My Stupid X-Men Opinions -The Toast

Aw, Toad came back! There…there he was. Toad.

Okay, so the ending of X-Men: Days of Future Past sort of nullifies the events of X-Men: The Last Stand and maybe also X-2 and I think possibly X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which is a lot of nullifying. It feels like between the Monster Retcon of DoFP and the brand-new First Class cast the studio’s trying to halfway-reboot the franchise without actually rebooting (mostly, I would guess, to preserve the Patrick Stewart/Ian McKellan/Hugh Jackman moneymaking trio) and the strain is starting to show. Reboot the dang franchise! It’s been fourteen years, that is a good run. Wolverine is looking old, though, man. Can’t have an old Wolverine.

And selfishly, I want Jackman to be free to make the Boy From Oz movie.

Don’t reboot Patrick Stewart or Ian McKellan, obviously. Never let them die; they are precious natural resources.

There’s a scene where Peter Maximoff runs around in slow-motion redistributing recently fired bullets, and the song that plays over it is Jim Croce’s “Time In A Bottle.” That on-the-nose urge ought to have been resisted.

The role of Mystique deserves to be treated with the respect and careful casting that the role of a 150-year-old, venomously angry, lesbian shapeshifting assassin merits. She deserves a spinoff trilogy every bit as expensive as Wolverine Visits Japan. Jennifer Lawrence has a great jawline and seems like she’s a lot of fun at parties; she’s a good actress but she does not have Mystique running in her veins. I want to see a woman who looks like she’s committed murder during the act of sex wearing that blue paintsuit. I want a woman with falcon eyes and a crocodile heart, a balls-out weird woman, a woman who’s spent some time living underground. She deserves to be played by either Tilda Swinton, Eva Green, or Lena Headey, in that order.

Do not bring back Famke Janssen just for another spin in the Scott/Jean/Logan love merry-go-round. Don’t do that to me. She has not aged a day and I hope she made a million dollars for that one scene where she leaned against a door and said “Logan” in a tone of dull surprise and then made absolutely no subsequent expressions with her face but you can’t make me sit through that again. Please don’t.

Or bring that triangle back in every subsequent X-Men movie, but have the resolution always be “Jean dissolves Scott into nothingness, then Wolverine claws her in the gut and runs away.” I could actually be really into that eternal, Sisyphean love triangle, if it involved Famke Janssen making out with James Marsden until he dissolves into nonbeing.

Conversely, I would pay $15 for a 3D ticket of an X-Men: Apocalypse that’s just Kelsey Grammar’s Beast jauntily strutting down the hallway wearing a natty three-piece suit saying “Hey, Logan” in slightly different ways.

Find a way to work Michelle Rodriguez into the next movie, if she’s willing to put on the old action-movie white tank top one last time. I mean, I get it if she doesn’t want to, but if she did want to, I would really like it.

Man, I hope Lucy is good.

Did Magneto have any memorable lines in the whole movie? Give Magneto some bitchy lines. Really camp him up. His only move is basically “evil invisible orchestra conductor” — whenever he betrays Chaaaaahles, he straightens up, cape billowing, and performs a gesture that can only be described as conducts a malicious, floating, incorporeal orchestra. And Fassbender is a campy dude! Let him run loose! Really let him chew the scenery! That whole reunion-fight on the plane was so forgettably written; it was only saved by a balls-ton of Acting. Give us SOAP. Give us THESPIAN HAMMERY. They’re pretty much gods who are also ex-boyfriends that control metal and brains — Magneto builds a special helmet just to keep Xavier from knowing what his feelings are; HE BUILDS A BRAIN CAGE SO HIS EX-BOYFRIEND WON’T KNOW HOW SAD HE IS. That is the demigod-level mutant equivalent of setting your gchat status to invisible so your ex-boyfriend can’t tell that you’re online. That is so campy Susan Sontag just sat up in her grave and texted John Waters “omg did u hear about Magneto?!!!”

JOHN WATERS DID HEAR ABOUT IT. AND IT RULED.

Oh shit, Marvel owns Loki and Thor too, right? Give us a movie where Magneto and Loki become best friends and skate across Bifrost and destroy the mortal world together. Campy bastards just glamming it up on the world tree, swapping helmets and floating over the crushed bodies of their victims while holding hands. Buy FOX if you have to, just make it happen.

I don’t like the bone claws. They look gross. No more bone claws. I don’t care if you don’t bring back the adamantium, but cover them with something. Sand, or yarn, or acrylic, or something that’s not just human ivory.

That’s all the opinions I have about X-Men right now, I guess. It was a good movie, with some problems; you should probably see it if you like the X-Men, which I do.