February 4th 2012 (Retrospective)
Let's have some fun
No better way. Because, frankly, it's time to enter pun territory again; the reason I have a lot of love for the trilogy (plus Wolverine and First Class, but we'll get to that later) is because they represent - and it's a bad pun, but you were warned - a fascinating example of evolution.
Sadly, a lot of that evolution relates to the narrative tone of the films; if you count the on-screen fatalities (and, sadly, I have, although for a good reason), they rise exponentially between I and III. Now, if you're a comics reader, there's an easy way to describe this, because it happened to them around ten to twenty years before the current superhero popularity boom; everything became, frankly, Darker and Edgier. It was the 1980s and the 1990s; whaddaya gonna do?
But let's do the impossible, for a brief moment, and step back in time, because the first film is entirely a happy experience for me.
Back in the day - cue dissolve effect or wavy lines - I was visiting someone on the coast. This is where the temporal mechanics get a bit wavy, because she would end up being a girlfriend for a while, but at the time that wasn't the case. So this was in the pre-relationship time, where everything probably seemed a little sparkly, i.e. there was that brutal-but-fun denied chemistry.
Anyway.
This would have been during the summertime, between semesters, and I'd gone down to visit her for a party and ended up staying for a few days - and yes, this is so close to being a lyric from Close but No Cigar it's not even funny - and one day, we went down to the cinema (well, the big Leisure Complex near the coast and the train station that had a cinema) and saw the first X-Men film.
There's a word I've used a few other times during this series of columns, and if memory serves it was best used during the Blade column, but it needs to be broken out here again; on leaving the cinema, I felt the most tremendous sense of validation.
Let's break this down; I freely admit that I'm a comics reader, ever since I was taken to the Forbidden Planet when I was much younger. (I get the feeling that wasn't the intention, because the Parental Unit who took me there was more of a science-fiction-books kind of person, so that was probably a bit of a backfire.)
After that, I sought them out where I could, but it's the old-fashioned small-town problem, especially in the pre-mass-market trade paperback days, where trying to get a collected edition meant using the microfiche in the back room of the local bookshop to see if it could be imported, and 9.9 times out of ten, well, no.
Then I hit my teenage years and reading comics became a dirty secret - arguably dirtier than, say, buying pornography, because at least the latter was halfway to an admission that you were growing up, whereas comics were, of course, a retrograde step that you should have grown out of in time to get to the dirty pictures.
Unfortunately, I'm pretty stubborn.
So I would wait until school finished, then get the bus over to the nearest big town and just about get to the nearest speciality comic shop before it closed, then get the bus back, making it a pilgrimage as much as anything.
Then trade paperbacks started to hit their stride in terms of popularity, and things got much easier, although it did mean I got addicted to The Invisibles, which is arguably the worst thing that can happen to a teenage comics reader.
If we then skip on a year or two, I moved to London, and lo and behold the Forbidden Planet was just a train ride away.
Now, you may be thinking that Blade was enough validation that studios were suddenly thinking about all the intellectual property rights they owned viz comic books and were actually getting round to them, but comparing Blade to X-Men is difficult, because Blade was a relatively low-budgeted punt into the superhero arena, whereas X-Men was a full-on acknowledgement that the studios felt there was an audience big enough for the film to be worth making.
Hence, validation. In a way, this is a little sad, because in getting the validation I was looking for, I was essentially recognising that I had finally become part of a target demographic to be appealed to. Then again, if you look at what's happening now with superhero films, sometimes it's nice to be part of a target demographic.
The main contributing factor to that feeling of validation was that the film managed to do that impressive trick of avoiding alienating new viewers while avoiding patronising comics readers who were - and, in some ways, still are - an important, vocal, extremely small minority when it comes to filmgoing. The film was smart, and occasionally funny, and the set-pieces weren't just ways to deploy all the visually-smart superpowers and wow the audience. Alright, there were some dialogue clunkers - let's be honest, we all know what happens to a toad when it gets electrocuted, thanks - but the film just had the most elusive of qualities, the right feel.
I remember that when I emerged from the cinema, having watched the heroes I'd been more-or-less secretly following for a few years by that point, into the sunshine and sea air that I couldn't stop smiling, for reasons I couldn't articulate at the time. I hope I've managed to articulate them better now.
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