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,
but she displays no award-winning ambitions here - just a hairdo at the end that looks
stolen from Eastenders' Rosa di Marco.
"It's my way, or the hard way, okay?"
The baddies are fronted by the aforementioned Magneto who has apparently borrowed
Jodie Foster's sphere from Contact and uses the magnetic force to alter the
DNA of those too close to appreciate it. We see the effect it has on abducted
Senator Robert Kelly (Bruce Davison), who has been campaigning against
the mutants. At first his life feels enriched, but it won't be long before
he's not a well man.
Sabretooth (Tyler Mane) is Magneto's right-hand ma.., er.. creature, but looks
like a cross between Chewbacca and Bungle from Rainbow. Star Wars chief
baddie Darth Maul was portrayed by Ray Park - an actor who charges a ridiculous
£15 a time for signatures - and here he plays Toad (not of Toad Hall), who has a
tongue that would put Kiss's Gene Vincent to shame.
Finally, bottle-blonde model Rebecca Romijn-Stamos portrays the almost-silent
shape-shifting Mystique, who has a blue Monday every week.
"I get one line of dialogue, but I CAN do it with feeling!"
Overall, the film leaves you feeling very underwhelmed and certainly not very
X-cited. The special effects are nothing particularly adventurous these days and
Magneto's brief attempt at turning everyone's brains to mush is as stretching as
it gets.
For a 12-certificate, there's quite a lot of violence within including multiple
stabbings, many by Wolverine thanks to his metal talons. With its comic overtones
it gets away with the lower certificate, whereas Freddy routinely received an
18 for his antics, but it's not a film for kids under the certificate's age, despite
the cinema's complete lack of bothering to keep them out, as they did for
The World is Not Enough
and
The Matrix.
By the end of the film, are we not meant to think that Xavier and Magneto
are enemies? It just looks like they've got the same "male-bonding" thing that
Tarantino said Maverick and Iceman had in Top Gun :)
Either way, X-Men 2 and a further sequel are already on their way, with many
of the original cast members signed up for these additional exploits. No doubt
they'll coin even more money in than this limp effort, which recently grossed more
revenue in its opening weekend than any other non-sequel (or non-prequel) in movie
history.
So, while the film feels like a series of extended pop videos with a lack of
substance, Fox can still be congratulated upon a full-on AV experience.
The 2.35:1 Panavision ratio looks fantastic with zero artifacts and a cracking
anamorphic transfer, bringing the life of the comic book sparking onto the
big screen (well, a 32" WS TV is a fairly big screen :)
I could not determine the average bitrate. Playing the film itself I couldn't
access all the usual DVD-ROM onscreen remote control features such as
the titles for the individual bitrate count, so heaven knows what Fox have
done to the disc on that scale.
Couple this with the Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound, which makes all the
many action scenes such as Senator Kelly's "experience", Professor X's
echoing voice and the train station explosion all rumble and shake as they
ought.
Storm has a bad hair day.
In the extras dept., we begin with six Deleted Scenes, in
non-anamorphic 2.35:1 widescreen and Dolby Pro Logic, but the clever part is
that it allows you to either watch them on their own or mixed back into the
film where they would have been, courtesy of seamless branching.
There's also an interview with director Bryan Singer by Charlie Rose,
plus 3 Theatrical Trailers (totalling 6 mins) in non-anamorphic 16:9,
3 30-second TV Spots, similarly attired, a 30-second trailer for the soundtrack
album and a trailer for the animated film that flopped so badly it put the
mockers on any future Fox-drawn films,
Titan A.E..
Two featurettes are included: The Mutant Watch (22 mins), in which non-anamorphic
16:9 clips are mixed in with general soundbites from the cast and crew and
the plainly-titled X-Men Featurette (7 mins), which is more of the same and
even contains bits of the same material. Hugh Jackman's Screen Test
does exactly what it says on the tin but lasts just a mere two minutes.
The Storyboard Animatics are animated storyboards used to visualise the
look of a scene before filming. There's two, lasting around a minute each,
showing the action in the train station and upon the Statue of Liberty
and they come across rather like the FMV sequence from a 3Dfx game. Finally,
the Still Galleries wouldn't play on my Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM at all
- making it crash - and on the
Playstation 2, things
were rather the same. It tells you to navigate this section with the 'next'
and 'previous' chapter buttons but it just doesn't work.
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Privacy Overview
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Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
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