That Moving Saggy Part in the Middle: Part Two of an “Aria” Retrospective

Part One of the Aria retrospective, if you need to catch up

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In my life, I have watched the entire Aria saga through multiple times—at least three that I can remember. And every single time I did, I would burn straight through Aria: The Animation, get through the first three or four episodes of Aria: The Natural, and then just suddenly lose all will to watch the show. I would put off moving on to the next episode for weeks. I would sometimes watch other shows in the interim. I would consider ending my run early. And I had no idea why. Those first few episodes of The Natural were good, I thought. I loved them, I thought. They were just as good as anything in The Animation, I thought.

Conceptually, those first few episodes of Aria: The Natural are amazing. Carnevale, leading into a dance through a darkened city following a mysterious figure in a cloak. A treasure hunt where the real treasure is Neo-Venezia and its people. A luxurious afternoon coffee in the piazza. A night watching a meteor shower atop the roofs of the city. So I was always mystified why I had such a hard time getting past them, when the enthusiasm they created should have carried me through the next few. Watching the show again, I finally understood why it was that I always had such a hard time making it past Episode 6 or so: much more than the other two series, The Natural has episodes that are badly paced, overstretched, and boring.

The Saggy Middle of the Saggy Middle

I always used to blame Episode 5, another two-parter which I think of as “the Alicia duology” since both stories focus on Akari and Alicia spending time together. But this time, I enjoyed Episode 5. At least, I enjoyed the second story, “The Discoveries on That Spring Day…”, which follows Akari and Alicia on a picnic into the inlands, where they spend a day discovering old train tracks, an abandoned train car, and cherry trees in full bloom. It’s a nice little story that reminds me of exploring the mountains near my house when I was a kid, where there were also abandoned train tracks.

No, the first bad episode of Aria: The Natural is actually Episode 7, “To the Kingdom of Cats…”, which illustrates the biggest storytelling vice of Aria: The Natural: dragging a story out way longer than the material can actually sustain. “To the Kingdom of Cats…” is based on a manga story that was one of the earliest hints in the manga towards the magical ghost cat subplot. Aika and Akari see President Aria going somewhere by himself in his little boat, so they decide to follow him. They end up stuck in a loop in a mysterious abandoned canal where they go through a gate and come out into the same room they just left. This continues until President Aria comes out and helps them get free. That’s it. Episode 7 stretches this story out to 22 minutes. It achieves this mainly by showing Akari and Aika stuck in the loop for what feels like fifteen solid minutes. Whether it’s actually that long, it becomes so boring that it feels much longer.

Looking back at my notes, though, I still cut “To the Kingdom of Cats…” some slack at the time. I wrote that it was “Kinda boring but okay.” I became much less forgiving of this flaw as the show continued to do it. Episode 11, “That Precious Sparkle…” has a real story but mercilessly pads itself, adding in pans and tracking shots that feel pointless even in light of the new definition of “having a point” you have to adopt when watching Aria. On the other hand, Episode 11 has one of the stronger messages of all the episodes of Aria, addressing Neo-Venezia’s own history independent of Venice on Earth that it was built as a replica of, and whether that history has value of its own. So I still cut it some slack as well.

Episodes 16, “Parting with that Gondola…”, and 17, “After That Rainy Night…”, received no such regard.

By this point the show had already started to become a bit of a slog. And Episode 16 follows on Episode 15, “At the Center of That Squared Circle…”, my personal pick for worst episode of any Aria, bar none, so my charitable feelings towards the show were running low. Then it decided to spend two entire episodes showing Akari say goodbye to her gondola, which has become old and needs to be replaced. Yes, two entire episodes devoted to bidding farewell to a hunk of floating wood.

In hindsight, it’s a little bit genius. For all its faults, which I’m going to continue enumerating at great length, Aria: The Natural masters themes and messages. It chooses more complex and more unique messages than the other two Aria shows do, and it symbolizes those themes in interesting ways that tie seamlessly into the world of Neo-Venezia. Episode 11 uses art snobs’ attitudes towards Neo-Venezian glassmaking to explore the city’s odd relationship with the city it was built as a replica of, and Episodes 16 and 17 use Akari’s old, beat up gondola as a symbol for how much she’s been through since coming to Aqua, and how much her life has been defined by it.

But as Episodes 16 and 17 illustrate, the show doesn’t always do a good job pacing those stories. They become too heavy, drive the same points in too many times; and they become too overwrought, trying to pack in too many feelings, which in the end becomes emotionally fatiguing and can even make what should be moving laughable. Through flashbacks, these two episodes adapt most of the stories from the early parts of the manga when it was called Aqua that weren’t adapted in Aria: The Animation. Putting this material so late in the series has an odd effect. It loses its original impact because Akari is experiencing all these early, awkward moments as memories that she’s now so far away from that they’ve become fond, even though they weren’t all pleasant at the time. So we as the audience experience these events as Akari does now: as bygone memories, a little wistful, things that shaped who Akari is today. Except when we don’t: having never been aware that any of these things happened, we have little context for them. We don’t know if they happened the day before Episode 1 of Aria: The Animation, or the year before. For me, some scenes survived this disconnect. Watching Akari struggle to row in front of Alicia and embarrass herself rowing backwards, I felt about it as current-day Akari did: a little nostalgic, recalling the rough beginnings that often go with new jobs and new lives. Watching her test to become a Single, I didn’t feel much at all.

By Episode 17 they’re mostly out of stuff from Aqua to adapt, so they start making up original material, and even bring in Alicia’s memories of training with that gondola herself back in the day. Then they finish on what feels like a solid ten minutes of Akari lying in the gondola while emotional music plays (a song called “Amefuribana”) and the exact same clips that we just saw in the first part of the episode repeat, this time cut up in different ways to coincide better with the music. Some of this is artfully edited—there’s a shot I like where they show Alicia cleaning off the gondola with a hose and then fade into Akari doing the same later—but it doesn’t change that it’s a clipshow of material we just saw earlier in the same episode. Not only does this seem either lazy or desperate, it also did weird things to my emotional investment in the situation. Showing a scene more than once is usually a heavy-handed way to emphasize how important that scene is. After two whole episodes of weighty sadness, melancholy, and nostalgia around this gondola, I had no more to give. I was tapped. Repeating these clips, in effect telling me “This is important, pay attention, you should feel sad about this” tipped me over from “no more feelings to feel” to annoyance. The show tried to milk that scenario for just a little bit more emotion than it was actually good for, and in the end, when they needed another five minutes of footage and decided to repeat some from earlier in the same episode, it accidentally brought everything crashing down. At that point in the show, when it had already become a bit of a slog, it couldn’t recover easily from that. And it never really did in my eyes. It started to make amends in its last three episodes, but it wasn’t until Aria: The Origination that I started to really enjoy it again.

Four boring episodes out of twenty-six shouldn’t be a big deal. But the truth is these four weren’t the only boring ones. At least half the episodes of Aria: The Natural are boring on some level. These four were the worst, because they had the most boring story content and were the most excessively dragged out. But sadly, even episodes with great story concepts were made boring, because the animation reaches new lows in this series.

Aria depends heavily on its art and music to convey emotions. There’s also emotion to be had from the characters’ stories, but neither Aria: The Animation nor Aria: The Natural do a great job of getting at it; they both have a ton of episodes that rely on art, music, and story concept with a few episodes that rely on character sprinkled in. The character-based episodes are consistently the best, and this is partially because the staff manipulated things to be that way. The terrible animation, at its worst, is too obvious to miss. There are large sections of some episodes that feel like picture dramas, where we see a still image with a lens flare on it to try and make it look more dynamic and the characters talk over it, but don’t appear anywhere in the shot. When the characters do appear, they don’t move, not even their mouths, they just stand in one pose while the camera slowly pans over them, while the dialogue is delivered in voiceovers. I can’t recall a single time in the character-based episodes—like Episode 6, “The Smile Reflected in That Mirror…”; Episode 13, “Those Really Self-Imposed Rules…”; or Episode 18, “That New Me…”—where the animation degenerated to this extent. But terrible animation completely destroyed Episode 2, “Chasing That Treasure…”, whose finale hinges on the beauty of Neo-Venezia being the real treasure. Episode 23, “That Sea, Love, and Heart…”, which has some nice things to say about how society perceives love and relationships, also made me start looking at my watch towards the end because the bad animation made its pivotal scene feel so drawn out.

In this episode, Akari meets an older man and his wife who’ve come to Neo-Venezia on vacation after years of the husband being unable to get away from work long enough for the trip. He wants to do a ceremony called the Marriage to the Sea to reaffirm his love for his wife. He’s rebuffed, but Akari levies her group of friends and acquaintances to put together a ceremony for him so he can tell his wife that he still loves her. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen another anime do a serious story about an older couple’s love like this. It ends with Akari writing Ai a line I really liked, arguing against the ideas of true love and soul mates: “Maybe every encounter is a miracle, and love is really something you have to nurture.” The final scene, which should be a beautiful affirmation of an older couple’s continuing love against the backdrop of a beautiful orange sunset on the ocean, becomes a bunch of drowse-inducing pans over still images in which none of the characters are visible. Voices come out of nowhere and talk over these still images, but we don’t see the people they belong to, or if we do it’s from far away and they don’t move or change expressions at all. The episode, despite its unique message, is all but ruined by this. It especially hurts the squad of minor characters that the main six Undine recruit to fill out the celebration; we never see them, so they don’t add any visual weight, and we only hear their voices as disembodied speech from the ether.

Better animation would probably improve a huge number of the episodes I didn’t enjoy in Aria: The Natural. Some would still have story problems, but the series wouldn’t have felt like such a slog for so long if some of these plot-heavy, character-light episodes that proliferated at least had some pretty stuff to look at.

Aika Is a Borderline Psychotic Drama Queen and Other Odd Discoveries

Throughout Aria: The Animation and into the first 17 episodes of Aria: The Natural, the only one among our three heroines who really has a character arc is Alice. Almost every episode I think of as “character-focused” is about Alice, oftentimes with Athena as a strong supporting character. We’ll talk more about her arc when we discuss Aria: The Origination, but it’s by far the most full and interesting arc of any character in the series.

Akari never has a character arc, because she follows what this video about characters without arcs calls the “Flat Arc”. Akari starts the series with certain fundamental beliefs, and never changes those beliefs throughout the series. Instead, she changes other people by exposing them to her beliefs and the unique abilities those convictions give her. In Episode 10, “That Heartwarming Town and Its People…”, Akari inspires Aika and Alice to avoid judging others by their appearances, and shows them how powerful her ability to make friends with everyone is. She helps mend fences between a child and his teacher who quit her job to get married in Episode 4, “That Neo-Venezia Colored Heart…”, and helps a glassmaker heal the chip on his shoulder in Episode 11, “That Precious Sparkle…” Throughout the entire series, Akari helps Akatsuki become a better person. He starts out as the biggest jerk in the whole show and slowly becomes a decent human with each time he meets Akari. Though she and Alicia are compared and portrayed as similar throughout the series, Akari seems to inspire others to be better people, whereas Alicia only seems to inspire others in their pants. Everyone who admires Alicia talks about their admiration in physical terms: Alicia is beautiful, Alicia is graceful, Alicia is an untouchable ideal. When people appreciate Akari at all, they appreciate her because she made them kinder or more open or showed them a new way of looking at the world that made it seem brighter and friendlier. That’s also why only Akari could be Alicia’s apprentice. Akari is humble, but not obsequious. She treats everyone like a close friend. While she admires Alicia’s skill and respects her as a veteran Undine, Alicia is a person to Akari, not a physical embodiment of an untouchable ideal. Aika could never have been Alicia’s apprentice, because she would have been so blinded by her admiration of Alicia that she wouldn’t have been able to learn. She would have constantly been chasing the picture in her head of what Alicia is, an impossible image of what an Undine should be, and ignoring the reality that she can never be that, nor does she have to be to be good at what she does.

Unfortunately, the other parts of Aika’s character arc, which really doesn’t begin until the later parts of Aria: The Natural, don’t quite work. Everything the writers try to say about her character is contradicted by evidence in the show, so none of her character beats come off the way they’re supposed to. In the first story of Episode 19, “That Crybaby…”, Aika has come down with a fever, so she misses practice and leaves Akari and Alice on their own. She expects this to be a huge problem, because she thinks Akari and Alice are complete idiots who can’t find their own feet without her. After a few days in bed, she’s feeling better and getting bored, so she sneaks out to go shopping, eat ice cream, and spy on her friends, who are doing just fine without her. Seeing this, Aika has what appears to be a full-blown existential crisis, runs back to her room, and hides under the covers crying because she thinks her existence is meaningless since her friends don’t need her to boss them around. When Akari and Alice come by to tell her they miss her and bring pudding, Aika remembers that life is worth living and immediately rebounds, and the crisis is over.

Aika’s character traits are supposed to be “serious, diligent, hardworking, and reliable”, but we repeatedly see her lose her mind over tiny incidents. In Episode 18, “That New Me…”, she runs away from a barbecue crying because her hair got burnt and now she looks ugly in front of Alicia, and then screams at Akira that she hates her because Akira isn’t sympathetic to her reaction. In the second half of Episode 19, “That Young Girl’s Heart…”, she’s so depressed that she can’t function in her day to day life, because Al, her crush, hasn’t seen the new short hairstyle she adopted after her long hair burned in Episode 18. This doesn’t make her come off as serious or reliable. She’s more concerned about her hair, Alicia thinking she’s pretty, and showing off for the guy she has a crush on than building up her skills as an Undine. Her perception of Akari’s and Alice’s incompetence that we see at the start of “That Young Girl’s Heart…” is completely skewed, to the point where I’d call Aika an unreliable narrator. There’s another episode during The Origination that further erodes Aika’s image as “serious, hardworking, and reliable” that we’ll discuss when we get to it.

The Natural also adds some weird and ultimately meaningless coincidences to Akira’s and Alicia’s pasts in what I consider the worst episode of any Aria series, Episode 15, “At the Center of That Squared Circle”. In this episode, Akari is enjoying a day off when she happens to run into Akira. There’s a scene between them that I liked a lot, but soon Akatsuki, Al, and Woody show up and the whole thing somehow turns into them all reminiscing about a time when they were children. It turns out that Akira and Alicia were on a field trip to Ukijima when they were young and happened to run into Akatsuki and Woody, who Al was babysitting at the park. Akira and Akatsuki competed at a bunch of challenges and Akira came out on top, leading Akatsuki to spend years thinking he’d been bested by the manliest boy ever. At the end he discovers that it was Akira and that she was a girl. Akari muses how wonderful and mysterious it is that they all met before.

While there are plenty of episodes, especially of The Natural, which are boring or oddly structured, this is the only one I’ll call genuinely terrible. It stomps on its own message: discovering that, by some insane coincidence, Akatsuki, Woody, Al, Akira, and Alicia all spent an afternoon together when they were children doesn’t make the world seem wide and wondrous, it makes it seem small and incestuous. The mere fact that Akatsuki, Al, and Woody all knew each other as children already felt like a huge coincidence since Akari meets them all by chance and then discovers later that they know each other. I also didn’t like the reveal that Alicia and Akira knew each other as children, for the same reason: two childhood friends happening to become two of the greatest Undine of their age makes the world feel narrower and poorer. Are there really so few people in Neo-Venezia that it can just so turn out that all of these people Akari randomly met happened to already know each other from the past? And these existing relationships don’t add anything to any of these characters. Akira and Alicia’s relationship was already well established (and already felt uncomfortably coincidental) by their time as trainees together. Akatsuki, Woody, and Al have no relationships. Even when we see them all together, usually in the festival episodes, we don’t see them interact in any meaningful way. It feels like it was just a convenience so there didn’t need to be a scene where they meet each other—but there already didn’t need to be a scene like that, because they never really talk.

The Cat God

I mentioned last time how much I ended up disliking the supernatural material. The Natural doubles down on ghost cat material and even crafts an odd sort of story arc around Akari’s encounters with Cait Sith, a seven-foot-tall cat god who seems to take a liking to her early on. He first appears in Episode 1, hidden under a robe and mask and playing the part of Casanova for Carnevale. The finale of this episode is a self indulgent-feeling five-minute sequence of Akari and Ai following Cait Sith and his entourage while singing, dancing, and clicking canastas. At the end, he takes off his mask and reveals who he is, fleetingly, from a distance. The entire sequence sums up my feelings about the Cait Sith material in The Natural: it’s artistically beautiful, and it’s well animated, it’s atmospheric, and it adds variety to the show by letting us see things we’d never see in regular old Neo-Venezia, and it breaks the world and it adds nothing to the story and I hate it and I hate that I don’t completely hate it.

The show never attempts to explain what Cait Sith is, beyond Alicia quickly explaining the myth to Akari that he’s a cat god from Manhome. I’ve seen theories that he’s a genetically engineered supercat, which fits into the world, since the Martian cats like President Aria can understand human language, meaning they must be genetically engineered. But late in the series, he saves Akari from a vengeful ghost. In the very next episode he’s seen conducting a magical sky train. And even back in Episode 4 of Aria: The Animation, a ghost cat taking human form handed Akari a letter. Attempts to explain these phenomena within a hard sci-fi, no-magic world get more and more strained, to the point where it’s meaningless to pretend anymore that Aria is a no-magic world. Given that, why overcomplicate things? Cait Sith is a magical cat god, and that’s the end of it.

I tried to justify the magical cat god material as part of Akari’s character arc, since she’s the only one who ever sees him. (Everyone else just accepts that he exists without question, even though I know I’d have some questions if my friend told me she’d seen a magical cat god, let alone been saved from a ghost by him.) But Akari doesn’t really have a character arc. She changes the people around her; she herself does not change. The Cait Sith episodes don’t provide her with one, either. She seems entirely unchanged by her encounters with the giant magical cat, other than the odd quasi-romantic attraction to him she develops in the last couple episodes of the storyline. If we wanted to we could interpret Cait Sith as some kind of out-there symbolism—as Akari’s childhood, as Akari’s sexual awakening, as a sign of Akari’s incipient mental illness, as Jesus, as Satan tempting Akari who symbolizes Jesus—but no matter which symbolic interpretation I tried on, it didn’t add anything to the story that connected to anything else in Aria at all. No matter how I interpreted Cait Sith as part of Akari’s character arc, he was either redundant or completely from left field. In the end, nothing about his presence in the show hangs together. He adds very little, and he subtracts a sense of realism.

Moving into The Origination

The Natural finally started to capture my interest again in the last few episodes. Once we moved past the cat god material we finally got back to stories about the characters and their lives. Three of my top episodes of Aria: The Natural are “Those Undine of Tomorrow…”, “The Fruits of That Encounter…”, and “That White, Kind City…”, which all come in here at the very end of the series. All three show how the main trio are advancing as Undine, setting up what’s to come in The Origination, but “Those Undine of Tomorrow…” and “That White, Kind City…” both do it under the simplest auspices. “Those Undine of Tomorrow…” just shows the main trio sitting around speculating about the future, punctuated by Akira getting mad at Aika for trying to inherit Alicia’s special Undine alias instead of creating her own identity. Even though “That New Me…” does this conflict more explosively, it’s handled with a lot more symbolic potency in “Those Undine of Tomorrow…”. An Undine’s alias is custom-made for her by her mentor, and characterizes her style and the experience a customer will have with her. It’s closely linked to her identity as an Undine. For the main trio, being an Undine is a core part of their personal identities, so the aliases they choose clearly express their personal identities and how they see themselves. So when Akira criticizes Aika for trying to take on Alicia’s alias, she’s much more pointedly advising Aika not to couple her own identity to Alicia; otherwise Aika is setting herself up for constant self-loathing and dissatisfaction when she fails to live up to her vision of Alicia.

“That White, Kind City…” is, in some ways, a tempest in a teapot. Alicia pulls off a classic mentor maneuver, answering Akari’s straightforward question about what she values in her job and what motivates her with a long, meandering stunt and a Zen koan. On the other hand, with a show that wears its themes on its sleeve like Aria, a little subtlety can be very refreshing. Ending the series on such a low-key story, where characters other than Akari and Alicia appear only briefly, seems a bit odd, but it works. It’s a fun, sweet episode, the beautiful imagery and focus on the Akari / Alicia relationship of “The Discoveries on That Spring Day…” improved by a strong plot thread and theme.

As we’ll discuss next time, Aria: The Origination is much more subtle, low-key, and focused on character and relationships than The Natural, and these last few episodes start moving us in that direction. They are all the better for it.

My Biggest Compliment for The Natural

Aria: The Natural is inferior to the other shows in story, character, and animation, but it manages to have my favorite soundtrack of all three shows. Since the soundtracks of all three shows are brilliant, this doesn’t quite absolve it of its failings, but it’s a definite point in its favor.

The Natural has the most varied and interesting background music, but it also racks up huge points because one of its endings, “Natsumachi”, is quite possibly my favorite anime song of all time. I have no ear for music, so it’s hard to really explain why, but over the years this song has almost never failed to make me think nostalgically of summer evenings by the beach and lavender sunset skies over the ocean with the stars just becoming visible. Oddly, the only real memories I have of a scenario like that have some unpleasant aspect to them, so the song is making me feel nostalgic for some synthesized thing that’s never actually happened to me. That’s pretty powerful.

The three Aria openings, “Undine”, “Euforia”, and “Spirale”, are almost identical songs in a lot of ways, but “Euforia”, the opening for The Natural, succeeds most at being that song. The Natural does, however, have my least favorite ending theme, “Smile Again”, for its second half. “Smile Again” is far from bad, but to my ears it’s merely pleasant, where the other endings, “Rainbow”, “Kin no Nami, Sen no Nami”, and the aforementioned “Natsumachi”, achieve something more stirring. If you translate the lyrics, all four endings are pretty much the usual anime song pablum about romantic yearning and the blue sky, so it’s hard for me to describe what separates them for me. This is where words fail me, and I have to throw up my hands and admit that that’s how I felt about it, but it really is just a feeling.

Conclusion

Aria: The Natural has some of the best material in the Aria series, along with most of the worst material. There are times when it’s boring, and times when it goes in directions that undermine its own world. There are also times when it’s beautiful, and times when it nails a feeling or a theme perfectly. I understand now why I always felt so conflicted about it in the past. It has good ideas and executes some of them very well, and all of them competently, but it feels like it’s spinning its wheels and filling up space a lot of the time, which grew frustrating at times. It may have been better served by a thirteen-episode run, doing away with the cat god story and some of the other filler, to concentrate the good parts and leave behind the less good parts. But in the end it’s part of the Aria saga, and its length, as much as it burned me out towards the end, served some purpose: it bridged the gap from Aria: The Animation, where our three heroines have just gotten into the swing of things and still have a lot of growing and maturing to do, to Aria: The Origination, where they’ve matured a lot, and are now well on the way to becoming Primas.

That Nostalgic Memory I’m Ambivalent on Whether I Should Have Dug Up Again: Part One of an “Aria” Retrospective

My love for anime has been a bumpy ride, with peaks and valleys, zeniths and nadirs, apexes and azimuths, local minima and maxima, but during one of the highest heights of love for anime I’ve ever had, I considered Aria, the show about female gondola tour guides in an exact replica of Venice on Mars in the 24th Century, to be one of my favorite anime ever, second only to Bakemonogatari in my esteem.

It’s been a long time since I watched it. A few months ago, I figured, it’s fall, I’m old, what else do I have but to relive younger, happier times through media? Why not go back and watch Aria again? If it was still good, I could have the pleasure of nostalgia satisfied; and if it was terrible, I could once again feel the ache of a part of my youth crumbling into an ash of bitter disillusion inside me. What else do we live for but that feeling, after all?

In the end it was, as ever, more complicated than that. Re-watching Aria—by which I mean all the episodes, across all three series, plus the OVA—gave me a lot to think about, in every way and on every level.

When I think about art, I do so roughly on three levels. There’s the level of my personal experience with it, the emotion I felt while experiencing it. Then there’s the level of how this piece of art is constructed. How does it use the tools of its medium? Is it made skillfully or clumsily? When you read a film review and the critic gives it a rating at the end, it’s usually based on some combination of these two: whether the critic enjoyed the experience with the film, and whether it was constructed well. There’s also the more symbolic level: what’s the subtext? What are the implications? What is this trying to tell us, either implicitly or explicitly? This is how literary analysis looks at works of literature. These three levels aren’t discrete or even easily separable, of course. In practice they’re more like parts of a tree. The symbolic aspect is the root system. It’s not always easy to see and you’d be excused in some cases for thinking it doesn’t exist. Sometimes it doesn’t go very deep, and it’s not essential to the art that it go very deep, but trees with shallow root systems are prone to blowing away in storms or getting eroded out of the ground, and I’d argue the same is true for art. The construction aspect is the trunk. Without a trunk you don’t have a tree, and without the construction of art you don’t have art. The trunk is the most conventional part of the tree; there’s some room for variation, but mostly it just goes up and supports the rest of the tree. The construction is the most conventional part of a piece of art; try to get too outside the box with how it’s constructed and you end up with utter nonsense. And the emotional experience of individual people is the branches, leaves, flowers, and fruit. Its shape varies a lot, it’s very subjective, and it’s simultaneously the most superficial and the most important part. Giraffes love eating the leaves of the acacia tree; humans don’t, but we love eating apples, and we love looking at cherry blossoms. For a work of art, the emotions it creates are the reason people want to experience it, so they’re important, but they’ll be different for everyone. Some people might be scared of a movie, and others might laugh at the same movie.

Aria, it turns out, has enough going for it at all three tree-parts that I couldn’t write one coherent post covering all of them, so this first part covers the leaves and the branches and the trunk; to start with we’ll be going over the construction of the show’s art and narrative and the emotional journey of revisiting it. But even that produced enough material that I’m going to split it into three parts. In this part we’ll talk about Aria: The Animation. In the next part we’ll discuss Aria: The Natural, and in the final part we’ll go over Aria: The Origination and Arietta. In a future post I’ll talk about the root system. There’s a lot going on around the edges of the world of Neo-Venezia that deserves to be unpacked. But for now we have the much easier task of answering the obvious question:

Is Aria actually good?

I hesitate to say Aria is good. Not because it isn’t good. On the contrary, it takes a lot of creative risks that pay off spectacularly. It has charming characters and a beautiful world and incredible visuals. But it is flawed. So flawed that I hesitate to call it good, even though in aggregate the things it gets right are so large and the things it gets wrong are so small that it almost doesn’t seem to matter that it has flaws, it might as well just not have them.

But I didn’t watch the show in aggregate. I watched it one episode at a time, one day at a time, and at that level, I have to say, Aria has flaws. It has storytelling flaws. It has technical flaws in its art and animation. It has some flaws in its character writing that I’ve decided, after some consideration, I can’t put down to “it was accurate to the character’s personality”.

If you’ve never seen the show and you want me to tell you whether or not you should watch it, I’ll tell you yes, you should watch it. You should not expect action-packed excitement. You should not expect a laugh riot. You shouldn’t even expect moe; Aria is not, despite appearances, a “cute girls doing cute things” show, though you’re least likely to be disappointed if you go in expecting that. And you should not expect perfect storytelling or unimpeachable animation. You should not expect to enjoy every episode. You should also be prepared not to like it. Whenever a show does its own thing as confidently as this one does, it always risks some people not liking it. But you should watch it. And you should watch it now, before you read the rest of this post.

Aria: The Animation: Setting the Tone

The first Aria series came out in 2005, the same year as Tsubasa Chronicle, Strawberry 100%, and Negima!. It had one job: beat us over the head with so much suteki that we’d go punch-drunk. It did its job.

It’s rare for anime to diverge too drastically from the original work they’re based on, but if a studio was ever tempted to make something over completely, to make its anime adaptation into something entirely different from the source material, they had to have been tempted with Aria: The Animation. In 2005, the popular anime were harem, fantasy adventure, harem, wacky comedy, and harem. Looking over Wikipedia’s list of anime TV series that debuted in 2005, you’ve got My-Otome, which is sci-fi harem; Negima!, which is fantasy adventure harem; Paniponi Dash!, which is surreal comedy with harem elements; Rozen Maiden: Traumend, which is harem about dolls; Shuffle!, which is harem about angels and demons; Amaenaideyo!, which is harem about Buddhist nuns; Strawberry 100%, which is harem about strawberry panties; and Best Student Council, which is madcap comedy with harem elements. (I should mention I have, of course, watched all of these shows at one point or another, because I am trash as a human.) This was the time period when harem shows were starting to transmorph into moe shows, and it was becoming acceptable to do lighthearted shows about a group of attractive girls without thrusting some generic loser guy into the center of the narrative for them to lust over. The elements were all there in the Aria manga. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to take on a more jokey tone, show a little bit more skin in the bath and beach scenes, let the camera linger a little longer on boobs and butts, play up the yuri aspects of Aika’s worship for Alicia, and make something that would be a more surefire hit in 2005 in the 1 AM timeslot. But they didn’t do that. They stayed true to the unique spirit of the manga, confidently asserted themselves, and created something people still talk about with great reverence thirteen years later, unlike Shuffle! and Best Student Council, which have faded away.

Aria: The Animation introduces all the characters: our three main heroines Akari, Aika, and Alice; their mentors Alicia, Akira, and Athena; Akari’s low-key love interest Akatsuki, and Aika’s slightly higher-key love interest Al; and last but not least, the three creepy pet cats that each of our heroines keeps as the symbolic president of her Undine company. It introduces the world of Neo-Venezia, a perfect replica of the city of Venice located on Mars, now called Aqua after being terraformed and covered with water. The original Venice, on “Manhome”, as the series calls Earth, sank into the ocean sometime between today and the show’s 24th Century time period. Manhome is not explored very much in the Aria series, and is never actually seen, but we get tiny hints of what it’s like. Machines do almost everything, yet people still work so ceaselessly that one couple Akari meets later on hasn’t been able to get away for a vacation in years. No food grows there anymore. There doesn’t seem to be much appreciation for history, art, or culture. Neo-Venezia is a hugely popular tourist destination, and everyone who comes seems to love it, but then, they have highly trained Undine tour guides to row them around the city, talk to them, and personalize their experience. Reading between the lines, my guess is since all services on Manhome are provided by machines, it’s a great luxury on Aqua to have a person providing a service for you. Undine train intensely to gain skill in emotional labor so they can provide an experience unlike anything these tourists, who are used to talking to machines, have had, and that’s why everyone we see has such an intense positive reaction to Neo-Venezia. We’ll discuss this further in a later post.

In contrast to the image we get of Manhome, Aqua is beautiful, full of trees, plants, water, friendly people, fulfilling work, and the most distinguished art and architecture from throughout Earth’s history. Anime is generally very good at showing the appeal of nature, but Aria also had to reproduce 500 years of Italian architecture, and the staff did so brilliantly. Even though you can tell they were struggling with the confines of a TV animation budget in 2005. The trip to Venice they talk about in the DVD special features really paid off. Other shows have also done an admirable job recreating beautiful European architecture—Gochuumon wa Usagi Desu ka? for example–but Aria‘s special trick was incorporating that into a world that makes sense. The world of Gochiusa makes no sense and goes totally unexplained. Towards the end of series I amused myself by theorizing that it took place in the same world as Aria, on a different part of Aqua inspired by Central Europe. Which then made so much sense that it’s now my head-canon that Gochiusa’s world is another city on Aqua. Aria’s world is so strong, it can even explain other shows’ worlds.

Aria: The Animation also introduces Ai, a young girl to whom Akari writes emails at the beginning and end of most episodes, explaining what’s been going on in her life. This framing device, which was different in the manga, throws off the beginning of the story a little. To introduce Ai in the first episode, Akari had to already be somewhat established on Aqua, so the anime couldn’t adapt the early chapters of the manga where Akari first arrives. On the other hand, it allows Alice to be introduced in Episode 3, whereas in the manga she wasn’t officially introduced for four volumes, very late for one of the main characters. Episode 3 is an anime original, but it serves early on to assert the direction the show is taking. It treats Akari as a symbol of everything the show stands for—its optimism, its welcoming nature, its relaxing atmosphere, its appreciation for the beauty of nature and of art, its reverence for history and human achievement. Then it puts Alice in the place of a new viewer as she slowly discovers that Akari is sappy, corny, wide-eyed “oh gee golly willikers”, a sanguine font of happiness, “transparent” with her positive emotions as the episode title puts it. At first Alice doesn’t understand how someone could possibly be like this, but by the episode’s conclusion she’s begun to understand the charm of Akari’s smile.

It only took a few more episodes to remind me why Alice has always been my favorite character. Akari may embody the series, but Alice is the most relatable. A quiet, quirky gondola prodigy, Alice is great at sculling when the series starts, but she has a lot to learn about working with people, including her mentor, Athena, who annoys her by being clumsy and dopey. Once she does establish a relationship with the other main characters, Alice is all the more afraid of losing it because of the work she had to put in to developing it. Alice grows a lot over the course of the three shows and probably has the most satisfying arc of any of the main characters. She also gets all the best lines. In Episode 5, the mentors send the three trainees a mystery invitation promising a trip to “Neverland”. The three show up to find an empty island; when they start speculating why someone would have done this, Alice says “Maybe someone wanted to crush our dreams”.

Aria: The Animation focuses on exploring the world of Neo-Venezia more than on the characters, aside from a couple of Alice episodes (mainly Episode 3 and Episode 6) and some moments in the spotlight for other characters (Athena also in Episode 6, Akira in Episode 7, President Aria in Episode 8, and the three mentors in Episode 11). But the characters are all introduced well enough that we understand who they are, and they stand out as one of the bright spots of this first series in hindsight. Another major bright spot: the art. Every episode is of full of imagery that makes Aqua look warm, pleasant, and friendly, beautiful in an approachable way. Neo-Venezia is not some static shrine full of priceless artifacts that can never be touched (even though, in a literal sense, it kind of is); it feels like somewhere people live, where their lives are improved by the beauty they’re surrounded with every day. Watching the characters harvest chestnuts at a rustic mountain cabin in Episode 9 or take a swim through a ruined mansion in the middle of the ocean in Episode 10 is enjoyable even though there’s not a lot of story involved, and we still see the characters react to the situations in ways that feel appropriate to their personalities, such as Aika’s misplaced competitiveness in Episode 9. There’s a lot more to the art than just faithfully reproducing Venice. The animators love to show images reflected on water, either the ocean or a puddle, and manage to perfectly capture the faded, yet clear quality of such reflections. There’s also a scene at the start of Episode 11 where Akari, Aika, and Alice are coming home from a day of bad weather that uses color more effectively than any other anime scene I can think of. The grey-green color of the sky and ocean communicate the loneliness, melancholy, and oppressiveness of being out in bad weather near nightfall with incredible skill, without a single word of dialogue. When the characters make it inside to the orange glow of a warm fire, there’s such catharsis, such relief, far more emotion than anyone would expect from the first five minutes of an episode, and without a single tear or any yelling. The festival in Episode 13 also wouldn’t be nearly as inviting without the cozy earth tones that make a night in Piazza San Marco with friends look so appealing.

The Groundwork for a Flawed Run

This first series is a microcosm of everything that’s great and not so great about Aria. The charming characters, unique worldview, and amazing art are all there; the bad animation, strained storylines, and some worldbuilding elements that I now don’t appreciate also begin here. I’ll save the discussion of the animation for The Natural, where it got so bad it interfered with the story.

Aria: The Animation’s storytelling is uneven, notably more so than the other two series since the show was still finding its footing at this point. Episode 5, for example, is about the girls having fun at the beach. Later episodes, even within The Animation, contented themselves with showing us the fun and the beautiful imagery and maybe slipping in a tiny, obvious message at the end. Episode 5 tries to have a complex message about remembrance that takes up the last two minutes of its running time and doesn’t flow at all from what we’ve seen so far, which has been the girls having fun on the beach. The analogy between the beach island and Peter Pan’s Neverland is strained and adds nothing to the story. Does this ruin the episode? No, we still get a fun segment of the girls doing intense training and then enjoying the beach in the middle. But it makes it feel choppy, as if we have three separate things going on that don’t actually belong together but they’ve been shoehorned into one episode just because. This episode is an anomaly in the show. I can’t think of another one that’s choppy and lumpy in the same way this one is.

Episode 7 fails in a way that Aria episodes more typically do. It’s adapted from a manga story that was only one chapter, so there wasn’t enough material to fill an entire episode. Thus the story was padded with original material about Akari, Aika, and Alice each using their unique talents to save a gondola ride for some customers of Akira’s. It’s clumsy, feels like the filler it is, and does nothing to develop the characters. It reminds me of an episode of the old Superfriends cartoon. You would always have scenarios where Hawkman, Apache Chief, and Aquaman end up in an aquarium that’s crumbling in an earthquake and have to save people. Apache Chief grows to a large size and holds up the building to help people escape. Aquaman talks to the fish and gets them to jump out of their tanks and let people ride them to safety. Hawkman uses his hawk-like laser eye beams to blast a path free. If you’re curious, the hawk-like laser eye beams in this episode is Alice’s ability to pick locks. It’s never explained why she learned it and it’s never mentioned again. (I have written in my notes for this episode, “Alice, you crafty little bitch! Where did you learn to pick locks?”)

Episode 8, which also fails in a way that would become characteristic of later duds, is two half-episodes starring President Aria. Both are pretty boring. Have you ever watched one of those Nick Jr. cartoons for young children who can’t talk yet? The animation is always very static because it’s trying to avoid overstimulating them before naptime. They can’t talk yet, so there’s barely any dialogue aside from narration, and they can’t really understand what’s going on, so the plot is always about some cute animal trying to find his balloon or something. That’s basically these President Aria episodes. The second one is a little better because we get to see what all the characters are doing with their free time. Junichi Sato, the director of the Aria series, has said in interviews that he had a hard time pacing the first series given such a big world, so many characters, and only thirteen episodes, and he titled the second series “The Natural” because it was allowed to proceed at a more natural pace. Given that, it’s exceedingly strange he would choose to spend an entire thirteenth of a series that was far from guaranteed a sequel, one precious episode from the few he had to tell this unique and beautiful story, following around the doings of a cat who loves food. I do hail the idea of making two-part mini-episodes, though. It’s a great way to avoid what happened with Episode 7 where the story was stretched out too thin. Unfortunately I can’t think of a time in the series where it really worked out.

Ghost Cat: Way of the Gondolier

I had the most problems with Episodes 5, 7, and 8, but the other episodes weren’t perfect either. Episode 4 caused me the most turmoil. The basic story is quite good. Akari receives a long obsolete data disk and a request to deliver it to another island far out in the Neo-Adriatic Sea. She asks her friend Woody, a Sylph who delivers packages on a flying motorbike, to take her out there, where they discover that the island is empty save for a graveyard from the early days of Aqua’s colonization. They find a reader that can play back the disk and discover it’s a letter to one of the early settlers, now long dead. I like this concept a lot: Akari, and the viewers, get to learn something about Aqua’s past and the early days of human settlement, which helps fill in the world a little more and drive home early on that they really are on Mars. On the other hand, the one who gives the disk to Akari for delivery is some kind of ghost cat who transformed into a human form and appeared to her in order to make a request that would allow it to rest in peace. If I recall correctly, it’s implied the ghost cat was the cat of the person in the grave Akari delivers the letter to. This sets off a whole recurring mystic ghost cat subplot that keeps coming back into play all the way up to the end of Aria: The Natural, where it comes much more sharply to the forefront.

Watching the show again, I discovered that I don’t like the supernatural ghost cat material. It’s done with the same mastery of art, color, and atmosphere that characterizes the rest of the show, and it helps put Akari in situations that would have been difficult to create otherwise, but it adds a supernatural element into a world that I don’t think needed it.

The world of Aria is somewhat hard sci-fi. It’s harder than Star Wars by a long way. Its terraforming technology is only vaguely explained, but the show does address how Mars became Aqua and how it’s kept that way. Aqua has its own calendar, based around each Aqua year being two Manhome years; in real life, a year on Mars is 687 days, or about 1.88 Earth years. Since people throughout the series treat coming from to Aqua from Manhome as a regular vacation, something that requires time off from work but not something that requires quitting your job and leaving your life behind, we can assume a trip from Manhome to Aqua takes between ten and forty hours. The spaceship we see Akari ride from Manhome to Aqua in the Aqua manga resembles a modern airliner, with no evidence of sleeping bays or stasis pods, which also backs that up. Mars is, on average, about 140 million miles from Earth, so you could reach it in about forty hours if you could travel around 3.5 million miles per hour, which is much faster than any spacecraft we have today, but still far, far slower than the speed of light (roughly 671 million miles per hour). My point is that Aqua may be on Mars in the 24th Century, but as science fiction visions of Mars in the 24th Century go, it’s pretty conservative and sticks fairly close to what might be possible with our current scientific understanding. Then it throws in a recurring subplot about magical ghost cats. Which, as we’ll see, barely affects the main story at all, but at the same time is framed as not a dream or a delusion, so it taints the straight sci-fi world with supernatural elements. That might have been okay if it had added something more valuable than what it subtracted. But as we’ll talk about next time, for me, it didn’t.

Rewatching the X-Men Reboots

After X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the studio recognized that something wasn’t working with the X-Men movies, and went back and did a soft reboot / prequel trilogy, casting James McAvoy as young Charles Xavier and Michael Fassbender as young Erik Lehnsherr, alongside Jennifer Lawrence as young Raven Darkholme, a.k.a. Mystique.

I had seen and enjoyed the first two movies, X-Men: First Class and X-Men: Days of Future Past, but this time around was my first watch of X-Men: Apocalypse, widely regarded as a disaster. It was interesting to compare the prequel trilogy with the original three movies; on the whole, I think they were better, but they definitely have some of the same bad habits as the originals, especially the second two, which were directed by a returning Brian Singer. First Class, directed by Matthew Vaughn of Kingsman, did copy some of those bad habits, but I noticed them less in that movie, and it also set up the really strong relationships between Xavier, Magneto, and Mystique that carry through the entire prequel trilogy and provide most of the emotional core.

X-Men: First Class

This was my favorite of the three movies and definitely better than any other mainline X-Men movie. I’m even putting it above X2. It’s close, but First Class has brighter, more vibrant visuals and a sense of fun. It plays around with its 1962 setting, using the history, the visual appearance, and the music to subtly place itself in that time without getting too cheesy. The story conceit that mutants were involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis is the best kind of comic book alternate history; it effectively establishes the stakes for the final battle and makes sense within the world.

First Class also had my favorite character writing of the prequel trilogy. It does a great job setting up the relationships between Mystique, Xavier, and Magneto, making us understand where they’re coming from and why they do what they do. Nicholas Hoult’s Beast was also great, and the subplot between him and Mystique was so well executed. Mystique is tired of having to hide who she is, her natural blue form and her identity as a mutant, behind a fake beautiful Jennifer Lawrence face. She yearns to be herself all the time and for people to find her natural form as beautiful as they do her Jennifer Lawrence form. When she meets Beast and sees his weird feet, she thinks at first that she’s found someone who will understand her and accept her, but she finds out that unlike her, Beast is ashamed of his physical appearance and wants to hide or change it. Magneto is the first person she’s ever met who encourages her to be her blue self all the time, and she’s drawn to him for that reason, even though she still loves Charles as a brother, and part of her seems to know Magneto is bad news. The friendship between Xavier and Magneto feels organic and real, but you can also see how their upbringings made them into very different people, and gave them both good traits and bad traits. Xavier’s childhood as part of a rich family made him kind, trusting, willing to see the good in people, but also sometimes naive and overly trusting. Magneto’s time in a Nazi concentration camp and the trauma he suffered there gave him a strong will to survive and a keen sense of justice, but also made him hard and ruthless, quick to blame and slow to forgive. Charles can see the good in him, and always tries to guide him towards his better nature, but sometimes he succumbs to his demons, and there are times where he’s right and Charles is just too naive to see it. My one complaint about the Xavier / Magneto dynamic, which we see a lot more in the next two movies than in First Class, is that since the movies are still popcorn blockbusters, they often vindicate Charles too easily, and don’t focus enough on the times when Magneto was right and Charles should have listened to him.

I’ve seen a few complaints online that the movies blow Mystique’s part way out of proportion to her importance in the comics and introduce a lot of changes in her character, like being Charles’s adoptive sister, but it really didn’t bother me. The writers saw an interesting story they could tell with this character, so they told it, even though it meant changing things from the comics. At their best, I think that’s what a movie adaptation should do. The comics aren’t constant about stuff like this anyway; when Emma Frost was introduced, she was a minor villain whose purpose was mostly T&A. As time when on, she became a much more developed character who was sometimes good and sometimes not.

Speaking of Emma Frost, the villain in this movie is the Hellfire Club, and Emma Frost is in it. The actress who plays her looks the part, but doesn’t do a great job delivering lines. Kevin Bacon as Sebastian Shaw, though, is a pretty good villain. He’s not a lot like his comics counterpart, which is a bit of waste since the Hellfire Club could make great villains in the current zeitgeist. (They’re a bunch of ultra rich guys who think ultra rich guys don’t get enough appreciation in the modern world and want to return to an earlier time when ultra rich guys were more appreciated. It’s like they were made to be villains in 2018.) But Bacon gives a suitably villainous performance and definitely comes off as a real threat to the heroes.

The other bad parts of this movie: there are some weird looking effects, and the younger mutants don’t get a ton of development. The original trilogy was guilty of that as well: it would introduce characters and then take no time to develop them at all. Havok gets a little bit of development, but the rest are pretty blank. I also don’t think there was any reason to make the CIA agent Moira MacTaggert. She’s nothing at all like her comics counterpart, so it didn’t add any depth to the story; it was an “in name only” version of her. These are all minor complaints, though.

X-Men: Days of Future Past

Brian Singer came back for this one, the only time I can think of when a comic book movie used the same kind of convoluted timeline reboot that the comics themselves use all the time. We see a horrific dystopian future where mutants have been hunted to extinction in a holocaust, and then, like the comics story of the same name, someone’s consciousness gets sent back in time to change the future and prevent it from coming to pass. In the comics, Rachael Summers sent Kitty Pryde into the past; in this movie, Kitty Pryde sends Wolverine into the past, because Brian Singer doesn’t know how to make an X-Men movie where Wolverine isn’t the main character. (Though it turns out to be kind of a bait and switch here; Wolverine actually has a fairly minor role, and the main story is propelled by the young versions of Xavier, Magneto, and Mystique.)

I liked this movie a lot, but it’s not as good as First Class. For one thing, they timeskip ahead eleven years, from 1962 to 1973, but no one looks eleven years older than they were in First Class. It starts throwing in pointless little callbacks to the previous movies, like the presence of Stryker; in this movie they’re just little things, but they develop into problems in Apocalypse. Every character from First Class except for Xavier, Beast, Mystique, Magneto, and Havok is killed offscreen. It continues to pretend like this timeline will somehow lead to the timeline of the original movies, even though there are a lot of details that don’t connect. The biggest one is Mystique. In the original movies, she was just a sexpot spy who spent her free time fawning over Magneto. There was no indication that she knew Charles. In the prequel movies, her relationship with Magneto is much more complicated and Charles is probably the most important person in the world to her, despite their disagreements. Speaking of which, I thought Rebecca Romijn was better at playing that sexpot spy version of Mystique; when Jennifer Lawrence tries to do it in this movie, it’s somehow unconvincing. Jennifer Lawrence is great as the younger, more conflicted, wounded Mystique that we saw in First Class and see in a good portion of this movie. This movie also contains the only time in the series where Xavier admits that Magneto was right: in the dystopian future, with Patrick Stewart Xavier and Ian McKellen Magneto. Of course, the movie goes on to still vindicate Charles when the government kills off the Sentinel program after Mystique saves Richard Nixon (which is morally problematic in other ways, but whatever, the characters had no way of knowing that).

There’s still a lot to like about this movie, though. Xavier and Mystique both have great character arcs. The 70’s setting is used just as well as the 60’s setting of First Class: it infuses a bit of style and helps get us grounded in the time period, without being obnoxious. The Quicksilver scene is awesome. Bolivar Trask is a surprisingly good villain. He has kind of an Ozymandias thing where he thinks that uniting humanity against mutants will end war and suffering in the world, and him being a little person adds an interesting dimension to his belief that it’s all right to persecute a minority group for the greater good. The action scenes in the dystopian future are great; they have a scale and intensity that we never got in any of the previous movies, where the heroes weren’t allowed to kill anything and there were always civilians and property around to be careful of.

Also, it erases The Last Stand from the timeline. So that’s good. When I saw this the first time, it had been so long since I saw The Last Stand that I didn’t really think about how its ending would have led into the dystopian mutant holocaust future, but now it’s pretty obvious how it happened. Magneto attacking Alcatraz and causing a giant battle between mutants and the army seems like a pretty obvious trigger for that sort of thing. It still doesn’t jive with how the 1973 timeline led into The Last Stand, though. For one thing, Mystique is still alive and running around menacing humanity in The Last Stand, whereas in Days of Future Past they tell us that in the timeline which led to the mutant holocaust, Mystique was captured and experimented on to create the morphing Sentinels. After watching this and even more so after Apocalypse, I pretty much decided that this trilogy was a reboot, not a prequel trilogy. It just incidentally ends with Patrick Stewart playing Xavier and Ian McKellen playing Magneto. I don’t think we can assume the original three movies as we saw them happened at all in this timeline, though we do know that Logan still had to kill Jean for some reason since Xavier sees the scenes from The Last Stand in his mind.

X-Men: Apocalypse

Definitely the worst of the three reboot movies, but I enjoyed it more than The Last Stand, though it shares that movie’s main issue: it’s crazily overstuffed. There are some good ideas and a lot of good actors here, but there’s so much material to cover that even if they’d focused, they never would have been able to do it all well, and the movie distracts itself with all kinds of pointless fandering that doesn’t advance the main story.

Here is a list of all the new characters that are introduced to the reboot timeline in this movie: Cyclops, Jean Grey, Nightcrawler, Angel, Storm, Psylocke, Jubilee, and Apocalypse. That’s eight major characters, each of which has a backstory and needs screentime to be developed. They also have to share the movie with Xavier, Magneto, Mystique, and Quicksilver, as well as Moira MacTaggert, William Stryker, and Wolverine, who shows up during a pointless middle section that tries to establish why he’s in love with Jean. I’m amazed at how well the movie actually does balancing all these characters, but it’s still not good enough; while we do get enough of all of them to get some sense of what they’re like, we don’t hear about anyone’s history in any depth and none of them gets a real character arc in this movie. In fact, the only characters I’d say do kind of get arcs in this movie are Magneto, who realizes by the end that he actually does care for Xavier, and Mystique, who realizes she could do some good with her newfound fame and help teach younger mutants what she wishes someone would have taught her when she was young. No one else develops. There just isn’t enough time, with all these new characters.

There are also way too many subplots going on in this movie. Magneto, who has escaped after his attempt to kill Richard Nixon and gone into hiding, is working at a foundry in his native Poland and has a wife and daughter whom he loves. They exist only to get killed, when a group of scared police officers accidentally fire a bow at them somehow. (It seems pretty hard to accidentally discharge a bow the way the guy does in the movie. Like, he has the string pulled back and then somehow accidentally releases it. It’s not like a gun where your finger can slip or whatever; it takes a lot of strength to hold a bowstring pulled back. You will be aware that you’re doing it.) Apocalypse, an ancient Egyptian mutant played by a squandered Oscar Isaac, is gathering his Four Horsemen, launching nukes into space, and creating pyramids for some reason. Scott and Jean are meeting for the first time and hanging out with Nightcrawler and Jubilee. Quicksilver is trying to tell Magneto that he’s his son. As I mentioned, there’s an entirely pointless scene in the middle where Stryker captures Mystique, Beast, and Quicksilver and locks them up for no reason, so Scott, Jean, and Nightcrawler have to come rescue them and free Wolverine in the process. The movie is two and a half hours long, just like the Marvel movies, and there still isn’t enough time to cover everything satisfactorily, because there’s enough material here for three movies.

Apocalypse skips ahead to 1983, and at this point the timeskips just become ridiculous. Nobody who was in First Class looks over twenty years older than they did in that movie. Havok, especially, was young and should have aged a lot, but he didn’t. Quicksilver too; not only did he not age, he’s still living in his mom’s basement after 10 years. (They lamely cover this by having him say “Yep, I still live in my mom’s basement. I’m a loser.” at one point.) I also don’t understand why they didn’t just make Xavier bald in this movie and imply that he lost his hair naturally. It would have made him look older, and it would have let them have a comics-accurate bald Xavier without the pointless fan-pandering scene at the end where a psychic struggle against Apocalypse somehow makes him bald.

Unlike The Last Stand, though, there are some good ideas here. I like the idea of Magneto trying to live a quiet life and find peace with a family. But that’s too big a change from what we saw last time to be covered in ten minutes of a movie with four other plots going on. I like Mystique’s character arc, where she realizes she can do some good by embracing her fame and the admiration young mutants feel for her. I like the idea of Magneto realizing he cares about Charles too much to directly attack him, even if they’ll never see eye to eye on other things. I like a lot of the actors: Alexandra Shipp is a good Storm, much better than Halle Berry, and Kodi Smit-McPhee is a great young Nightcrawler. Sophie Turner (a.k.a. Sansa Stark) is a decent young Jean Grey. Tye Sheridan is okay but not very exciting as Cyclops. I also don’t like how they wrote Cyclops. He does at least have a personality this time, but it’s almost the exact opposite of his comics counterpart—he’s rebellious and sneers at authority, instead of being upstanding and authoritative himself.

Funnily enough, I think X-Men: Apocalypse would have worked better if they’d cut out Apocalypse. His story was the second most pointless after the Stryker scene, and took up a lot of time. The whole movie probably would have worked better if Magneto were just the villain again, and only the young X-Men subplot, Mystique subplot, and Magneto subplot were covered. Mystique could have just recruited Storm to the young X-Men team, or Charles could have like he does in the comics. With how many characters there are, a smaller, more character-centered story would have been a better fit than the overly ambitious attempt at a giant, world-ending battle that we get.

Still, Apocalypse did have some aspects I liked a lot, and compared to The Last Stand there was nowhere near as much stuff that just felt stupid (“I’m the Juggernaut, bitch”, “I don’t respond to my slave name”, stuff like that). The main one is the scene where the young X-Men walk out of Return of the Jedi complaining about how bad it is; fricking nobody in 1983 was walking out of Return of the Jedi complaining about how bad it was. (Okay, someone probably was, but not four random teenagers. I don’t buy it.) So it’s my second least-favorite of the six main series movies, but it’s a lot closer to X-Men for me than it is to The Last Stand, despite the similar problems it has.

Conclusion

I liked the reboot trilogy a lot more than the originals. They had fun, color, music, comics-accurate costumes (except in Apocalypse when their costumes were just random flight suits they picked up at a military base, that was dumb). They had great actors (to be fair, so did the originals) and great character writing. They actually tried to focus on characters other than Wolverine. I’m still slowly working my way through the Claremont run of Uncanny X-Men comics, and these reboot movies did a pretty good job capturing the spirit of those comics. There’s fun and color and weirdness and jokes, but there’s also a serious core to it, with more complex themes than you’d typically see from characters like Spider-Man or the Fantastic Four.

It does concern me a little that they’re already trying to redo the Dark Phoenix story from the comics in the next movie. A huge part of that story’s power came from years of following the ups and downs of Jean Grey’s life, ever since Uncanny X-Men #1 in the 60’s. We barely know Sophie Turner’s Jean Grey yet; she got the most development of the young X-Men in Apocalypse, but it still wasn’t a lot. I don’t understand why movie studios develop these fixations on specific comics storylines. Yes, the Dark Phoenix saga was great, but it’s not the only good X-Men story ever told, and the other stories that came before it provided much needed buildup that helped make it so good. Let’s see a movie about Proteus. Let’s see a movie about Genosha. Even if an exact adaptation requires too much continuity to work as a movie, it’s still possible to take elements of these stories and make them into something that works for a movie. It’s the same with The Killing Joke, and The Dark Knight Returns, and Year One: those are all good stories, but they’re not the only Batman stories ever told, and the other stories provided buildup that made them as good as they were.

An Overview of the early Adam Warlock stories

The Roy Thomas Era

The early years of Adam Warlock, in Marvel Premiere #1 and #2 and Warlock #1 - #8, were mostly written by Roy Thomas.

This run covers Warlock’s adventures on Counter-Earth, attempting to introduce enough good to parry the evil introduced by Man-Beast and his Beast-Men. Warlock makes friends with a group of children who use all kinds of groovy, far-out 70’s slang, meets Counter-Dr. Doom and Reed Richards, and fights Rex Carpenter, the president of the United States who is actually the Man-Beast in disguise. He gets in philosophical arguments about good and evil with Man-Beast, Triax the Warthog, and the High Evolutionary, the creator of Counter-Earth who wants to just wipe it out and start over.
About four issues into Warlock, after one of these arguments with the High Evolutionary, I slapped myself on the forehead and went, “Oh, he’s Jesus.” The High Evolutionary represents God the father; Beast-Man is Satan, who rebelled against his creator and took a bunch of his fellows along to try to wreak evil on his creator’s later works; and Warlock is Jesus, who walks among the flawed humans trying to convince them to be good. It’s painfully obvious by the time we get to the conclusion of this arc, in issues #176 - 178 of Incredible Hulk, where Warlock takes on disciples, gets crucified, and then rises from the dead after three days.

After this, Warlock leaves Counter-Earth behind and flies off into space to get into new adventures, which is where Starlin picks him up in Strange Tales #181.

Roy Thomas’s material is grandiose pulp space opera nonsense: often ridiculous, a little bit pretentious, rather self-serious, yet oddly moving. I especially liked the mini-arc in the middle where we meet the Counter-Earth Dr. Doom, who sacrifices his life to save Warlock and the groovy kids, and Reed Richards, who turns into a Hulk-like monster called the Brute. The more down-to-earth beginning of the arc, when Warlock saves Los Angeles from a bunch of automated killer drones that try to blow up innocent people due to screwy programming, was surprisingly satisfying. I actually didn’t mind the Jesus metaphor until we got to the end in Incredible Hulk and it really started to beat us over the head with it; before that, it was just a little spice to give some weight to the story.

The early material reminds me a lot of the original Star Trek series in its look and themes. It’s very brightly colored, very concerned with good and evil and morality, and at times comical in its lack of subtlety. I enjoyed it for the same reason I enjoyed G Gundam and Kill la Kill: it was so over the top, so ridiculous, yet it took itself so seriously that I both laughed and became genuinely invested in the story. From a storytelling standpoint, its main weakness is Warlock himself. He’s not that well defined of a character. I didn’t really get an idea of what kind of person he is from the early stories, other than “good” and “moral” in some vague sense. It’s also very unclear what his powers actually are. He can fly and has some measure of super strength; beyond that, the Soul Gem seems to just do whatever the plot requires. The groovy kids also don’t add anything to the story. I had trouble remembering what their names were, and when one of them died in a battle with Triax the Warthog-Man, it didn’t really affect me at all. Plus they seemed to turn on Adam Warlock on a dime; one minute they thought he was great, the next he was the worst.

The 1970’s Jim Starlin Warlock

 

Warlock was cancelled after issue 8 and carelessly concluded in the pages of Incredible Hulk, but about a year later, a four-issue arc in issues #178 - #181 of the anthology Strange Tales, written by Jim Starlin, led into the next phase of Adam Warlock.

The Starlin material is still grandiose pulp space opera nonsense, but it goes so weird that you just have to appreciate how much its twisting itself in knots to do something original, and it fills in a lot of the simplistic Silver Age blank spaces that the older material left open. Warlock leaves Counter-Earth and goes off into the universe to search for new adventures, quickly declaring war on a tyrannical godlike being called the Magus, whom he soon discovers is a version of himself from a future where he was pulled into some kind of dimension of crazy, lost his mind, and fell out 5,000 years in the past, where he promptly started building a church around himself as a god. On one of the Magus’s slave ships he meets Pip the Troll, a troll who loves smoking, drinking, and whores, and who becomes one of Warlock’s most constant companions. He also meets Gamora, in her first appearance as a mysterious assassin who we later discover works for Thanos. The Strange Tales issues go straight into Warlock #9 - #15, which show Warlock’s battle against the Magus and the Matriarch, the corporeal leader of his church, alongside Thanos, who considers the Magus a threat and teams up with Warlock to end it. After the Magus threat is dealt with, there is a short arc on Warlock fighting the Starkiller, a human on Earth who’s in a coma but has somehow gained incredible powers in his vegetative state. The 1970’s Starlin era concludes with a fight against Thanos alongside the Avengers, Captain Marvel (Mar-vell, not Carol Danvers), the Thing, and Spider-Man in Avengers Annual #7 and Marvel Two-in-One Annual #2.

This run of stories is probably my favorite of the Adam Warlock stuff I’ve read. It’s deeper, more exciting, and more creative than the earlier stuff, and the characters are easier to connect with and care about. The Magus is such a weird villain, yet perfect for Warlock, given his constant concern with his own morality, and Thanos makes for a great confounding factor in the early parts of the story and a suitably threatening villain later on. The supporting cast becomes a lot more memorable, with Pip and Gamora instead of a bunch of interchangeable groovy kids. Warlock himself starts to take on a more definite personality, his ponderous, grandiloquent style mirroring that of the comic itself. I think the best way to describe him, starting from here and even more so during Infinity Gauntlet, is “Romantic hero”. He exists outside of any society or structure, wandering the universe on his own and trying to do good, falling into fits of melancholy over his perceived failures, wondering what his purpose actually is, never finding anywhere to belong. The Magus is again a fascinating contrast, because instead of isolating himself and living outside society, he created his own society with himself at the center, and expanded it ruthlessly.

The Infinity Gauntlet and the very beginning of Warlock and the Infinity Watch

 

Infinity Gauntlet, like most modern comics events, has prelude stories spread across like three different books and a ton of tie-in issues from other series. I read the prelude stories in Silver Surfer #34 - #38, the two issues of Thanos Quest that show how Thanos actually got his hands on the Infinity Gems, the six issues of the main Infinity Gauntlet story, and the Dr. Strange: Sorcerer Supreme tie-ins in issues #31 - #36.

While Infinity Gauntlet itself was amazing, some of the tie-in material was really hard to get through. Silver Surfer had some great Thanos material, but it took way too long for it to do what it needed to. I wasn’t that invested in the Silver Surfer as a character, and he doesn’t seem to really have any kind of supporting cast to speak of. I also read Incredible Hulk #383 - #384, which tie in somehow to Infinity Gauntlet, though I couldn’t really figure out how since they seem to just be Hulk stories. Between these issues and the ones that concluded the Roy Thomas era, I might never pick up an Incredible Hulk comic again. Not utterly awful, but just boring and hard to read.

Thanos Quest is pretty great, though. Unlike the Infinity War movie (which is pretty tenuously based on the comics, but insofar as it’s based on any comics, it’s based Infinity Gauntlet, not the later Infinity War), the Infinity Gems in the comics aren’t in the hands of sympathetic characters, but of a bunch of asshole cosmic beings who don’t know what they’ve got. It’s fun to see Thanos outwit each of them and take their gem. The only one who’s a little bit sympathetic is the Gardener, who’s a space gardener who uses the Time Gem to keep his garden looking its nicest eternally. The rest of them suck. The Reality Gem, like in the movie, is in the hands of the Collector, who’s possibly even more of a jerk than he was in the movie. He’s willing to trade Thanos the gem in return for a guy that Thanos shrank down into a baby with the Time Gem. The Mind Gem, instead of being in Vision’s head like in the movie, is in possession of the comics version of the Grandmaster, who loves games and only loosely resembles Jeff Goldblum.

A lot of people who commentate on movies and comics made it sound like Thanos was just stalking Mistress Death, the female personification of Death in the Marvel Universe, and doing stupid stuff to try and get her attention, but in actuality she brought him back to life to be her slave because she wanted half the universe wiped out and he seemed like the man to do it. Thanos does have a crush on her, so he goes out and steals the Infinity Gems, hoping that she’ll accept his love once he’s powerful enough to sit beside her. Death starts giving him the cold shoulder after this, saying that he’s now her superior and they’re still not on the same level. Even though she says that, she keeps on acting like she’s better than him, and since he’s evil and not very in touch with his emotions, he does start doing stupid stuff to impress her, eventually (in Infinity Gauntlet) wiping out half the universe’s people with a finger snap. Personally, though, I think Death was just pouting that Thanos became more powerful than her and wasn’t her slave anymore. She thought she was too good for him. When he got all the gems, she had to admit he was more powerful than her, but she still turned her nose up at him and acted all snooty. She just wouldn’t give him a straight rejection because she was afraid he would zap her with his infinite power. He even gave her what she wanted before when he wiped out half the universe, but she still wouldn’t talk to him even though she got exactly what she brought him back to life for. Thanos definitely does a bunch of evil stuff in Infinity Gauntlet, his torture of Nebula and Eros being simultaneously the most petty and the most horrifying, but Lady Death is at least partially responsible for this situation by bringing him back to life and putting the idea in his head that she wanted to wipe out half the universe, which is why I felt like the ending of Infinity Gauntlet was still fair even though Thanos mostly escapes punishment.

I was also surprised by how much I enjoyed the tie-in issues of Dr. Strange, Sorcerer Supreme. I’ve always liked the DC magic stuff—Constantine, Zatanna, Dr. Fate—and in these issues I saw that the Marvel magic stuff can be pretty interesting too. I actually liked #36 the most: Pip and Gamora summon Dr. Strange to convince Adam Warlock to rein it in a little now that he’s the holder of the Infinity Gauntlet. It’s mostly conversation, but it’s classic tortured ponderous Adam Warlock like we saw in the 1970’s Starlin material. We didn’t get much of that in Infinity Gauntlet, because Adam Warlock himself is barely a factor in that story. He’s the catalyst who sets it in motion, but he spends most of it sitting back and waiting for events to play out the way he knows they will, watching the Avengers and other heroes throw themselves futilely at the invincible Thanos. Infinity Gauntlet is ultimately not a Warlock story; it’s a followup to Thanos Quest, where Thanos is the main driving force behind the story and the end comes about more due to his flaws and his mistakes than anything the heroes actually do.

Warlock and the Infinity Watch, on the other hand, is definitely a Warlock story, and I’ve enjoyed it a lot more than I was expecting to. I took a short break to check out some other comics before I came back to it, but I’m glad I’m back in it. After five issues, the callbacks to older Warlock stories don’t always make sense, and the art is a definite step down from the George Perez art of Infinity Gauntlet (the same guy behind the art of the post-Crisis Wonder Woman that I praised so much before), but the character interplay is better than it’s ever been. After wielding infinite power for a while, Warlock is more alienated and conflicted than he’s ever been. He spends the first few issues trying to find his way back into the habit of being around other people, and I think this is possibly the most character-driven Warlock material yet. There’s a scene in issue #2 that really struck a chord with me: Warlock forms the Infinity Watch, hands each member one of the gems for safekeeping, and then they all pose together and a big word balloon has Warlock declaring them the Infinity Watch. Smash cut to the next panel, and he’s walking away, saying he must be going, because he’s “in dire need of solitude” in order to regenerate his spirit and strength. At this moment, I understood what I’ve always found compelling about his character: he’s a mopey, emo, self-serious introvert who’s obsessed with doing the right thing, but due to his isolation from society, he’s never quite sure what conventional morality would dictate and he’s always going it alone. At the same time, he can’t or won’t integrate himself into society; on some level he prefers to stay isolated. I relate to that. Like most emo, self-serious introverts, his greatest enemy is himself, and he has a small group of friends who may not quite understand him, but do care about him, that he never properly appreciates. I relate to that too.

 

Conclusion

I still can’t say I recommend trying to read the Adam Warlock saga to everyone, especially if you can’t stand older comics, and I definitely had trouble getting through some of the material around Infinity Gauntlet, like the Hulk and Silver Surfer issues. Overall I enjoyed it a lot, though. This was my first serious attempt to follow a long-running story that hops across several books and a bunch of tie-ins, and in this case it was worth it, even if I don’t like having to constantly check Comic Book Herald’s Adam Warlock reading order (which is awesome and thank all goodness that it exists) to know which book to read next. I’m looking forward to seeing Adam Warlock in the MCU with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. With how serious he is, I think he’ll make a great foil for the Guardians, just like Thor did in the Infinity War movie.

X-Men Movie Rewatch: X-Men, X2, and X3

I decided to re-watch the 20th Century Fox X-Men movies. Since I’m old, I saw most of them as they came out and remember liking most of them, but it had been a while since I’d seen the first few, so with how much I’ve been enjoying the X-Men comics, it seemed like the time to revisit those movies.

X-Men

Unfortunately, to my surprise, X-Men actually isn’t a very good movie.

It’s also far from a terrible movie. The two I remember hating are X3: The Last Stand (because the story was a complete hash) and X-Men Origins: Wolverine (which was sort of mediocre until the last 15 minutes, when you see their version of Deadpool, which even I knew was horrible despite having never read a Deadpool comic), and nothing I saw rewatching X-Men brought it to the level of those two. But in a world where Guardians of the Galaxy, The Avengers, Captain America: Civil War, Thor: Ragnarok, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Black Panther, Wonder Woman, Logan, and both Deadpools exist, it’s easy to see the cracks in the first X-Men movie.

One of the weird things I wasn’t expecting to notice is how uncool the powers actually are as presented in this movie. Compared to the modern comic book movies, a lot of this movie is done with practical effects—stunts, wire work, physical stage combat—probably because CG was so much more expensive in 2000 than it is now. Normally I really like practical effects, but in this movie the limitations of the practical effects made a lot of the characters seem weaker and lamer than they are in the comics or the animated series, or even in later movies where the effects budget was bigger. Magneto’s big show of power in this movie is stealing everyone’s guns and pointing them back at their owners. Professor Xavier’s is taking over the minds of Magneto’s henchmen and making them talk to him. Storm struggles to defeat Toad, one of the lamest X-Men villains. (Jean also does, but Jean in the comics was weak and lame until she became Phoenix, so at least it’s in character. Storm in the comics would wipe the floor with Toad.) The fact that Toad is in this movie at all is probably a result of effects limitations; you can get the guys in the makeup shop to whip up some gooey spit, and a CG tongue is cheap enough compared to what you’d need to do someone like Pyro or Avalanche. But setting that aside, even the effects-light fights, like Wolverine vs. Mystique, seem boring and low-impact for some reason. There’s something about the way they shoot and stage the combat. No one ever seems to land a solid hit—they’re always grabbing each other and throwing each other across the room on wires. This might also have to do with the effects budget; they can’t really smash up an environment like the fights in newer comic book movies can because it’s mostly practical, so they would have to build and set up destructible environments, and they would have to do it again every time they need a new take for whatever reason.

Another weird thing I noticed: the color scheme is super dark, and everybody’s dialogue sounds ominous and weighty and a little bit emo. There are a few jokes, but they’re not very good; there were things I enjoyed in this movie, but I definitely never laughed while watching it. There really is a big difference between the “grounded” look and tone that it was felt comic book movies needed to have in 2000, and the more fantastical feel they’re allowed to have nowadays. From what I remember, even X-Men: First Class is a lot brighter and more lighthearted compared to these first two movies. Of course, this was only three years after Batman and Robin, and that was both a critical and financial failure, so it makes some sense that everyone involved would think that getting as far away from that as possible was wise.

The story feels rushed. Magneto’s plot is poorly developed and makes very little sense—he’s either risking death in the machine or risking death touching Rogue, so why bother touching Rogue?—and the mid-movie reveal that he’s after Rogue, not Wolverine, is only shocking because it makes no sense. Rogue traveled, probably via hitchhiking, all the way from Louisiana or wherever it was she lived up to northernmost Canada. If Sabretooth was able to find her so easily even though she was riding in a camper with a hobo, he must have known where she was. So why did he wait to grab her until she was with Wolverine? Why not grab her when she was alone in a dive bar in the middle of South Dakota? Or even as she slipped out of the dive bar in northernmost Canada to stow away in Wolverine’s trailer, before they’d met and he was there to defend her? The twist also led to a painful dialogue exchange between Sabretooth and Magneto in which both of them speak in clipped, vague, awkwardly worded sentences solely because wording them more naturally would have given away the twist. This is most obvious when Magneto asks, “Where is the mutant now?”, solely because he can’t say “Where is she now?” because that would reveal that he was after Rogue, not Wolverine.

We get almost no character development for anyone except Wolverine, Rogue, Xavier, and Magneto, plus some tiny bits for Jean and Mystique. Cyclops and Storm are just there; they have no backstory, play next to no part in the plot, and do almost nothing of consequence. During the final battle they and Jean pretty much just get beat up until Wolverine comes in and saves them. The two villainous henchmen, Toad and Sabretooth, have no personality at all and don’t seem threatening, so the X-Men just seem pathetic for not being able to beat them. Now that I’ve watched this movie again, I understand why modern superhero movies are all three hours long: even for a solo movie, you need all that time to fit in the story, character development, and action scenes without compromising any of them.

The casting is a mixed bag. Hugh Jackman is of course brilliant as Wolverine, as are Patrick Stewart as Professor X and Ian McKellen as Magneto. Anna Paquin’s teenage Rogue is pretty good too, and I think she could’ve been great if they’d done more with her character. Rebecca Romijn as Mystique is surprisingly good too. I always thought she looked the part more than Jennifer Lawrence, but she also acts it well, getting across the simple emotions she needs to with facial expressions and sparse dialogue. James Marsden’s Cyclops is disappointing. He doesn’t have the presence to stand up to Hugh Jackman, so Cyclops and Wolverine’s arguments always seem one-sided. He also gets essentially zero character development, which doesn’t help anything. Same deal for Storm, except I feel like Halle Berry is even less invested in her role than James Marsden is in his, based on how she delivers her lines. Also, movie Storm is a lot more jumpy and screamy than comics Storm. There’s a scene where she’s standing in the infirmary by Senator Kelly’s bedside as he’s dying, and he asks to hold her hand. She takes his hand, and then he turns into water and dissolves, and Storm screams and flips out and runs out of the room, which I don’t see comics Storm doing in the same situation. Famke Janssen’s Jean Grey is okay, but we don’t get much backstory on her either, and she and Cyclops don’t really have any chemistry. (Neither do she and Wolverine, though, so both sides of that love triangle are duds.)

Despite all the marks against it, there are still some pretty great things in this movie. The performances of Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, and Ian McKellen, of course. The movie does do a good job introducing their three characters and letting us know what they’re all about. I also liked the dynamic between Rogue and Wolverine a lot, and I would’ve liked to see more of them paired up in the second movie. The score was surprisingly good, too: it’s grand and orchestral in the style of John Williams, but there’s a bit of a modern edge to it, which not only fits the tone of the movie very well but also fits the X-Men themselves, who are a classic superhero team in a lot of ways but also innovated in others.

X2: X-Men United

Unlike the first movie, I found X2 to hold up very well. It has its flaws: Cyclops and Storm still do almost nothing and get no further development; they throw in two-minute cameos of lamer versions of several classic X-Men for no reason; the final battle drags on for too long; the way they introduce Phoenix is clumsy. But on balance I thought X2 had more good stuff and less bad stuff than the first movie did.

X2 makes up for all the good action scenes the first movie didn’t have by being stuffed with good action scenes: Nightcrawler attacking the White House; Wolverine cutting through a squad of commandos to defend the mansion; Magneto breaking out of his prison and later holding up the entire Blackbird; Pyro blowing up police cars with his fire powers. It also has good character development. Wolverine learns more about his past. Iceman admits to his family that he’s a mutant, and while they try to be tolerant, they certainly aren’t happy about it. Stryker, the villain, whose son was a mutant that Xavier tried to help, sinks to depths that shake even the optimistic Professor X. While I wouldn’t trade the sunny, fun-loving comics version of Nightcrawler for this movie’s version, he fits in to the dark, miserable, grave world these movies have established while still feeling like Nightcrawler, and the way he uses his powers is interesting and works well with the practical effects that this movie still mostly uses. Alongside Wolverine and Magneto, he’s one of the more successful translations of an X-Men character to the screen that these two movies have pulled off.

Speaking of the practical effects, while there’s still something off about some of the fight scenes—particularly the Wolverine and Lady Deathstrike battle—most of them work a lot better than they did in the first movie. The Nightcrawler fight at the beginning of the movie, for instance, and another scene during the final battle where Mystique fights off a bunch of guards, both have impact, speed, and a lack of cheesy wire work. The Wolverine fight in the mansion was so visceral and brutal that if you threw some blood in it, it could have been in Logan. This movie also uses more CGI than the first movie did, to good effect: the scene outside Bobby Drake’s parents’ house where Pyro blows up a bunch of police cars uses a great blend of CGI to depict the fireballs and practical effects to show the cars exploding. Some of the action scenes in this movie even start to surpass the MCU, because the practical effects make them feel more grounded and real.

I don’t have a lot to say about this one; it’s a good movie, and even though some of the social commentary is stupidly on the nose (like the famous line “Have you tried not being a mutant?” that Iceman’s mom says to him), it makes its point without being too annoying about it.

X3: The Last Stand

I remember thinking this was the worst thing ever put on film the first time I saw it, but rewatching it, it’s actually not as bad as I remembered. It’s still terrible, but not as bad as I remembered; the plot is full of holes, there are a bunch of unnecessary deaths, several things that I just found dumb, a lot of comics references shoehorned in badly, and the pacing is weird, but at least the characters seem mostly in character with the previous movies, and I could always follow what was going on in the plot, which for me put it above Suicide Squad. I liked some of the new characters and actors it introduced, like Kelsey Grammer’s Beast and Ellen Page’s Kitty Pryde. Some of the action scenes were pretty cool, although there was nothing as visceral as Wolverine trashing those soldiers in the mansion from X2.

Broadly, the major problems with this movie come from trying to do too much in too little running time. They’re trying to do a version of the Dark Phoenix Saga, with Jean coming back to life, killing Scott and the professor, trying to hump Logan, and going over to Magneto’s side. They’re also trying to do a version of the mutant cure storyline. I haven’t read this story in the comics but in the animated series the mutant cure was a plot by Apocalypse to prey on desperate mutants. Weirdly, it being a plot by an evil blue immortal being who was worshiped as a god in ancient Egypt feels more realistic than what this movie does with it: in this movie, it really works and you can just shoot a mutant with a dart and they’ll lose their powers. They’re also trying to introduce a new team of X-Men and a bunch of new villains, while explaining why the old X-Men and old villains aren’t around anymore, and have enough action scenes to keep everyone satisfied. They do all of these things poorly; for the most part, the plot mechanics make sense and fit together, but because it’s all squeezed together so much, none of it really has emotional impact or meaning. They’re just checking boxes.

It reminds me a little of The Dark Knight Rises. That movie was also too ambitious, large scale, and grandiose with its plot. In that movie, this also introduced various plot holes and things that did not seem to be given their proper due as major events. Some of the ones that people complain about in The Dark Knight Rises, I actually don’t care about. (How did Batman get from the middle of the Gobi Desert back to Gotham after he climbed out of the pit? Who cares, he’s the goddamn Batman!) But there are definitely some plot threads in that movie, like every cop in Gotham being locked in the sewer for six months, that feel weird, cursory, and not well enough explored or set up. And a lot of X3 feels similar.

The specific things I disliked about this movie mostly come in two flavors. There are plot holes, continuity breaks with previous movies, and things I just thought were stupid—things that make this movie bad even if you’ve only watched X-Men, X2, and this, and know nothing about the comics. Then there are things that were changed from the comics, in my opinion for the worse.

In column A we have the following offenses:

• Mystique: “I don’t respond to my slave name”. For anyone who thought “Have you tried not being a mutant?” was too subtle.
• I get why Phoenix killed Professor X—he was the one keeping her sealed away. Why did she kill Scott? Given that she killed Scott, why did she try to have sex with Logan instead of kill him too? (Out of universe, the reason is that James Marsden left the movie in the middle to be in Superman Returns as some guy who’s not Superman or Lex Luthor, and is therefore not important. Not that Cyclops was ever that important to these movies.)
• Making the mutant cure a dart gun that you can just shoot someone with and it immediately rewrites their DNA to take away their powers with no ill effect breaks even my suspension of disbelief.
• There was no reason for Angel to be in the movie. He doesn’t do anything. He only talks to the X-Men once. He goes to live at the mansion, but he doesn’t actually join the team; he just shows up at the final battle to save his father.
• Magneto shows up at a community meeting of mutants and just recruits them all to be soldiers. One of these mutants conveniently has the power of detecting mutants and their power levels from a distance, and also super speed.
• They introduce a class system for mutant power levels with no explanation. Its only purpose is telling us how powerful Phoenix is. We don’t need this; we can see how powerful Phoenix is. If the reveal of Phoenix’s power were going to be pushed to the end of the movie, I can see why this foreshadowing would be useful, but we’ve already seen a small demonstration from when she was a child by this point, and we see a bigger one about 15 minutes after this when she kills Professor X and raises her house into the air.
• Personally, I hate it when a character is a “good girl” and then develops a split “bad girl” personality. It’s hard to explain why I hate it in general, I just find it boring. It’s akin to the “all girls want to date bad boys” maxim, which denies the complexity of real people’s tastes and motives, ignores the variety of relationship dynamics that exist in real life, and has been done to death in fiction. In this specific case, I hate that it implies Jean had complete contempt for everything and everyone in her old life except for “bad boy” Wolverine, who spoke to her “bad girl” side, and was just suppressing a gag reflex as she went along with Professor X’s and Cyclops’s dumb square life of science and teaching and trying to help mutants until Professor X’s mental manipulation wore off and she was able to go have sex with Wolverine and join up with Magneto’s evil crusade. It makes her look like a terrible person in retrospect, and it invalidates every emotional scene we had between Jean and Scott, including the ones where Scott was mourning her earlier in this movie.
• There’s a subplot about Iceman cheating on Rogue with Kitty Pryde. It comes straight out of nowhere. Rogue acts like the hysterical woman characters from 1950’s TV who only care about holding on to their man and keeping his eyes off that hussy down the street. Kitty just goes along with it, even though the whole school knows Rogue and Iceman are together. In the end it’s entirely meaningless because Rogue gets the cure and she and Iceman get back together. It does lead to one good scene: Rogue decides to sneak out and get the mutant cure, and runs into Wolverine as she’s leaving. Wolverine gives her a little speech about responsibility and being able to make her own choices, and tells her to make sure that whatever she does, she does for herself, and not for some guy. Unfortunately the conclusion of the subplot undercuts this scene, because it looks like Rogue really did just do it for some guy who was going to cheat on her if she couldn’t have sex with him, and as soon as they could have sex he immediately ran back to her. It also makes Iceman look like an asshole; he was going to ditch her unless they could have sex and go shack up with Kitty, but as soon as she caves to his desires and gets the cure so they can have sex, he’s right back with her.
• Magneto abandoning Mystique after she got shot with the cure dart felt out of character. Mystique betraying Magneto after that felt even more out of character. The president actually says “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” when we find out she betrayed him.
• So the cure is a dart that you can inject into mutants, but it also comes from this kid who’s a mutant that can cancel the powers of other mutants (kind of like Mikan from Gakuen Alice or Touma from A Certain Scientific Railgun). It wasn’t clear what the connection between these two is. In the final battle, Magneto is trying to kill the kid. (At least, I assume he’s trying to kill him, since he sends Juggernaut to plow through the walls to get at him.) I don’t understand why. Would killing the kid magically make the cure darts stop working? Was he just planning to take the kid and do research on him to try and figure out how to reverse the cure? Where did he think he would be able to do that after declaring war on humanity on national television and tearing the Golden Gate Bridge in half so he could transport his army to Alcatraz?
• They have a mostly new X-Men team for the final battle—Wolverine (who is the leader, of course), Storm, Beast, Iceman, Colossus, and Kitty Pryde. They didn’t really set them up at all except for a single sequence in the Danger Room at the beginning. Colossus only has one line in the entire movie and does nothing of consequence in the final battle.
• After Jean goes full evil and joins Magneto, she spends the entire final battle just standing there next to him and doing nothing while the other mutants on their side get shot with cure darts, even though she’s powerful enough to wipe out the entire force defending the island, tear apart their plastic cure dart guns, tear open the prison, and take or kill the kid all by herself. At the very end, she decides for no reason to start fighting, and then Wolverine kills her.
• What happened to Nightcrawler? He’s just not here anymore.

In the much shorter column B:

• Storm sucks. The scene where Professor X tells her that she’s going to be his successor is the only time she does anything that doesn’t suck. It’s undercut when you realize that Jean is dead and Xavier has decided Scott was too broken by her death to take over, making Storm the only choice left. As in the previous two movies, she hardly does anything, has no character building moments, no backstory, and gets beat up in every fight without achieving anything. Unlike the comics, Wolverine has zero respect for her, ignores her orders in the Danger Room at the beginning, and just assumes leadership of the new X-Men team before the final battle, even making the inspirational speech.
• Juggernaut looks ridiculous and we never see him do anything cool or intimidating. The sequence where Kitty runs ahead of him in the Alcatraz lab is pretty cool, but it would have been better if I actually felt like he was dangerous and not just some idiot who says “I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!”
• Kitty has no personality. She cries over Professor X’s death, but that’s about it.
• Colossus isn’t Russian. What’s up with that?

Even though I didn’t like X-Men nearly as much on rewatch as I thought I would, this was by far the worst of the original three movies.

Conclusion

These three movies were important steps for bringing comic books movies to where they are today, but they achieved it by giving up a lot of what makes the comics fun. They made a habit of suppressing or drastically re-envisioning anything from the comics that felt too colorful or not grounded enough. The black leather costumes and the “yellow spandex” joke are the most obvious examples, but there are a lot of other changes in the movies that I attribute to this attitude. This is probably why Colossus isn’t Russian (Deadpool, which had a comedic tone, was allowed to go back on that), and it probably contributed to us losing Storm’s and Cyclops’s backstories, which are very comic booky and weird, but work because of how they help us understand them as characters. It’s definitely why the movies’ main plotlines could never go outside the “mutants as metaphor for oppressed groups” narrative.

Looking back, it seems like the semi-grounded, semi-dark tone this Fox X-Men trilogy established was adopted by other studios as the generic “superhero movie” feel. The Sony Spider-Man movies are a little more colorful, but they have a similar tone and similar mopey plot points. The Ang Lee Hulk movie, aside from its weird habit of splitting the screen into panels, also adopts this kind of ponderous tone. Even Iron Man feels like it’s transitioning between this tone and what the MCU would become; it’s a lot more colorful and fun and less mopey than any of these X-Men movies, but it’s still more grounded than what we would get even a few movies later with Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger. The trailer for Sony’s Venom movie was interesting because the tone looks less like the MCU or the DCEU and more like this generic early 2000’s grounded feel. That could turn out good, like X2, or not so good, like the other two, but it’s definitely different from what Marvel and DC are doing nowadays. (Personally I’m a bit of an optimist on Venom. It’s not something I’m hugely looking forward to, but it doesn’t look terrible so far.)

There is, however, one corner of the MCU that I’ve realized has a tone much closer to these early X-Men movies: the Netflix shows. Luke Cage is a little more stylish and colorful, but Daredevil and Jessica Jones feel like these movies with better dialogue, and Iron Fist could practically have been directed by Bryan Singer. That’s part of its problem, I think: like Captain America and Thor, there’s nothing about the character of Iron Fist that lends itself to being grounded. The show was constantly dancing around essential parts of Iron Fist’s backstory, like how he received his powers in a wrestling match with a dragon, that didn’t seem grounded enough. It was trying so hard to be Daredevil that it ignored the kind of gonzo grindhouse kung fu movie feel that could have made an Iron Fist show fun to watch, the way Luke Cage plays on blaxploitation film tropes.