More Soap Opera than Superhero Story

turin0016

This animated installment of X-Men is just not easy to enjoy. It's unrelentingly bleak, right up to the final act. Even the art seems made for dark, dour thoughts with sharp angles everywhere and dull color (or lack thereof) palettes. The characters are variously flat, uneven, or crippled by angst. Actually, "crippled by angst" could be a title for the show's run, but more on that later. Its pace is unnecessarily slow, and a good chunk of the action sequences feel like they were shoehorned into the episodes near the end of production in an effort to give each episode something other than talking and often aimless soliloquizing.

Despite all these general flaws, the show does have some positives. The animation quality is generally rather good, and the art is well done (although I personally don't care much for the style, I can recognize that it's generally good work). Some of the English voice acting - namely Steve Blum as Wolverine - is quite good. The action sequences can be varied and interesting, but they have flaws too (did we really need to see an animation studio trying to mimic that scourge of modern-day cinema, shaky-cam, for a few scenes?). The story itself is decent enough, though it develops at a glacial speed until hitting a point where it becomes wildly transparent (which point is well before "revelations" are made). The interplay between Wolverine and Cyclops is handled pretty well, and it's refreshing to see an X-Men tale told on-screen that isn't utterly fixated on either Rogue or Jean Grey.

Back to the gripes, first and foremost is how the series rather quickly turns into "Mutant Japanese Schoolgirl and her X-Men Escorts." In fact, most of the 12 episode run consists of Cyclops angsting or Hisako upstaging the X-Men - both in the same episode if it can be managed. Granted that comics tales are loaded with this sort of thing so it's to be expected to a degree, but still it pulls the show away from X-Men's greatest strength - rather blunt social commentary interwoven with badass superheroes doing badass things. Instead we get a collection of super-chaperones dragging the uninteresting yet clumsily vital-to-the-story Hisako along, and the X-Men wind up spending much of their time clenching their fists and trying not to cry as their sorrow or indignation boil - though they do eventually fight at some point, usually after the writer seems to have momentarily run out of dialogue clichés. Not even Wolverine completely escapes this over-sensitivity, though he does provide most of the "snap out of it" moments.

Second, and more a personal issue than anything else, the whole "look" of the show just isn't very appealing. The colors are dull and dreary, which works for Batman or Spawn or other traditionally "dour" comic franchises but really doesn't mesh well with X-Men (which is essentially on the optimistic side of realist, much of the time), although I suppose it fits with the aggressively bleak attitude of this particular show. I could go on about other personal gripes with regard to the art style, mostly related to characters' body structure, but instead I'll make one point only: laughably massive breasts on very thin bodies.

Finally, there's how simply unlikeable or horribly bland several core characters are throughout the show. This is an area tougher to comment on without spoilers, but I'll just say that Cyclops was never the easiest character to like in the first place and in this show he's positively insufferable. Storm is nearly irrelevant, in combat and out. She only has the juice to attack for maybe a second each episode, then she disappears; when it comes to non-combat situations she seems to exist just to play den mother to Wolverine and Cyclops. Hisako has no depth and feels extremely forced into the story. A relatively major character is poorly portrayed as someone succumbing to tragic folly but actually comes across more as simply a blind, morally bankrupt idiot. Not even the villains and enemies are compelling or colorful (and often superhero story villains steal the show); they're basically divided into cannon fodder and infrequently appearing nuisances. Put all this together and you have a cast that's basically reduced to Wolverine as likable, Beast as acceptable, and Emma Frost as a watered-down mother figure.

In the end, the show is just not very good. Its good qualities are practically crushed beneath its more numerous bad ones, and it's just so very bleak all the way through - and it's a bleakness without the depth that makes darker franchises like Batman work so well. It's a shame, because the X-Men deserve better and the TV and movie-watching casual X-Men fans could use more stories that don't revolve around Jean Grey or Rogue.

score 4/10

turin0016 10 August 2012

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2658031/