What I’m saying is why waste your time eating Brussels sprouts when every time you eat Brussels sprouts you’re miserable, and meanwhile there’s a great huge, heaping dish of chocolate over here, just begging to be eaten?
(The answer, of course, is that for some reason you’ve agreed to a week-long cyber-argument about the relative merits of Brussels sprouts and there’s no turning back now and it’s your duty to convince anyone reading at home that, not only are Brussels sprouts painful to eat, they are – contrary to everything you may have been told by doctors and nutritionists and parents – actually quite bad for you. Possibly even poisonous. Deadly even. And so Brussels-sprout eating must go on.)
So … anyway … my inability to see the affecting tragedy in a death scene from a movie like X-2 has everything to do with context. Of course, two love-thwarted rivals taking solace in each other’s arms after the death of the one they pine for is juicy stuff. The problem, though, resides here:
Jean Grey dies after throwing herself from a malfunctioning X-jet in order to use her telekinetic powers to encase herself in a corona of fire so as to stop the deadly flood-waters rushing from a dam that was destroyed during a confrontation with a brainwashed one-eyed, laser-shooting mutant named Cyclops, who was sabotaged while trying to help his fellow mutants infiltrate a secret base and stop a sinister covert government operative named Stryker, who uses an experimental drug to control the mind’s of his enemies, who has a son with the power to blind people to reality through the projection of powerful visions, and who has created his own version of mutant leader Professor X’s telekinetic “Cerebro” chamber and is therefore able to control said professor and turn him against his friends until someone called Nightwalker teleports someone named Storm into Stryker’s “Cerebro” chamber, where she frees the professor from his telepathic illusion and thereby saves the world of the mutants from certain doom … but not before Jean Grey dies in that corona of fire and onrush of water, leaving her wounded mutant paramours, Wolverine and Cyclops, alone together to mourn their loss in the form of an embrace, which will remain loving so long as Wolverine’s enormous, retractable steel claws don’t pop out accidentally.
Call me crazy, but I just can’t seem to feel the drama in a scenario like that. Telekinesis chambers? Retractable claws? Nightwalkers? It all sounds like gobbledygook to me. And I can’t bring myself to see the tragedy in the death of a gobbledygook heroine, no matter how untimely.
I’ll leave you with a question: Doesn’t it ever bother you when watching super-hero movies that the rules of reality don’t have to apply, and that, therefore, the movies’ writers are free to dream up whatever they want, whenever they want, so long as it fits their needs? Doesn’t it take away from a movie’s chances for real drama and conflict when you know at any moment some new potion or weapon or superpower or super-villain can just be introduced to get around any expository roadblocks?
Now, I’m going to play basketball.
This article appears in July 4 • 2008.