Something I wanted to mention in my review, but couldn’t find a way to fit in was the opening credit sequence and first 20 minutes of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. This was the best part of the movie.
In a credit sequence that shows Wolverine and Sabertooth fighting in nearly every war from the last 100 years, we get a sense of their camaraderie as well as Wolverine’s concern and condemnation of Sabretooth’s growing blood lust and violence. Fast forward a few years to when the two are part of William Stryker’s elite mutant black ops team, they’ve done a good job of setting the stage for conflict while succinctly introducing a lot of supporting characters.
It should be mentioned that Ryan Reynolds steals the show in these opening scenes and it’s positively criminal he wasn’t given more to do.
At any rate, before I de-evolve into more criticism, I wanted to make mention of the curious phenomenon going on with 20th Century Fox’s super hero movies. It seems like they’re able to knock it out of the part in the first 20 minutes, but totally lose traction after that. Exhibit B? Watchmen.
Another film with a brilliant opening credit sequence and strong opening scenes. Then, a handful of screwed up details later and you’re left with a big steaming pile of “Oh, well.”
What’s going on over at Fox that creates this? Are the executives so busy they only have time to watch the first 20 minutes of their films and the crew knows they can phone it in after that? Or maybe the just have EXTREMELY unfocused editors who only have enough stamina to maintain the narrative in the first reel? In any case, I thought it was worth mentioning.
Something else worth mentioning is The Triple Feature, the movie podcast I host with Joe Dunn from Joe Loves Crappy Movies and Gordon McAlpin from Multiplex.
There’s no doubt we’ll be talking about X-Men Origins: Wolverine tonight. But we’ll also be talking about something else…
Joe issued an interesting challenge last week – To predict the Top 10 Box Office earners between now and the end of August. The victor will be judged not only by how many correct movies he has on his list, but by how many movies he correctly places within the Top 10.
All three of us have put together our lists and will be sharing them on the show tonight. So be sure to tune in at 9PM CST so you can listen live and chat with us in real time.
If you need a reminder, follow my Twitter account. I usually send out a notice 15 minutes before we start recording.
Be there!
Just a quick point; Fox did not produce Watchmen. While they were awarded a cut of the film’s box office gross, they did absolutely no work on the movie, it was produced under Warner Brothers.
While I can understand the last half of Watchmen becoming less engaging than first, it was still trying to tell a cohesive story. Wolverine was just a sloppy mess from start to finish, with the “plot” only existing to move from one cameo to the next, making it hard to care about a characters origin story when the whole thing is made up on the spot.
It’s not even the little nerdy details that they miss (Xmen canon is a mess as it is, I can forgive small details being lost in translation), but even whole real world trivia they get wrong.
-Canada being inhabited by what seems to be a rather well off white family, living up in the Northwest Territories in 1840? Uh, no. It wasn’t even officially a country for another 20 years.
-Wolverine’s love interest tells him a fable which explains why the wolf howls at the moon each night, thus giving the origin to his name. Only problem? A wolverine is much, much different from a wolf. They must have made the connection that the names sort of sound familiar and went with it.
I would be surprised if the script even was given a quick second glance once it was hammered out. It was just lazy as hell.
Okay NO! Watchmen was made solely off of the purpose of being as accurate and close to the source material as possible. The fact that people went into that movie with no previous research was their OWN undoing. If the story seemed to fall flat for anyone, they should have read the novel, or at least accepted a mentality of trying to LEARN something from it, because the original point of WATCHMEN was not to allow a thick brained action druggie to, “get their fill.” The point was to provide a social commentary on superheroes and ask questions about them that have never been touched upon. For any fan who cared about the movies message, even those who never ead the comic, it was as successful as it was intended to be. For the idiots who just wanted an explosion, and found their brains trying to work, I am sorry that you could find nothing more from the story.
Wolverine was a compilation of random sources. The beginning with him as a child was based off a comic, the actuall adamantium scene was more based on a book called Weapon X, but not entirely, and whatever half-sewn plot that resulted from this was probably more of a concern to the producers than whether an explosion causes fire or not. And yeah, Warner Brothers made all of Watchmen, Cristoval Castillon is correct, 20th Century Fox only got a cut of the profits because of the issue over the rights to the movie.
Ravek, I think you’re reading a little too much into things.
All I’m pointing out is that the first 20 to 40 minutes of both movies were a more enjoyable experience than what followed. Both films make a big splash out of the gate and lose steam as they go.
I never said anything about the plot or what it was meant to achieve. I’m talking from a straight-up filmmaking perspective.
Just because the Watchmen adaptation was based off one source and X-Men Origins: Wolverine was based off multiple sources doesn’t mean that Watchmen is immune from this criticism.