the last film »Nemesis« being a flop, it was quite unlikely that Star Trek would continue at all in any way. So the only thing left was experiencing the vast majority of past series (which I'd suggest everyone to do - my favorite is Deep Space 9).

So the message that there should be a new film was surprising and promising. Though from the beginning, I was quite sceptical - the concept of a prequel to the original series with new actors for famous roles seemed difficult. It rarely happened in the past that different actors played the same person in the Star Trek universe and it was only the case for side roles (e. g. Ziyal in DS9, Zefram Cochrane in TOS/ST8). But what was even more disturbing was the director J. J. Abrams - with movies like Armageddon I didn't find him very predestined for this job. But as I read some quite positive reviews, I gave the movie a chance and went to the cinema on the first day.

To give a conclusion: I was absolutely right not to expect much from the film. It is a middle-class Hollywood action movie and has just nothing from the Star Trek spirit I liked so much.
The no-gos are countless. I mean, product placement is a pity in films any way, but in a Star Trek movie? And have you ever heard a pop song from the 90s in ST? (Oh, you remember that scene from ST4 in the bus? Has the guy inventing that scene with Kirk in the car ever seen that movie?)
The film introduces lot's of characters from other ST stories without any relation. Soval (was the name even mentioned?) has just nothing of the person known from TOS/TNG. Those Romulans - they look different, their ships look different, there's no connection to any previous Romulan story, it just seems like a randomly picked species name. And the old Spock - yeah, every real Trekkie likes to see Leonard Nimoy is still able to play his role. But if you remember the last time Spock appeared in the ST universe - a plot in TNG with an underground resistance movement on Romulus, where Spock stayed - a quite open end - it's just predestined to continue telling that story. ST11 doesn't do that.
Then there's this thing with the parallel time line - parallel time lines are a common story methodology in Star Trek, so the idea has potential. But it seems it's just there so there's no need to stick with the Star Trek story too much - every mistake can just be explained as something happening in the alternative time line. It didn't really make any sense to me beside that.

Well, maybe the buzz around the movie opens perspectives for new Star Trek material in the future - and hopefully with more talented directors behind the scenes. Till then, I'll watch some episodes of Hidden Frontier.

Update: Only german, but nice review (WOZ).