The memory cheats. John Nathan-Turner, the flamboyant producer of Doctor Who throughout the Eighties infamously reminded Whovians of the fragmentary and deceitful nature of the act of remembering. Today I was convinced that I saw X-Men: The Last Stand on my birthday in 2007. This was the day John "Smeato" Smeaton, an asthmatic baggage handler on a fly fag break, "set aboot" terrorists at Glasgow Airport.
But that can't be. The film came out the previous year. I've conflated the two dates already, only a dozen years later.
There were a number of things I liked about the film- Kelsey Grammer's professorial Beast- and things of course that were ludicrous- exhibit A being Vinny Jones's campy turn as Juggernaut. The transfiguration of Jean Grey into a voracious, psionic demon-goddess became subsumed, really, as part of the tragedy of Hugh Jackman's Wolverine. I didn't mind that quite so much, since that performance is iconic ( like Chris Evans's Cap). But I did feel annoyed with the deaths of Xavier and Cyclops.
The film has been revised in fan memory as a "diminished sequel". But how could the tragedy of Jean Grey really be told satisfactorily over three movies? If we confine it only to the Claremont-Byrne years of the comic, it played out over three years and some two dozen comics- beginning with the Magneto/Savage Land sequence through the Proteus conflict and the Hellfire Club gambit, to the climax on the Moon.
So significant and emotionally impacting was the storyline that it was revisited very quickly with Dark Storm, then Kitty's Fairy Tale and her imposture in the second Cockrum run.
The "Phoenix Rising" trope was revisited in the Paul Smith era and in the pages of the Teen Titans team-up; and then again with Rachel Summers. Not forgetting the launch of X-Factor where Kurt Busiek supplied the idea for a typical Byrne "Everything You Know is Wrong" coup.
I suppose we could even include the mischievous debut of Firebird in the early 80s and definitely the travails of Raven in the Titans as responses to the resonance of Jean Grey's story.
And so here we are again, as I said, a dozen years later, with Dark Phoenix. I went to see it at the Moray Playhouse last Sunday afternoon and honestly, it was like meeting up with old pals.
Of course, crucially there was no Logan- and I still haven't seen Jackman's last hurrah, the final farewell of the Christopher Reeve of X-actors. Nor did any version of the Singer-Verse X-Men appear: Kitty, Colossus, Iceman or Rogue.
Archangel and Psylocke from 2016's X-Men: Apocalypse were also absent although happily, the laconic Quicksilver did play a part ( a hero confusingly deceased in the MCU). A Nightcrawler in the spirit of Alan Cumming was also featured and rather wonderfully, there was a cameo for Dazzler.
Yet again, Storm was devalued- so frustrating- but there were significant roles for Hank McCoy, combining the feral and the intellectual and for Fassbinder's majestic Magneto. I felt, in fact, that this film was influenced more by mid-Eighties elements of the mutant saga. The film also introduced Selene but one who was more like the Morlock Callisto than Claremont's immortal psychic vampire.
The theme of Jean Grey's paternal abandonment is new- or at least it's not part of the Claremont characterisation with which I'm familiar. Jean's killing of a team-mate (which was always more like the What If iteration) now saw Mystique as victim rather than Cyclops.
The other antagonists in the film were aliens who resembled Skrulls or even Dire Wraiths. They were D'Bari- named after the "asparagus people" destroyed by Dark Phoenix's cosmic hunger in the comics but presented here with vague motivation and with no connection to the previous First Class films.
For all the over-familiarity of the plot and the brute force of its excessive destruction, however, Dark Phoenix wasn't really as bad as has been made out. I came out of it in a better mood than I did after the bloated and plaintive Endgame.
In upcoming posts, I might talk about the Pulitzer prize-winning The Overstory and Muhammed Khan's Kick The Moon. I'm also reading some old Gil Kane and Steve Ditko comics too. And Thongor of Lost Lemuria. But before that, our first school Comic Con is launched this coming Thursday. Look out for that next time.
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