Glass: Superhero Movies Are Dumb and You Are Dumb For Liking Them

***SPOILERS AHEAD***

Besides my comic book writing on Retcon Punch (RIP), there have only been a few times over the past several years where I have felt compelled to unearth this old WordPress and click-clack away on the keyboard. Usually it’s a reaction to a movie or TV show that is a mixture of frustration, confusion and overall curiosity. And boy oh boy have I found a movie that elicits all of those feelings at once.

M. Night Shyamalan’s 2016 film Split was a perfectly fine movie experience, (albeit with a message about victims of abuse that I’m very uncomfortable with). Even if you had given up on Shyamalan for the umpteenth time, you probably showed up to see James McAvoy portraying 23 identities over the course of the film – which was definitely worth the price of admission. Then came the final moments of the movie where it’s revealed that Split takes place in the same universe as 2000’s Unbreakable – Shyamalan loves his needless twists after all.

Apparently The Horde’s preferred method of killing is…squeezing.

In recent interviews Shyamalan has told reporters that this crossover had been part of the plan ever since he started writing Unbreakable (Which MUST be true, and completely unrelated to a slew of cinematic flops over the past decade). Screenplays go through many revisions of course, so it’s possible that “The Horde” – McAvoy’s cavalcade of identities – was in the DNA of Unbreakable in some form or another. But…come on dude. This wasn’t your master plan.

Apologies for the long preamble, but I feel a little context is necessary before going into this movie; now Glass itself. Where to begin? To put it mildly, Glass is a deeply flawed movie whose twists betray its own internal logic.

We pick up where Split left off: The Horde is still at large kidnapping and killing, while Unbreakable’s David Dunn (Bruce Willis) and his son Jacob – playing the Oracle/”man in the chair” role – are trying to find him. David tracks Horde down, they fight, yadda yadda then they are both locked in the same mental institute – you saw the trailers.

Somehow, the local authorities have agreed to allow Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson) three days to work with Dunn and The Horde – real name Kevin Wendell Crumb – and get them to realize that they are not special, but are suffering from the VERY common delusion that they are superheroes. Because three days is enough to treat/cure a major psychological ailment, after all. In short, there’s a whole lot of talking until master planner Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson) frees Dunn and Crumb to duke it out on the front lawn of the institute.

This asshole has his own monogrammed pin and fancy purple suit that has been kept in perfect condition for 19 years.

It’s possible that Glass could have been a great piece of psychological fiction. It’s also possible that M. Night Shyamalan could have planned this oeuvre of “realistic superhero” myth all along. Unfortunately we live in a world where neither of these things are true.

I have only seen Unbreakable once, and honestly can’t remember a lot of it but I know that it is revered and is one of Shyamalan’s respected films. In a time before the bloated superhero movie machine it was very unique – and in many respects still is. But in the time since, audiences have seen countless origin stories, sequels and reboots of the capes and tights set – they are fluent in the language of a superhero tale. So it’s a little tone-deaf when the film approaches its climax and Jacob Dunn and Casey Cooke (Split’s Anya Taylor-Joy) do comic book store “research” figure out what their super-powered co-stars might be up to. Shyamalan presents it as some mythic revelation that “answer lies with superheroes’ parents” or “there will be a big final battle between the hero and the villain.” Now that I think about it, it’s possible that Shyamalan has been working on the Unbreakable/Split/Glass universe for decades, because it seems like he hasn’t been to the movies since 2001.

It’s hard not to read any given Shyamalan film as a rebuke of his critics and a statement of self-adulation. (Remember in Lady in the Water when he had a film critic get violently mauled to death by the big bad wolf??) Having seen Glass, I don’t think that Shyamalan likes superhero movies all that much. And believe me, though I have seen every major superhero movie in recent memory, I am not their champion. If I understood batting averages (or math) I would say that the genre has had more misses than hits overall. Unlike me however, I get the sense that Shyamalan haaaaaaates superhero movies as a whole.

Shyamalan has always fancied himself a modern-day Hitchcock, inserting himself into his own films. Though he appears in Glass as an inquisitive customer of Dunn Home Security, I think that Shyamalan’s true avatar in the movie is Paulson’s Dr. Staple. An exhausting amount of the movie is spent focusing on Dr. Staple trying to convince Dunn, Crumb and Glass that their powers are not real. Which  would be a novel story if say, all of us and the characters knew that that was 100% not the case.

Staple completely refutes Jacob and Casey as they spout off their comic book research as if it were gospel to their current situation. She essentially says “superheroes are stupid and you are stupid for liking them!” In one of the final twists of the movie we discover that Staple works for some secret group of people with shamrock tattoos who seek out the super-powered and hide their existence for the world. Her goal is accomplished by the end of the film, as McAvoy’s character dies from a gut shot, Jackson’s dies from broken bones and internal injuries and Willis’ drowns…in a fucking puddle.

Night Shyamalan did it: he killed the superhero movie. There shall be no more.

—————————————————————————————————————————————–

Stray thoughts:

• Shyamalan has no idea how to film action. The majority of the fights between Willis and McAvoy are shot from underneath Willis’ chin, as if he’s wearing a GoPro.
• David Dunn – the unbreakable strongman – is arrested and put in chains. The Horde – an insane serial killer – is marched in with zero restraints.
• The Horde’s cell is no bigger than my college dorm room, and the only security precautions taken are a set of strobe lights set to shift him to different personalities.
• An orderly uses this security measure after Horde tries to attack him. Instead of leaving the room, said orderly keeps flashing lights and telling Mr. Split to “stop talking!”
• Literally less than 10 people work at this hospital.
• Dr. Staples tells multiple people how the psychiatric condition of “thinking you’re a superhero” is more common than you’d think
• Dr. Staples – ostensibly a medical health practitioner – allows Casey – a former victim of both sexual abuse and kidnapping – to physically touch the man who kidnapped her.
• David Dunn and The Horde’s rooms are across the hall from one another because of course they are.
• Shyamalan uses deleted scenes from Unbreakable, as well as a new scene where David Dunn tells his wife (who is shot from behind, so we don’t see her face) that he has something to tell her. We never find out what this is and his wife died of cancer off camera.
• No comic book store has separate “heroes” and “villains” sections. NONE.
• Kevin Wendell Crumb’s dad was on the same train that David Dunn was in Unbreakable because of course they were.
• Both this movie and Split seem to insist on using the full name “Kevin Wendell Crumb”, so I must use it too.
• Inexplicably, Shyamalan waits until the climax of the movie to show that Mr. Glass – the titular villain of the movie – has gross teeth.
• There is a scene where Anya Taylor-Joy is talking to Sarah Paulson, and it is clearly just a stand-in with red hair shot from behind, with Sarah Paulson ADR.
• Chekhov’s puddle
• Dr. Staples lets David touch her so he can get a vision of her backstory with the Shamrock Gang. The vision is a painfully long scene about a secret society at a restaurant waiting for their server to leave the room.
• For some reason Jacob Dunn, Casey Cooke and Mr. Glass’ mom become pals at the end of the movie. Mr. Glass emailed them all video footage of the final battle that Staples thought she deleted. They upload it to the internet and expect it all to change. Because when you put something on the internet, everyone sees it instantly, and it changes everything.

Arrested Development Season 4 Revisited

It was Memorial Day 2014: I had just come back to Chicago after being out of town. The new season of Arrested Development had been released on Netflix and I knew my cousin/roommate Max had watched a couple of episodes already so I asked him what he thought. After a brief pause he half-heartedly told me “They’re…ok…” This did not bode well for the return of a beloved series that I had rewatched multiple times.

I made my way through the season slowly but surely with great disappointment and confusion. Michael Bluth was not as likable, seemingly absorbing Jason Bateman’s less desirable traits. Similar to the joyless fourth season of Community the characters became self-parodies, turning terrific one-liners from the first three seasons into obnoxious catchphrases. And worst of all it had been made abundantly clear that the show’s strange, Rashomon single-character-focused episodes were in part due to conflicts in the actors’ busy schedules.

The season ended on a strange cliffhanger: Michael Cera’s George Michael Bluth punching his father Michael in the face; implying that there would be a follow-up season. I didn’t love the cliffhanger but I agreed with that punch on a visceral level.

Flash-forward to three years later: May 2018. In preparation for Netflix’s upcoming fifth season of Arrested Development, series creator Mitch Hurwitz released a “remixed” cut of Season 4 in an attempt to make the narrative structure similar to that of the original three seasons. Being the flagellating type, I presented myself with a challenge: rewatch the original cut of Season 4 as I simultaneously watched the remix “Arrested Development: Fateful Consequences” with my non-cousin roommate Matt. He had never seen the original cut of Season 4, so his viewing experience would serve as a control for my little project. And as the man once said: “Let the great experiment begin!”

Since I was watching the original cut by myself, I breezed through it a lot faster than I did Fateful Consequences with Matt. And surprisingly…I found myself kind of liking it? Though I can recall plenty of conversations in passing where I mentioned how terrible Season 4 was, it would seem that the years had softened my anger and disappointment by the Netflix revival.

To be clear, the things that didn’t work the first time around still didn’t work. George Senior’s “sweat & squeeze” in the desert still felt like a drawn-out, pointless experiment in how to make John Slattery unbelievably annoying and useless. Lindsay and Tobias’ stories were still painfully unfunny and uncomfortable, made only worse by their respective new love interests: Marky Bark and Debrie Bardeux (sorry Maria Bamford fans, but this is the only thing I’ve seen her in, and…not great.) And the idea of “Cinco de Quatro”…always seemed stupid to me.

Repetitive jokes and running gags rise and fall from random variations of slightly funny, annoying, hilarious, and suicidally god-awful. So this time around a lot of those running gags seemed to have hit me in the right way: “Same” “Get away Get Away” “Anne/And” “Prayer hands” etc. Ok, a lot of them have to do with GOB. And I didn’t really have an opinion of him before but this time I enjoyed Terry Crews’ buffoon politician Herbert Love and his calling Buster the “Blindside Monster.”

I still say that if Mitch Hurwitz couldn’t get the whole cast together to film at the same time, he shouldn’t have done it at all. The long-awaited return of a cult classic comedy is not the best place to switch up the storytelling format. However there is something very unique about the puzzle box structure of the story. No single episode of Season 4 makes complete sense until you’ve watched the entire season, explaining the preceding chapters in hindsight. On the outside every member of the Bluth family seems to have their shit together, but when the episode focuses on them we see those scenes of confidence replayed in a new, less flattering light. The best of these probably belong to George Michael and Alia Shawkat’s Maebe Fuhnke, whose stories were a lot more concise and revelatory than the rest of the Bluths. In fact, George Michael is probably my favorite character of the whole season.

And now the story of an OK season of television that got re-cut in an attempt to save face but made it even worse. It’s Arrested Development: Fateful Consequences.

It was clear to me very early on that the remix was not going to work. You can edit the hell out of something to rearrange it chronologically, but it was very clearly written to be a strange mystery comedy. By *attempting* to tell the story chronologically, Hurwitz steps on his own feet. Instead of remaining a mysterious figure until the end of the season, some of George Michael’s shortcomings are revealed too soon.

More frustrating is all of the heavy-lifting that Ron Howard’s narrator has to do. With all of his new dialogue I wouldn’t be surprised if Howard put in as much time in the sound booth as Hurwitz did in the editing bay. A fourth of Fateful Consequences‘ runtime is dedicated to recapping and explaining things. There’s a “previously on” section in numerous episodes. On Netflix. “Real shoddy narrating. Just pure crap.”

Fateful Consequences all builds to the Cinco de Quatro finale, which has been morphed into an odd three-parter. Each chapter opens with a narration by the John Beard reporter and closes with a very ham-fisted narration laying the groundwork for Season 5’s “Whodunnit” murder mystery premise. It’s perhaps the most jarring and unsuccessful section of the remix.

For the time being, Fateful Consequences is being upheld as the definitive version of Arrested Development Season 4. In fact, Netflix has made it incredibly difficult to even find the original cut. To access it you have to search within the rarely-traversed “Trailers & More” section. Worse still Netflix does not provide its usual option to “pick up where you left off” with the original cut, instead pointing you towards Fateful Consequences.

I’m sure there are plenty of people who did not put themselves through that process and instead went into Fateful Consequences cold, perhaps liking it the better for it. And while I’d love to favor a version of a season of Arrested Development that is more traditionally cut, this is not a traditional season of Arrested Development in the first place. Sometimes funny and frequently arduous, Arrested Development Season 4 is a bizarre experience – but one that I appreciated and respected a lot more without rage-colored lenses.

Batman v Superman: Emails of Justice

Time for me to chime in, but where to begin? First, let’s talk sheer concept: Batman vs Superman, who would win in a fight? Here are the typical answers to that “age-old” question:

1. Superman, duh. He’s like, super.
2. Batman, because Batman always wins and…ya know, kryptonite?
3. This is a fundamentally uninteresting question that seems to be missing the point of these particular superheroes…

With that out of the way, let’s focus on the movie itself. To be clear Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is not a movie – it’s a commercial, it’s a misguided “adaptation”, it’s fool’s gold and it’s a steroid that DC/Warner Bros is using in an attempt to catch up with Marvel Studios in the superhero movie arms race. Most importantly  Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is not a movie because it is several movies that have been forced into one.

I’m still wary on exactly how many movies exist within the 153 minutes of Batman v Superman. Any given movie is made up of a handful of ideas that come together to create conflict and propel the story and its characters forward. Batman v Superman is overflowing with ideas – most of which are never fully realized or explored. Let’s try to count and label the number of movies in BvS without judgement  (that comes later) – shall we?

1. Man of Steel sequel
2. Batman reboot
3. Wonder Woman set-up
4. Justice League set-up
5. The Dark Knight Returns/The Death of Superman adaptation
6. Zack Snyder’s attempt to pretend like he understood the Man of Steel outcry

Ok, so I might have tagged on that last one and you could argue that some of my “movies” could be combined so let’s say there is at least FOUR movies happening in this ONE feature film. I’m ambivalent about the Marvel Studios films for the most part, but there’s no denying that they own the market on the Hollywood capes and tights crowd. DC/Warner’s penis envy of Marvel Studios permeates the entire structure of Batman v Superman, creating the incoherence of its four-in-one structure.

Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (I really hate typing out that fucking subtitle) is a bizarre experience. Where Man of Steel legitimately angered me, BvS merely made me roll my eyes at its audacity. Though it is clunky, forced and stupid, the studio’s “world-building” parts of the movie thankfully gave less time for Snyder to fundamentally misunderstand the DC heroes on the same level as he did in Man of Steel. There are so many plates half-ass spinning at the same time that it’s not as easy to ridicule Zack Snyder for his typical flaws.

That said, Snyder gives the “source material” of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns the same slavish reverence that he did in 2009’s Watchmen. Screenwriters Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer cut and paste lines of dialogue and inner monologue from Miller’s book into BvS. Without going on too much of a tangent, The Dark Knight Returns is simultaneously the best and worst thing that has ever happened to the character. It’s inspired a lot of great reinterpretations and critiques of Batman but it has also lead to readers and creators championing it’s more extreme moments – like Batman fighting Superman  and firing a gun at a kidnapper- as gospel. I’d equate this group of people to those who simply love Quentin Tarantino for the gratuitous violence and racial slurs in his films and nothing else. The Batman in The Dark Knight Returns is at the end of his rope, after a career of fighting crime in Gotham; it’s the last Batman story. To have Ben Affleck personify that Batman in a movie that is posed to set up the Justice League and the entire DC Cinematic Universe is mind-boggling. It’s one of those instances that it seems that Snyder just does something because “it’s cool.”

Oh bro, he’s pwning

Actually, the whole movie could probably be categorized as happening just because “it’s cool”; the characters’ motivations certainly don’t justify themselves. Batman wants to fight (and kill) Superman because he thinks that Superman has the potential to enslave mankind…or something. Batman expedites his Super killing scheme when he has a nightmare vision of the future. Batman – a man of reason and science – bases his whole plan on a dream. Lucky for Bruce that his dream was very straightforward and not Freudian (because the Freudian stuff is saved for the end of the actual fight.) Batman is a bully and Superman is a sad sack god who doesn’t ever make any active choices in the entirety of the movie. BvS even gives Superman a platform to tell the world what he stands for – in the ever exciting superhero courtroom scene – but takes that very platform away by blowing the whole damn thing up. The movie strives for meaning but never claims to have any. Batman vs Superman is supposed to be a battle of philosophies on how to be a hero, but it’s kind of hard when both of the guys in capes are just assholes. Metropolis is supposed to be a shining city of tomorrow – perpetual sunshine to Gotham’s perpetual night. But since Zack Snyder’s color pallet is as varied as your favorite Instagram filter (and the fact that they’re just a river apart) you don’t get this most basic of dichotomies. 

Snyder frames several shots of the film as if he assumes that we as an audience are fucking morons. In that courtroom scene the camera cuts between Lex Luthor’s empty seat and the jar of piss in front of Holly Hunter (not even gonna explain) several times before the courtroom blows up – just in case you weren’t sure who the villain of the movie was. The “resolution” of the ten minute Batman/Superman fight is absurd and similarly force fed. Batman stops trying to kill Superman when he realizes they both have mothers named Martha. If you never realized that coincidence you definitely did by this point in the film, as the script has gone out of its way to hammer that silly factoid in your skull.

Yes, “our moms have the same name” is the reason Bats and Supes team up, because women are not characters in this movie, but plot points. Amy Adams is wasted on this 2-dimensional character of Lois Lane yet again. The movie might have you believe that stating she’s not a lady but a “journalist” and involving her in some impossible to follow Superman/bullet murder frame job, but she’s just the damsel in distress unfortunately. Lex Luthor’s abduction and abuse of Martha Kent is similarly damsel-y in nature – cruel, degrading and uncomfortable. “What about Wonder Woman” you ask? Well she’s a similar plot device who is doing her best Anne Hathaway Catwoman impression for most of the movie until she comes in with her own rad electric guitar theme for the Doomsday fight at the end.

In attempt to punctuate things, I’ll tackle Doomsday and kryptonite at the same time. kryptonite can be used effectively in Superman stories but more times than not it is a crutch. Doomsday was a villain of sheer force that was created in the ‘90s to kill Superman without kryptonite for the cynical intention of hoping that fans would care about Superman again. It should come as no surprise that Batman v Superman fails to say anything interesting or original about this bland Superman in relation to kryptonite or Doomsday. Lex Luthor literally refers to kryptonite as “a silver bullet” – which narratively it typically is. And yes, this movie had to kill Superman too for some reason.

Jesse Eisenberg chews the scenery of the movie until he chokes on it, vomits it back up just so he can chew on it yet again. It’s almost a tie between Lex Luthor and Batman for their lack of reasoning in wanting to kill Superman. It’s revealed (but not explained of course) that Luthor is behind everything: the dumb bullet frame job, pitting Batman against Superman and even (inadvertently) the founding of the Justice League. Having the future heroes of the Justice League be revealed in an email (with their respective logos, no less) requires no further elaboration on my part than to say: it is dumb. So very dumb. 

This piece I’ve written probably comes off as schizophrenic and jumbled together, but in that way it’s an accurate representation of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. So to cap off this already long diatribe (if you’ve gotten this far) I will present to you some highlights from my SEVEN pages of notes, in no particular order:

 

• Snyder doesn’t fully paint a picture of who this Batman is, but cheats by relying on imagery that we’ve seen in the Nolan films. Why was Wayne Manor carpet bombed, exactly?
• If the nation as a whole is so unsure of Superman, how did a major American city commission a god-like statue of him on the ground zero he caused?
  • Metropolis PD acts like paraplegic vandals climb Superman statues all day, everyday
• This movie opens and closes with a funeral. Yay!
• Thomas Wayne, MD attacks a man who has him at gunpoint
• The angle of the gun pointed at Martha indicates a point blank shot to the face – she’d be obliterated. Can’t wait for the R-rated version!
• Does Ben Affleck Bruce Wayne live in the lake house that Rosamund Pike stayed at in Gone Girl?
• Lex Luthor’s podium speech trails off into madness
  • This movie in a nutshell
  • Holly Hunter’s courtroom speech trails off into madness, as an apparent ode to Lex’s speech.
    • This movie in a nutshell
•  Clark: “The Daily Planet used to stand for something” Perry: “And so could you if it was 1938, but it’s not 1938”
  • This movie in a nutshell
• Superman tells Lois that he’s been living life the way his father wanted
  • Which is actually false, because Pa Kent’s advice to Clark in Man of Steel boiled down to “stay in the closet ya homo, don’t be different.”
• Why does Batman have to have a nightmare vision where he shoots a bunch of dudes? WHY?!?
• The superheroes in this movie get a lot of their info from the TV news and the newspaper
• “They [Batman’s parents] taught me the world only makes sense if you force it to”
  • This movie in a nutshell
• “Thankfully the workday is over” – said real life Anderson Cooper never
• Doomsday looks like he’s having sex with the energy he’s absorbing
  • Also, that’s Parasite’s shtick, not Doomsday’s.
• Supes to Lois: “You are my world”
  • Appropriating his father’s bullshit
  • Women are not people, not objects, but worlds.
  • Good or bad? DEBATE!
• Oh look! Clark was gonna propose! We need more things in this movie, don’t we?
• Bechdel test fail
• Dirt rises, just like…children levitating bats

 

Well…this was exhausting. There’s so much more I want to say…what a weird thing this movie is. I can’t wait for the next email movie from DC!

X-Men: The Animated Series review

You know how when people talk about the X-Men movies, the general rule is “Two or Three great ones, two miserable ones and a couple in between”? That same logic can be applied to 1992’s X-Men animated series, oddly enough. With 75 episodes spread out across five seasons, X-Men is a kind of glorious mess of a television program. There’s a mix of good, bad and “are you kidding me with this right now?”

The world of X-Men is a 90s Jim Lee-inspired landscape of mutants who all seem to wear costumes for some reason, even if they aren’t affiliated with the X-Men or Magneto. There are good mutants and bad mutants and not a whole lot in between – barring a couple of coming-of-age/learning your mutant power stories set in various “Smalltown, USA.” Wisely, just like the 2000 X-Men film, it is a world of fear and hatred of mutants already in progress. That being said, the first season is by-and-large introducing the X-Men and the viewers to the obstacles that they will be facing for the majority of the series’ run. X-Men is also a show that likes to remind its viewers that Jubilee is gonna be in this show and there’s not a damn thing you can do to change that. “She shoots fireworks! Kids LOVE fireworks!” (Ok, Jubilee’s not THAT bad.)

Let’s start off with the pros of this particular X-Men incarnation, shall we? First off, unlike the X-Men films, it was unashamed to dive head-first into X-Men lore. Though they were among some of the sillier episodes, the series highlighted The Savage Land – the prehistoric continent that had dinosaurs, goofy mythological religions and cave men vs. pterodactyl men. It had the Shi’ar – the cosmic bird-like race with radical hair-dos that looked like sideways Mohawks. And once you throw the Shi’ar into the mix you have to have The Phoenix Saga – the classic Chris Claremont tale that made the otherwise bore of a character Jean Grey into a galactic powerhouse. To date, X-Men’s Phoenix Saga is as close as any onscreen iteration has come to that original storyline. Also Wolverine has one-liners. Boy oh boy does Wolverine have one-liners.

You just couldn’t do it right, could you Bret Ratner?

Another thing that X-Men got right is the voice work. In recent years, voice actor Steven Blum has done scores of Wolverine voice-acting roles, but for my money, Cathal J. Dodd IS Weapon X. Magneto’s voice has a cadence that echoes with power, as does Apocalypse’s booming unearthly speech and Mr. Sinister’s hollow, metallic tone. Beast’s Shakespearian soliloquies also translate very well from page to screen. On the more obnoxious end however we have Professor X, whose screams of psychic pain seem to increase as the series progresses and Juggernaut, who’s just too stupid to be real (fake.) They are half-brothers after all…

Now let’s get to the uglier aspects of the series…which are myriad. Though Apocalypse, Magneto and Mr. Sinister are all villains portrayed with bravado and zeal they are pretty hammy incarnations with small scope ambitions. Wolverine’s past is something comic books LOVE to flesh out, and rarely is it executed gracefully; the animated series is no exception to this universal truth. Logan is the perpetual grumpy “I’m gonna slice your face off” anti-hero, but if the personal past depicted in the series is to be taken at face value, he would probably be a little less broody and maybe just irritated every now and then. Also I can’t tell you how many times that Cyclops’ badass son from the future appeared and I was begging for them to address their relationship…they never did.

Early on in the series it’s pretty clear that the creators of the show don’t necessarily know what they are doing. There are a bunch of head-scratching moments where it’s pretty safe to assume the writers are just making shit up. In an episode where Cyclops is kidnapped by the sewer-dwelling Morlocks, he says: “Sunlight fuels my power; I won’t be much good to you down here.” —wait, what?? Magneto’s first attack is ultimately stopped by Xavier telepathically attacking him while the Master of Magnetism’s helmet is STILL ON. That’s rudimentary X-Men science right there folks: Magneto helmet = no mind hacking. That never really made sense, I know, but that’s the rule dammit! My favorite WTF moment of the series is in a Season 5 episode (that was supposed to be in the middle of Season 3) “No Mutant Is an Island;” It’s a Cyclops-only episode which means it will automatically be terrible. Cyclops returns to the orphanage where he grew up, has a creepy romantic thing with the woman that raised him and stumbles upon an Oliver Twistian-perverter-of-orphans (Purple Man) who uses them for their mutant powers. He instructs a mutant child in a wheelchair (Tacky) how to break into a bank with the following: “You, Tacky – we’ll use your wheelchair transformation power to gain access.” The young lad’s wheelchair then morphs into…a tank…HUH?

Everybody remembers Gambit being super awesome, but honestly he sounds kind of…special

Epic and dramatic, silly and farcical, X-Men is a piece of 90s nostalgia that probably wouldn’t be made in the same fashion in 2014. It broached the subjects of racism and intolerance with its mutant allegory and even brushed up against the notion of God and religion in an excellent portrayal of everyone’s favorite teleporter, Nightcrawler. Most of the characterizations were spot-on actually. X-Men suffered from curious episode production problems and the animation style mutated from grungy Jim Lee anime to production line Bible Adventure cartoony. The show often seemed aware of its shortcomings though, as it constantly took the character of Morph on and off the table – Professor X often told Morph he “wasn’t ready to be back on the team.” (Morph was pretty much Jar Jar Binks before Jar Jar Binks was a thing.) X-Men started off flat, rose to entertaining heights with The Phoenix Saga and other multi-arc storylines, and plateaued back to where it started quality-wise, ending with the whimpering series finale: “Graduation Day.” I rewatched most of it, skipping solo character episodes about Gambit’s weird swamp cult and Storm’s exhausting claustrophobia, but for some reason I watched those godforsaken Cyclops episodes in their entirety. I rewatched them so you don’t have to. If you do want to venture back into the 90s X-Men cartoon, go for episodes with Apocalypse, Nightcrawler, Magneto and Phoenix. Skip the last season man. Just skip it.

 

Final Grade: ★★★ 3/5

Watch it? …If you REAALLY miss the 90s and/or LOVE X-Men

Grant Morrison’s New X-Men

 

Grant Morrison’s New X-Men run launched in May 2001, and more than a decade later it is still a fascinating and thrilling head-trip of a read. This specific run of New X-Men is well-remembered for the controversial transformation of the sometimes sympathetic villain Magneto into an outdated genocidal maniac – which has since been retconned. But for all of the complaints against that particular plot point, there are plenty of characters and ideas that Morrison instituted that are now mainstays of X-Men lore.

Morrison began pitching his New X-Men story to Marvel shortly after the success of the 2000 Bryan Singer film. Like that first movie, Morrison’s X-Men team ditched the spandex altogether and went for a more militaristic/stormer uniform. The characters themselves questioned why they dressed as superheroes in the first place. New X-Men introduced the concept of “secondary mutations,” giving additional powers to characters like Emma Frost in her diamond form and the constantly evolving Beast. Though it’s entirely hard to fathom, Grant Morrison was the man who outed Charles Xavier and the Xavier Institute as mutants, firmly reinforcing the ideals of self-acceptance and tolerance that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had intended for the X-Men, created nearly 40 years prior. Though this New X-Men run lasted 40 issues, the series could conceivably be read separately – arc by arc. Storylines ranging from one to nine issues were packed with emotional resonance and high-concept philosophies. Typical to form, Morrison’s New X-Men scripts were full of self-aware characters whose every line of dialogue felt intentional and heavily significant.

Grant Morrison kicks off his epic with the mass-genocide of Genosha – the island consisting of half of the mutant population on the planet. We discover that the culprit behind this attack is Cassandra Nova, Professor Xavier’s twin sister that he killed in the womb. Another villain Morrison creates is John Sublime and his U-Men: normal human beings who wish to gain powers through harvesting mutant organs. Magneto “died” on Genosha only to revealed to be in hiding among the X-Men as the mutant healer Xorn, cultivating a new generation of Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, crippling New York City and killing Jean Grey in the process. Morrison also created the savvy, super-cool Fantomex, a master thief and self-invented character that came from the same government program that Wolverine did.

Morrison is known for his big, sci-fi ideas, but New X-Men also nailed the character work in a way that X-books up to that point had been missing for some time. Cyclops is often portrayed as a Boy Scout leader without much depth, but Morrison utilized this and turned him into a man without a purpose, questioning everything following a recent possession by the villain Apocalypse. Morrison gave us a Scott Summers whose marriage was falling apart and who was committing telepathic adultery with Emma Frost – a far more interesting character than the self-important Magneto-lite that is featured in today’s X-books. X-Men books can often transform into episodes of “The Wolverine Variety Show,” but here the X-Man is placed as an equal member of the team, used only when necessary. Even the “C-list characters” who make meager cameos were given imaginative uses and purposes – Jamie Madrox, The Multiple Man, made a reference about vocally harmonizing with his fellow duplicates from time to time. Grant Morrison is a man who knows his comics history and utilizes characters in new ways that still honor their core concepts.

Xorn was Magneto in disguise…later to be retconned as Xorn in disguise as Magneto in disguise as Xorn…

Readers generally take umbrage with Morrison’s use of Magneto however. Instead of the “Malcolm X of mutants,” Morrison turned Magneto into full-on supervillain, leaving little room for the gray area that the character usually resides in. Though it’s not a portrayal of significant depth, this Magneto certainly fit in with the overall structure of New X-Men. Morrison recognized that the X-Men (and comic books in general) are the study of generational change. With stories about new students like Quentin Quire revolting against Xavier’s status quo and constant Darwinist approach of “new vs. old,” an old man trying desperately to appeal to the new generation but misguidedly failing is completely on-point. Readers didn’t want that Magneto but neither did the characters of the book. Xavier said it himself:

“Magneto had become a legend in death, an inspiration for change. Now look at you—just another foolish and self-important old man, with outdated thoughts in his head. You have nothing this new generation of mutants wants…except for your face on a T-shirt.”

Grant Morrison’s New X-Men isn’t a perfect piece of comic book literature however. The 40-issue run starts off strong, but sometimes Morrison can’t match it at the back end. The penultimate arc “Planet X” was followed by a “Days of Future Past”- inspired dystopian arc called “Here Comes Tomorrow,” which of course didn’t feel as significant, knowing that everything would go back to the way it was. The art was split among a handful of artists such as Ethan Van Sciver, Igor Kordey Phil Jimenez and frequent Morrison collaborator Frank Quitely, among others. Quitely’s particular style of self-assured characters gels well with a team of X-Men who have been fighting the good fight for years. Ethan Van Sciver takes pleasure in the grotesque aspect of Morrison’s new and strange mutants. Kordey somewhat stumbles along in places, with character work that sometimes makes it look like faces are melting off. Jimenez succeeds as a modern John Byrne of sorts, especially in “Planet X,” where he rarely falters.

Imperfect it may be, Grant Morrison’s New X-Men run is a wondrous piece of pop culture that has added so much to the X-Men universe. 13 years later we have characters like Quentin Quire, Fantomex and The Stepford Cuckoos still prevalent in the comic books. Morrison’s human fly mutant Angel made it into X-Men: First Class, as did the Weapon Plus concept in the abominable film X-Men Origins: Wolverine. There’s a lot of staying power in Morrison’s ideas, which laid the foundation for X-Men stories of the past decade and beyond.

EVERYONE loves these guys.

Final Grade: ★★★★ 4/5

Read it?  If you love X-Men and/or Grant Morrison, absolutely.