Friday, May 23, 2014

Continuity or Quality?






So with X-Men: Days of Future Past about to hit the theaters, it's time to visit a topic that has become more and more of big deal as we've gotten more and more comic book movies.  The question is about continuity.  In an interview here, director Bryan Singer has basically thrown continuity under the bus in the name of good storytelling.  Anyone who has seen all or most of the X-Men and X-Men related films knows of the timeline inconsistencies that plague them, not just with the source material but with the film themselves.  Throughout the entire series, details and plot points have been introduced that would later be contradicted.  Whether it's when Prof. X met Magneto, the age of Moira McTaggert, or Bolivar Trask going from being a bald black guy in the 2000s (played by Bill Duke) to a short white guy (played by Peter Dinklage) in the 1970s, the series will have you repeatedly saying 'wait a minute...' to yourself when you see a certain character or hear a certain line. This is the fifth X-Men film and the seventh film set in the X-Men film universe; there are bound to be some loose ends here or there that don't get completely tied down.  And based on early reviews I'm reading from fans and critics, they don't particularly care.  Here are a few telling quotes from film reviews:

USA Today:  "It's a labyrinthine dance that may or may not line up with every detail in past X-Men sagas. But don't worry about fitting all the pieces together. too hard to Just sit back and enjoy."

 I do think that these things are not raising a huge stink because they for the most part minor details, throwaway lines from the first movie or 30 second appearances in X: Men - the Last Stand, which we'd all like to forget about.  If Cyclops were still alive in the future after getting disintegrated in Last Stand that would be a different matter, but that's not what they did.  It looks to me like people are more concerned with just having a good product on the screen in front of them than with whether or not every single i is dotted and every t is crossed.  And for the most part, it's not really a big deal.  Because let's be real, the source material isn't a model of consistency either. 

No comments:

Post a Comment