What the X-Men Movie Taught Me About Comic Books

The short answer is that X-Men the movie informed me, as a geeky ten year old girl, that comic books and in fact the whole of the super hero genre could be for girls as well.

It’s not that I was ever big on following stereotypes. I wore dresses Friday, played on quads Saturday and watched football Sunday. For the most part, I never felt much of a rejection from the geekosphere because of my gender. There were talks where I had to assure boys that, yes I, as a girl, did indeed play video games. That I liked Dungeons and Dragons. And I in fact watched more nerdy television shows than they did.

Eventually my nerdiness became a bit of a non-issue (except in the ‘she’s so cool’ sort of way.)

But superheroes remained a boy zone.

I blame Saturday morning cartoons. For the most part cartoons (at least the ones I enjoyed) were very male dominated, much like everything else. Yu-Gi-Oh!, Digimon, and Pokemon all had resoundingly boy dominated stories. To get something girl oriented I would have to flip on over to the Lizzie Mcguire Show and there was nothing about it that I found enjoyable.

Yet despite the blatant guy-ness of these shows there was a decent enough female presence and even the lead male characters seemed pretty agendered at the end of the day.

I suppose I should also point out that I can perfectly appreciate a male led story. I do, in fact, enjoy male characters and don’t mind them having arcs. I can’t stress that enough. I can even project on male characters. But it has always been easier to do so with female characters and I’d like to see my gender portrayed more often. Since there’s nothing wrong with my gender, any more than there’s something wrong with the male gender.

Yet the picture I was gathering from my cartoon commercials was that superheroes go a step beyond a male led story to this no woman land.

Imagine it: sitting there, excited for the upcoming female arc that’s been promised in one of your favorite shows. Then the commercials start with names like Batman, Spiderman and Superman. Better yet, pretty much all sidekicks and side characters were boys as well. From what I gleaned from my father, a comic collector when he was a younger boy, the superhero world was pretty male populated.

I suppose it seemed sort of cool, heroes fighting crime with super powers (except for Batman because he’s Batman) but there were no girls. I wasn’t interested in something that seemed to have quite literally zero girls. Star Wars at least had one girl! Who kicked general butt and was hinted at having the same magickal powers as her twin brother. The few female names associated with the superguys (Lois Lane and Mary Jane) were just love interests. Nothing more.

I wanted none of that. It just didn’t seem interesting to this little girl.

In the year of 2000 when I turned ten years old, the X-Men movie came out. Suddenly girls had super powers and I couldn’t have been happier. Not only that, but I had choices: Rogue, Jean, Storm and Mystique! I felt spoiled.

I remember after that happened peppering my dad with X-Men related questioned. I learned about characters like Kitty, Colossus and Nightcrawler. All of whom sounded pretty awesome.

My memory fails me on which order the next events came at me in so I’ll just go with most important first. 

The real game changer was the Christmas my dad gave me The Dark Phoenix Saga as a present. This was my first ever comic book. I devoured that thing, feeling pretty jazzed up about that whole comic book idea.

And then there was Jean Grey aka the Phoenix. Sure, she spent the majority of the arc as the unequivocal source of conflict for the X-Men but let’s keep in mind that until now all things superhero genred had been named after men. Here, for the first time, was a title based on a female character who was the focal point for an entire multiple issued arc.

 

This was no little thing for my inner girl power.

I became mildly obsessed with Jean, though the majority of my knowledge remained based on that comic and the X-Men films. A small bit from online role playing and fanfictions. This love of Jean Grey was so much that Last Stand, though disappointing in its use of the Phoenix, remained my favorite X-Men film until quite recently (it was the only one I owned until three years ago when I purchased X-Men Origins.)

There was something about how a woman could be a hero and a villain, a love interest yet not the damsel that captivated me. It was simply nothing I had seen thus far, especially not near the superhero genre.

And I think it’s because of X-Men that I feel so strongly about female representation in my media. In 2000 it pushed the envelope on what I thought was possible. That even to me, who was all about blurring the lines between ‘girl stuff’ and ‘guy stuff,’ superheroes seemed solely to be a town populated by guys. X-Men blew that theory out of the water and said ‘look here, women are special too and can save the day.’

Unfortunately there has been nothing since 2000 that has pushed that envelope again and it’s seriously disappointing. In fact, we’ve gone backwards. Not since 2005 have we had a superhero film named after a woman (Elektra) with no real promise of anything this year or next. A decade since the last female led superhero movie.

As had been said before, we’re getting a movie with a talking tree person and a talking raccoon but DC can’t even get a Wonder Woman movie to work.

The cast of X-Men: Days of Future Past is entirely male heavy even ignoring the fact that two characters have two actors portraying them with no promise of a main storyline for any of the possible female characters.

Basically, I see no progress: only stagnation.

Luckily the television side of things seems to be holding up better. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D is rocking a fifty percent female main cast and Agent Carter looms on the horizon as the next Marvel produced TV series.

 

So, yeah, I’m happy.

I’m also unhappy.

X-Men shattered my preconceptions on a genre I might have ignored all my life. But now I have higher expectations that aren’t being met and I don’t even really feel like I’m asking for the moon here.

Just more love for the fans that actually exist instead of the ones Hollywood seems to think exist. 

(And just because, Dazzler as a S.H.I.E.L.D agent because until Fox and Marvel get along, it’s never going to happen in TV or Movie land… Please tell me somebody is as sad about this as me)

If I were in charge of the X-Men movies…

Since the direction of The Wolverine movie was announced – that it would be post X-men 3: The Last Stand – I was cautiously optimistic for the direction of the X-Men movie franchise. I saw in work a very slow moving plan to bring us back to the formula that worked okay for the first two X-Men movies and hopefully bring out a healthy cousin to The Avengers. I don’t expect that same brilliance, but then I doubt Fox is going to hire Joss Whedon, especially with Whedon now so busy, even if they should because he’s amazing.

That movie has come and past and while not a bombshell of a movie, it was decent. It didn’t do as much paving as I hoped but the potential was still there. I could see it, practically taste it. And of course we already knew Days of Future Past was going to be a thing before that movie even came out.

Now Days isn’t even in theaters and we’re hearing that 2016 will be bringing in Apocalypse (yes, it’s a confirmed thing: http://www.themarysue.com/xmen-apocalypse-announced/). Again, I am cautiously optimistic but who knows how much I’m projecting. Because I know how I’d fix things if I could.

When I first watched X-Men, X-2, Last Stand, and even X-Men Origins I knew very little about the X-Men and comic books. My knowledge came from the stories my dad would tell and the one comic book I owned, the Dark Phoenix Saga. Even that I did not receive until after the first movie, so I was of course far more critical of Jean Grey and the movie’s use of the Phoenix for it.

I liked the first movie. It did its job and it pulled a newbie into a world I hadn’t really realized I was allowed to be a part of. After all comic books and super heroes were a boys club; most of my knowledge was of Batman and Superman. I didn’t like those stories because I was never really interested in stories where men beat each other up while women screech on the sidelines. So following a teenage Rogue, who had super powers, and then gets rescued by Storm, who has super powers, really drew me in.

And Logan is hot.

The second movie did its best at showing an X-Men team. But since for the majority of the movie the team is actually disjointed and Wolverine is playing babysitter with the kids, it mostly comes off as a Wolverine movie. There was nothing bad about it necessarily, but it wasn’t what I read in my one comic book.

It was the third movie I feel that did the team thing the best and unfortunately it failed in storytelling. It was in this movie that the X-Men movie franchise shot themselves in the foot.

After that mess was created, they attempted to go back in time and did a Wolverine origin story. While with my own head canon nuances added to the movie makes me like it, from an objective view point it did not make things better.

First Class made things better (we really do get our first team movie here) but with no clear central character to latch on to (Is it Xavier? Is it Magneto? Maybe it’s Mystique? I don’t really know…) and most characters were there simply as powers it failed in really bringing the X-Men to life. Leaving out entirely the continuity questions it brought into play.

The movie makers learned from their mistake of not having a central character and decided again to make a Wolverine movie. Fans of the Canadian were glad while others feared another Origins movie. I for the most part had little opinion. Out of any of the movie franchise characters, Logan’s was the most realized and I knew the most lucrative, so it was hard for me to imagine the movie being terrible. I do enjoy Origins (and even Last Stand to a certain extent.)

But I profess to be growing bored of the mountain man and wished that at some point another one of the many X-Men characters had been developed more so they could at least share center stage with Logan. And by this time in my life I am reading comics constantly. I am aware of how that story structure works and even how an actual X-Men team operates.

So back to my earlier statement, I was cautiously hopeful with Wolverine taking place post Last Stand. This meant that the timeline had to be progressed forward. I predicted (and quite accurately too) that the movie would be used to get Logan past the fact that he killed his love, regain some of his honor and trust in himself, and send him back to America where he could once again bring the audience into the X-Men fold. This time, however, I saw Logan gathering the X-Men back together and continuing Professor X’s goal.

It seems in a way I was right. The first two check marks definitely. The third… well, from what we’ve seen so far of Days it’s actually Xavier and Magneto that recruit him (again) but it is to be Logan’s job to go back in time and form up the X-Men in a sense.

Now the disappointing prospect of this film is that in the comics this was Kitty Pryde’s story. She was the one that went back in time and saved the future. My sadness is twofold: no female lead and we once again get a Wolverine lead. The only movie he hasn’t been a lead to was First Class.

That being said I understand why they did it. And if they continue down this path correctly they can be completely and utterly forgiven for having to do this.

But they really need to do the following:

1. Build up some characters.

This is unfortunately looks rather difficult since they have such a large cast. Young Xavier and young Magneto look to become strong focal points to the movie, just as they were in First Class. There’s nothing wrong with this and with Logan as the lead, less pressure is on them to figure which of them ought to be the main character.

It’s still irksome, though, that it’s mostly male characters squabbling for the lead. Mystique looks like she has a chance to have a strong presence in the movie and I have my fingers crossed. She’s been as iconic as Wolverine in all the movies and finally got some actual character development in First Class; she has a chance at becoming a female lead in an X-Men movie but only if the writers and directors aren’t afraid to really use her!

Meanwhile, Kitty, Bobby, Piotr, and Rogue all have small flashes in the trailer so they’ll be involved. Rogue had been created to be a bit of a central character in the first movie but has since been relegated further and further back in the cast lineup. Not always to her detriment and I’m sure the younger audience would still jump on a more Rogue centered plot again.

But of course we’ve also got new faces popping up in the trailer, Bishop and Blink most prominently, which worries me. We have a sea of severely underdeveloped characters and now we’re adding more who may or may not have any real importance to the plot? I think they’re more a set up for sequels which harkens me to Ironman 2 and their introduction of Black Widow. It can work, but it also severely weakens the movie it happens in. That being said, I like Blink in her Age of Apocalypse incarnation. As long as they don’t use her just for her teleporting power, I could be a pleased fangirl.

2. They need to step off of the Wolverine gas pedal a little

He’s our lead for two good reasons: he doesn’t age which makes him the perfect one to time travel and he’s the most recognizable character for the audience to follow. By now the audience trusts Logan to lead us through an X-Men movie as he will remain the most consistent thing within it.

But if I wanted “Wolverine and oh yeah there are some X-Men” I would go read more Wolverine comics. I read Wolverine and the X-Men but even that focuses more on the students in the school he’s running with some occasional teacher subplots. Wolverine runs the show but he isn’t the show. Which is a potential Days could possibly reach. Have Wolverine lead us into the story and even possibly out of it, but his healing and his claws and his wrecked memories do not have to be the story once again.

And when the sequel to Days comes for the love of god try and form a story without Wolverine as the lead. That really does need to be the direction they take this film, building up at least one other character to fill the hole of lead character. That is the only reason I can forgive them for replacing Kitty with Logan: they want somebody familiar so that we can learn to grow familiar with another character. That now familiar character can then be the one to lead us into the next movie (while they still milk money with Wolverine by way of his stand alone movies and quite possibly X-Force.)

3. Give us villains other than Magneto but limit us to one or two a movie

Since Days is about Sentinels and the 2016 movie is supposed to have Apocalypse, they’re already making headway on this.

The Sentinels are going to be a somewhat familiar force, though. They are a human creation meant to take out mutants. Not that much different that the mutant ‘cure’ set up in Last Stand (along with Magneto’s Brotherhood and the Dark Phoenix.) But just like making Logan the lead makes sense because he’s familiar, going with Sentinels also makes sense.

It’ll be Apocalypse that will be a harder chord to strike. He’s become pretty iconic (as my friend says, he’s the bad song on the radio you just can’t escape) but I’m having a hard time thinking of any good plots he’s had they could use that would be accessible by a movie going audience. A lot of people have been throwing out Age of Apocalypse, which is a completely alternate universe in which Apocalypse rules the planet and humans are culled because they are weak.

The problem with this sort of story is that it’s far too grand and while Bishop, Blink and the time travel in Days could easily be the set up for this, that still seems like too much for a single movie. It could potentially give us back Scott and Jean but there are a whole lot easier ways to do that too.

My guess (or maybe hope) is that we’ll get a very stripped down, simplified version of Apocalypse’s basic story. He’ll collect his horsemen (which Angel should be amongst) and start culling the weak from the strong. The X-Men (whoever they may be) will be forced to fight their own friends and once again protect the humans that fear and despise them. It’ll be very unlikely that Apocalypse will be set up as anything other than a super strong, super mad mutant with ideas of grandeur stuck in his head. I doubt they’ll bring in Celestials or that he actually is from Ancient Egypt. In fact, I’d be surprised if they used his real name at all!

After the credits cut to a small scene of Sinister watching the fall out and an evil smile crosses his lips. “Good,” he’ll say. “The stage is set.” And maybe even show –gasp- his clone of Jean Grey floating in a tank behind him!

…

Yes, I have thought about this a lot.

And I have come to the conclusion that despite the fumbling about done with Last Stand, Origins and First Class this is a franchise that is still completely salvageable. Even keeping every single thing in every movie canon while being willing to overlook huge gaping plot holes, it can still be saved.

Though the job is made a lot easier if Origins is ignored.

My suggestions that go beyond the three ‘needs to happen’ above are this:

a. Build up Storm more!

The nay sayers that complain that Halle Berry simply isn’t storm need to get over themselves all ready. It’s done. We’re stuck with her as Storm same as I’m stuck with Anna Paquin as Rogue and Ellen Page as Kitty. I don’t think they’re completely right for the parts but it’s what we have and they’re not bad actors either! So let’s give them good material to work with and we might be surprisingly satisfied.

Since it was set up in Last Stand that Storm is now leading the X-Men, go with that flow! There are several comics where she is the leader of an X-Men team. In fact some would argue that this series of time was some of the strongest ever for the X-Men comic books. Find some stories from there for our dear African Goddess and breathe some life into her character.

Bring in Forge or send her to New Orleans in the body of a little girl to meet Gambit. Something, anything! (Though I have a preference if you couldn’t guess it…)

b. Give Rogue her Ms. Marvel stolen powers

Clearly Ms. Marvel is off the table since she’s an Avenger and Disney owns the rights to that. But create somebody with super strength and flying that Rogue holds some grudge against and sends into a coma, permanently taking on her powers. For better impact, have Mystique be the one that urges her to do just that.

Now that this has been done look at what you now have: a far more proactive character and character building angst! Can the team trust her? Is she even with the team or has she joined the Brotherhood? And what if now even the briefest touch allows her to hold onto powers even more long term? Plus now that she does actually have powers that can be used to help people, will Rogue still have as strong an urge to be without them forever as she had been in Last Stand? (I did say I was keeping all the movies canon…)

c. The next time Dark Phoenix comes, planets need to blow up

Or just one planet, anyways. In fact, let’s just be willing to leave Earth’s atmosphere altogether with the X-Men movies. There is so much involved with the Shi’ar it’s really starting to limit the movies. The Disney led Marvel movies have long since shed off Earth bound problems as being the only problems and have had much success in it.

Fox’s other super hero movie, The Silver Surfer, did not so good… But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t potentially do better.

Once we open up outer space we could also get things like Asteroid M and the Spacejammers. Space could also give the possible X-Force movie a different playground than the X-Men movies just so they can be clearly distinguishable.

d. Bring back Scott and Jean

I think this is already planned for, but I’m wishing for a non-alternate dimension Scott and Jean. Which is why I want the Apocalypse movie to end with a teaser for Sinister. Because minus time travel and alternate versions of themselves, Sinister is their best bet.

That and cosmic Phoenix powers.

But Sinister was always interested in the Summers and the Greys (why is just about anybody’s guess) and I doubt he’d be pleased that his experiment ended so prematurely. In the comics he did clone Jean Grey after her first death, leading to Scott’s romance with Maddeline and the birth of Cable (who he then sent into the future… or something like that.) Since it’s a pretty good bet Cable will be involved in the franchise sooner or later, this romance can easily happen mostly off camera.

Leave how Scott came back to life completely in mystery until his dead wife comes back in a flash of Phoenix energy and goes ‘what the hell? I give you a fresh new life and all you do is repeat history?’ Nobody saw him die in Last Stand after all! We’re just meant to assume. Let’s make this grievous oversight more clever than it actually was.

e. I love X and Mags to death, but can they go back to  being vague figureheads with somewhat religious overtones instead of central characters?

It always seemed to me that every mutant in the comics had to choose an ideal to follow: Xavier’s dream of cohabitation with the humans or Magneto’s cynical outlook of carving out a world solely for mutants in rather insidious ways. Both ways actually have a ring of truth to them but alone Xavier and Magneto are singular men.

It’s their followers that give their vision strength, and all X-Men live somewhere in the grey spectrum of the real world. Pulled continuously between a dream and a cynical reality.

Scott especially had the burden of being pulled between the two extremes. In a way he was both Magneto and Xavier’s child. In recent years in the comics he seems have gone to the dark side, becoming very Magneto-esque. Even still, he yearns for Xavier’s dream of cohabitation much more than he had in the Utopia years. Imagine the dramatic story of a man that has to be both student and leader, trying to find his own way in the world while everybody keeps whispering in his ear. Xavier. Magneto. Jean. Storm. Logan. All of them whispering and whispering, encouraging him, advising him and/or berating him.

How exactly does a person find his own identity in a storm like that?

…

In conclusion, though, not all of this can be done overnight with one movie. And likely not all of my suggestions are going to be listened to. I don’t actually know how the movie business works and I don’t work in it. But I know what kind of movies I like and have plenty of examples of movies that do work.

I’m still cautiously optimistic that the X-Men movies are heading in this direction though. It’s just a matter of if they’ll veer dramatically off course….