by Alan Rapp on March 10, 2020
in Comics
Giant-Size X-Men: Jean Grey and Emma Frost #1 kicks off a series of comics from Marvel highlighting various X-Men characters and artists. Russell Dauterman does the art for this mostly silent tale involving the interesting team-up of Jean Grey and Emma Frost traveling inside Storm‘s mind to rescue their fellow X-Men who has been attacked by the Children of the Vault. Although there are cameos from other characters, the issue is devoted to Frost and Grey to stop the attack by a machine virus threatening to kill Storm in the next 30 days.
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- Title: Legion – Chapter 27
- wiki: link
Legion comes to a close with a final episode that features Kerry (Amber Midthunder) fighting time demons, Switch (Lauren Tsai) evolving into something more, David‘s (Dan Stevens) squaring off against the younger version of Farouk (Navid Negahban), Charles Xavier (Harry Lloyd) coming to an understanding with the older Farouk, and David being granted his most fervent wish for a second chance. More linear than many episodes of the series, “Chapter 27″‘s low-key tone feels a bit underwhelming as the show’s finale. That said, it wraps up the existing plot points and offers a much happier ending than any of these characters had a right to expect. Subverting expectations by making the final confrontation with the Shadow King ultimately non-confrontational allows David to grow further (although I don’t know if I accept the growth necessary in either version of Farouk to make this ending possible). Still, for what it was, Legion offered a host of memorable moments over its three seasons which ends (not unexpectedly) with a song.
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by Alan Rapp on July 30, 2019
in Comics
This version of Uncanny X-Men comes to a close with an odd issue the feels pressured to fit into larger events in the long-term scope of Marvel’s favorite mutants. Emma Frost‘s plan is revealed, which turns out to be fairly benign in making the world forget about mutants, a major supporting character is killed, and the X-Men and Hellfire Club come together to battle Robert Callahan and O.N.E.
The run of Cyclops, Wolverine, and some marginal other characters will likely only be remembered for bringing Scott Summers back to life and reincorporating him with the team. Speaking of the team, the rest of the A-List X-Men arrive suddenly to help out the mutants and offer the reunion some fans have been waiting decades for.
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- Title: Legion – Chapter 20
- wiki: link
“Why don’t we have a time traveler?”
Legion opens its Third Season not with David (Dan Stevens) but with the introduction of a time traveler who we will come to know as Switch (Lauren Tsai). Going even more psychedelic and strange in the first 20 minutes, “Chapter 20” oddly becomes more linear once its storyline becomes less so as Switch travels back in time to save David’s life and the singular point-of-view splits from her to several other characters. Most of the first-half of the episode involves Switch following clues which lead to a hippie commune and an eventual meeting with David, a man she never completely trusts. The sudden attack by Division 3 on David’s compound not only leads to Switch traveling back in time in an attempt to save his life but also forces her to chose a side in a war that, until now, she didn’t even know existed.
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- Title: X-Men: Dark Phoenix
- IMDb: link
Abandoning any further attempts to reconnect with the original timeline in Bryan Singer’s X-Men, Dark Phoenix offers Sony a second chance at the “Dark Phoenix Saga,” so thoroughly botched in X-Men: The Last Stand. Set in the early 1990s where the X-Men have gone from outcasts to national heroes, the film centers around Game of Thrones star Sophie Turner as X-Man Jean Grey struggling to deal with new powers after exposure to a cosmic entity that overwhelms her personality and breaks down walls in her mind meant to hide traumatic events.
Dark Phoenix clears the lowest bar fairly easily, it’s better than X-Men: The Last Stand. Then again, so is a lukewarm Diet Coke. While Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, and James McAvoy are all holdovers from X-Men: First Class, the film primarily focuses on Jean Grey who was only introduced in (the mostly forgettable) X-Men: Apocalypse forcing fans to think back to Famke Janssen‘s performance to have any real connection to the character. It doesn’t help that Jean’s main relationships in the film are with the bland Tye Sheridan as the boyfriend with which she shares no on-screen chemistry or Professor X (McAvoy) in full-on asshole mode for most of the film.
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