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By: James Ryan

Saturday May 27, 2006

A Screenwriter's preview of X-men: The Last Stand
Since Tim Burton's take on the Batman franchise proved that Superman was not the only super-hero who could make a buck, Hollywood has taken to the notion of adapting comic book properties. We've had our slew of Batman sequels, a host of films from the Marvel Comics stable, and a few stray independents here and there. Mostly, these films are rather poor reflections of the franchises they adapt (Think: Daredevil, Spawn, Catwoman, etc.).

The flaws in super-hero films are usually not a result of their production value, as Hollywood tends to put good money behind such projects. Instead, the problem with these movies is consistently that they are made from a screenplay that reflects a poor interpretation of the particular franchise.

Every super-hero franchise has its own unique element, some core aspect of the central character or premise that organizes all the book's narratives and themes. Superman, for example, has always been emblematic of American idealism, whether he is teaching moral lessons to coal barons (as he did in the late 1930's), or saving the world from nuclear holocaust. Batman, on the other hand, serves as poster-child for the ill effects of childhood trauma, while the Incredible Hulk franchise is driven by the "monster within" motif.

In X-men, we have a truly unique comic-book franchise that has not yet been developed to its full potential. X-men is an ensemble pieceïa "team book"ïand its dramatic core lies not in a single character but with a web of relationships set in a world on the brink of global crisis.

When an X-men story is working well, there is a careful interweaving of minor conflicts with major ones. The constant threat of a global war between mutants and "normies" underpins the action, and the problems of an individual characters can easily snowball into battles that threaten the whole human race. We should feel this large-scale tension adding suspense to every conflict, however small. If we don't, then the story isn't living up to the franchises' potential.

So far, the X-men movies have not taken full advantage of the suspense possibilities of the franchise. Because the threat of war has never been sufficiently established, the first two X-men films lacked a narrative of richly layered conflict.

The trailer for X3 begins with the US President (Josef Sommer) insisting that he "can't negotiate with these people," presumably referring to the mutants as a whole. This is followed by a line from Magneto (Ian McKellen) who tells a follower that "the humans will draw first blood." Later on, after quick shots of escalating action, Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) states that the President has "no idea what is upon us now." All this serves to suggest that the war between mutants and humans will begin in this installment.

The question is whether or not this large-scale conflict will resonate well with the lesser conflicts to create richly layered suspense. If Marvel was on the ball, the threat of war would have been clearly established in the first reel of the first X-men movie. Then, we would have had a delicate game of teeter-totter as the X-men worked for peace while Magneto and crew attempted to plunge the world into war. What we got instead was a bit of beat-em-up in the first film, followed by a slightly more sophisticated tie in with Wolverine's (Hugh Jackman) history in the second. At this point, the war may come as simply an escalation of scale, but not of dramatic intensity, because we've not been led to anticipate it.

This is not to say that nuanced suspense isn't possible for X3, but to accomplish this, Director Brett Ratner and team will have to make sure that all levels of conflict are interacting like a well-oiled machine. A carefully crafted narrative would involve a delicate back-and-forth between lesser and greater conflicts. A ham-fisted one will give us large-scale combat sequences that are poorly reinforced by a plot that seems to roll from one scene to the next without any interaction between the layers of conflict. We won't see how small decisions snow-ball out of control, or how large movements add tension to the lives and relationships of minor characters. We'll just get a few scenes of love interest and mutant angst, followed by a few scenes of the horrors of war, with a chase scene or two thrown in for good measure, all amounting to little more than a flop.