Returning to Film?

Thank you for the comments. I'm shocked and a little humbled to have an audience.

I've moved away from Chabon a bit lately, and I've been wading through some sci fi films. This includes movies that most would consider rather "low-brow," like The Fantastic Four or the X-Men trilogy. All of these were mostly a waste of time. I find myself intrigued by the social implications of the mutant in the midst of mainstream culture, and that was probably the best part about the X-Men movies. But the flashy finale of the three was really empty for me. Jean Grey's massive power seems to come out of nowhere, and becomes an important part of the plot without really being used or explored. I probably would have spent another half hour just on her, roaming the country destroying things. She trashes the whole island in the end, and murders dozens of people, but it seems like she's too easy to kill. If she's really that powerful, why isn't she important until the third movie?

Perhaps that's what annoyed me about X-Men - the final movie concocts this whole Jean Grey thing and suddenly makes her the engine of the plot. They invent a classification system that might have been implied before, but is suddenly overt and important. Magneto knows that he's a Class 4, and he knows that Jean is a Class 5, and he knew that all along, and showed no interest in her powers in either of the previous two movies?

Several movies that I saw were surprising, though. I finally sat down and watched War of the Worlds. I was surprised at how unusual it seemed to me that Tom Cruise was shown as a bad father in the beginning of the movie, with some violent tendencies. I liked that part - it was unexpected, and it added an edge to the movie that helped make it more interesting. The ending of the movie was horrible, though. Other than the struggle to escape the tripod using the grenades, there was no epic battle between the humans and the aliens. It was a victory because of our diseases? Say what you want about Independence Day, but at least it had that element of battle and victory.

I also watched the movie Serenity. It might be easy to dismiss this one as another butt-kicking-chick movie (like The Fifth Element, Aeon Flux, Elektra, Catwoman, Tomb Raider, Dark Angel and Alias on TV, Terminator 2, Sarah Connor files now on TV, and so on), and the fact that Joss Whedon is also the Buffy the Vampire Slayer guy adds some credence to this theory. (Perhaps I could lump some Chinese martial arts movies in here, like House of Flying Daggers or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but that seems unfair and might make a nice follow-up post.) Heck, even Heroes has a killer cheerleader. But this movie is not just about a killer teenage girl. It also wants to be about a government that hides from its mistakes, and tries to control people and information.