I watched X men – 3 on telly last night. What a terrible film. The premise is interesting enough but the narrative was so bad, and so were the female characters.
- The Archangel: they should have just gotten rid of this plot since they didn’t have enough time to develop the father/son relationship.
- Female characters.
I hated the Jean Grey/Phoenix character and in fact all the female characters. They’re all weak and submit themselves to dominant stereotypes of what it means to be a desireable woman.
JG/P – Is the most powerful creature in the world but doesn’t manage to control her power and ends up killing “the man she loves” etc… At first I thought, ‘okay I don’t want to read her as typical of the archetypal villainess who is too [sexually]powerful etc..fear of female sexuality ” because at the moment I’m trying to avoid theoretical jargon. But how could I not read it this way when everytime she goes “psycho” she turns red, the oceans rise, men stand up -rise to the occassion and then get incinerated when she unleashes her full power. She’s a cliche. Also why didn’t Wolverine just inject her with the “cure” instead of sinking his knives into her? All 10 of his digits.
Okay and even if I am getting all undergrad cultural studies student-esque about this – the poor actress didn’t get to talk much. Though she did get to do her famous scissor thing with her legs.
Rogue – Pathetic. Another female who is so powerful she can’t touch her man without killing him. So she gets the cure. For herself – she says…and after she loses her powers, the boyfriend comes back to her. Otherwise he spends most of his time with Juno.
Juno – plays a pre-pubescent character – kitty. So she doesn’t count. She wants her parents more than she was a man.
Storm – the only woman to keep her super powers and remain relatively happy. And she takes over from Xavier. But notice in the film she doesn’t get to fight the really powerful mutants. Her main nemesis is another woman of colour. “no no…enjoy the film,” I said to myself…”Don’t read the film, just enjoy it for the narrative” – but I couldn’t. The characters were so crap. Also Storm is asexual and has absolutely no love interest. I was hoping she would develop something with Wolverine – but that would involve miscegenation and that’s pretty rare in mainstream blockbusters. Though Kevin and
Whitney did alright in the 90s in The Bodyguard.
And even if I didn’t hate the female characters so much, the narrative was clunky.
