“There was a dream that was X-Men 3…”
Sadly, before Director Bryan Singer and his writers Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris could bring it to fruition, they heard the siryn call of Superman Returns, and it was a call Singer could not refuse. (It was, after all, the movie he’d been waiting his whole life to make.)
I will defend the greatness of Superman Returns till my dying breath, but along with the warm, happy feelings it leaves me with, I am also left with a small ache for what Singer’s X-Men 3 could have been... the clues to which are littered throughout both previous films.
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Up till this point, I’ve run on the assumption that anyone reading this blog has already seen at least the first two X-Men movies, but as I’m now about to go into the plot details of those films, I’m gonna throw up a big ol’
SPOILER ALERT
just in case. If you have never seen these movies and feel like you might actually be interested in doing so, read no further. Go rent ‘em, netflix ‘em, buy the DVDs… watch, and enjoy, and then come back here for the rest of my diatribe. Go on! I’m not going anywhere.~*~*~*~
X-Men ends with a climactic battle in (and on top of) the Statue of Liberty, between the titular heroic mutants and Magneto’s misguided Brotherhood. Magneto intends to set off a radiation-emitting device that will trigger the X-factor (or mutant gene) in regular human beings, thereby making mutants no longer an oppressed minority in the world.
What he doesn’t know is that the false mutation triggered by his machine will eventually kill all the normal humans who are affected by it.
In the end, the machine is set off, but the X-Men are able to shut it down before the radiation can reach Ellis Island (where a UN summit just so happens to be taking place). Magneto is defeated. The world is safe. The heroes can return home for milk, cookies, and high-fives.
(just as soon as Wolverine heals up)
(silly Logan)
But all is not as it seems. In the Director’s Commentary for X2, Singer points to something that happens during that final sequence as a clue towards the events in the second movie.
The radiation engulfs the upper half of the statue, covering the X-Men and Magneto. Since they’re all mutants, though, it is believed no harm can come from their exposure to it.
Except…
After the machine has been shut down and everyone is coming down from the Near Miss of it all, we’re shown a brief moment with the team’s telekinetic, Jean Grey. Under the circumstances, it could be easily assumed that this is merely a shot of her reacting to the tension of the scene. A combination of fear and exhaustion, since the last third of the film has seen her using her powers in far more demanding ways than she’s ever done before.
But, what if something else is going on?
Could it be possible that the radiation has had some kind of effect on her?
X2. When next we find Jean, she and her snazzy new haircut are accompanying a group of students on a field trip to the museum.
While watching over them, she is struck by an overwhelming wave of ambient thought. Everyone in the room thinking at her all at once. Trying to push these thoughts out of her head, Jean causes all the television screens in the room to flicker, like their signal is being interrupted.
Scott (Cyclops) approaches, concerned. He mentions that "ever since Liberty Island" she's been acting different.
“My telepathy’s been off lately," she tells him. "I can’t seem to focus, I can hear everything.”
“Jean, it’s not just your telepathy. A month ago you had to concentrate just to levitate a book or a chair across a room. Now, when you have a nightmare, the entire bedroom shakes.”
Wonder what could have caused that.
Skip to halfway through the movie, when a missile is fired at the X-Men’s jet. In a display of power heretofore unseen, Jean disables the missile from the comfort of the cockpit, sending it spiraling off to explode in mid-air.
The effort manifests itself as a flame springing to life in her eyes, and is followed by a moment of confusion and uncertainty on her part. As though she is afraid of wielding so much power.
Later, when forced into confrontation with a mind-controlled Cyclops, Jean’s inner flame once against manifests. She releases a blast of energy that knocks Cyclops back into his right mind and severely damages the facility where the battle takes place…
...leading to the climactic moment of the film.
The X-Men have saved their students from the clutches of the evil Col. William Stryker. They are preparing the jet for take-off, but the controls won’t behave, due to the damage the jet received earlier (from the second missile that Jean couldn’t stop). They’re grounded, and sitting directly in the path of the now-crumbling Alkali Lake dam -- which was damaged by Jean’s earlier showdown with Cyclops (talk about a bed of your own making).
The dam bursts, the water races towards the X-jet. Jean places herself in the path of raging waters, using her new powers to hold back the torrent, while simultaneously repairing the jet and lifting it to safety.
As she finally accepts this new power she’s been given, her entire body erupts into flames, and a sort of serenity overcomes her as she drops her arms and lets the water take her.
The X-Men are safe. Jean Grey is dead.
Or is she?
The final shot of the movie has us moving over the serene waters of Alkali Lake (now a river, I suppose) as Jean’s voice repeats the monologue from the opening of the first movie. And as the music swells, we see a flaming, birdlike figure just beneath the surface of the water.
“...every few hundred millennia, evolution leaps forward.”
So… what do you think X-Men 3 was supposed to be about?
Obviously, this was all leading up to an adaptation of Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s Dark Phoenix Saga, arguably the most revered storyline in X-Men history. But how could Singer & Co. translate that space-faring epic to the screen while keeping the somewhat grounded tone of the existing movies? To my mind, it was a simple matter of evolution.
Rather than the voracious cosmic entity which possesses Jean Grey and drives her to consume worlds in the comics… or the disturbed multiple-personality that Xavier locked away in Jean's mind in an attempt to keep her from abusing her enormous gifts in Brett Ratner’s X-Men 3… the story could have been about evolution. The radiation from Magneto’s machine causes Jean to evolve far beyond any normal mutant, into something with so much devastating potential it puts the whole world at risk.
With this thought in mind, I went searching the web to find out if it had ever been revealed just what Singer’s plans for the third X-Men movie were. Surely, I wasn't the first person to connect these dots, was I?
I wasn't. To my delight, the plans for Singer's third movie had been revealed, and they were even more ambitious than I could have guessed.
I was right about one thing, though… Evolution was the key.
Here’s an excerpt from David Bentley’s blog The Geek Files (full article HERE):
Author Thomas McClean's book Mutant Cinema: The X-Men Trilogy From Comics to Screen answers some of the questions raised by fans, who have been desperate to find out what Singer and his own writers Dan Harris and Michael Dougherty had been planning for their unmade version of the third film.
Dougherty had already revealed some time ago that they had wanted to cast Sigourney Weaver as Emma Frost, a comic book psychic who would be reimagined as an empath able to control people's emotions. Some reports have suggested that Frost would have been an old flame of Xavier and would have emotionally manipulated a resurrected, unstable Jean Grey into the evil Dark Phoenix.
McLean's book adds new information:
Dougherty says the resolution of the Phoenix plot would definitely have been a major part of their version: "The main element for me was Jean coming back and learning how much power she could wield - that she just became overcome by it."
Dougherty says that many of the ideas he was considering, such as Magneto trying to use Phoenix as a weapon, ended up in the filmed version. He also says that the idea of Jean using Cyclops' power to kill herself was one they liked, though they would have made it clear that only Phoenix's body was dying. Her spirit would live on, evolving Jean past mutant and into a godlike cosmic state.
Dougherty likens it to the closing lines of Arthur C Clarke's novel 2001: A Space Odyssey in which the Star-Child that was astronaut David Bowman hovers over the Earth: "Then he waited, marshalling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something."
For more detail on the plot and character arcs (I’ll give you a hint: Cyclops doesn’t die in the first act), check out Bentley’s other blog post HERE.
So there you have it. A far more faithful adaptation of the Phoenix story, and what’s more, a somewhat risky direction to take the third film of a popular franchise. From Chris Claremont to Arthur C. Clarke. From WWII to the cosmos. Singer's X-Men films were always pushing the boundaries of what you'd expect from a comic book superhero movie. Proving that truly ambitious storytelling was not precluded by the presence of a dude with knives in his hands.
Taking this into consideration, I have no doubt he could have pulled off his vision for the third film successfully. To me, Bryan Singer is still the best thing to ever happen to comic book movies.
Here’s hoping he makes another one some day soon.
