Hacker Cinema
X-Men
2000 · Film · 104 min
Part of X-Men Collection
Directed by Bryan Singer
AdventureActionScience Fiction
Two mutants, Rogue and Wolverine, come to a private academy for their kind whose resident superhero team, the X-Men, must oppose a terrorist organization with similar powers.
7 positive11 negative37 neutralfrom 55 commenters
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58 comments on Hacker News
What work of Disney is more influential on the modern American Psyche (today, in 2026) than Ironman, X-Men or Spiderman?
Moana? Sleeping Beauty? Mickey Mouse?
The only major "American identit" film I can think of was Princess and the Frog. Maybe Big Hero 6 (at least the San Francisco half).
12 Fast and the Furious, 42 X-Men movies… yeah - drowning
I think one of these days Peter Thiel is gonna just melt away like Senator Robert Kelley in the first X-Men film. He’s just so weird and…jelly looking.
Except American movies(and entertainment in general) haven't been good for about 10 years now, it's all slop based on established IP from 20-30 years ago.
When I was a kid growing up in the post communist 90-00s, we were going nearly weekly to the cinema to watch the latest American movies: Blade, Shrek, Toy Story, The Matrix trilogy, LotR trilogy, American Pie, Batman trilogy, Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, Fast & Furious, X-Men, Spider-Man, Star Wars, Scary Movie, Rush Hour, etc
We couldn't get enough of US entertainment, while now everyone here avoids the new US releases like the plague since it's only cash grabs injected with $CURRENT_DAY identity politics, diversity box ticking based on focus group testing, resulting in sterile, predictable, zero-humor, zero-edge, zero-creativity slop that's not even worth pirating.
Americans have no idea how much soft power they lost worldwide by forcing their identity politics and ideologies in entertainment. Japanese anime and Koran movies and TV shows now run rings around the US entertainment industry.
People often consider the 2000 X-Men film to kick off the explosion of superhero films in the new millennium, and that was pre-September 11, so I’m not sure that correlation is causation here. Moreover, a lot of European artists in the early–mid 1960s remarked how superheroes were oddly prominent in American pop culture, and at that point the USA was still on top of the world and hadn’t been shamed by Vietnam.
Original Star Wars trilogy. Lord of the Rings American Psycho Total Recall (1990) Blade Runner Love Actually The Fifth Element Unbreakable Pulp Fiction Four Weddings and a Funeral Guardians of the Galaxy X-Men X-Men the Last Stand Showing my age here, but I started to lose interest in movies after the 2000s. No I do not want to watch a remake of [Blade Runner, X-Men, etc...]. Also X-Men was great, but my interest didn't stretch to Captain America and Iron Man, so the MCU was a loss for me.
I was just watching the X-Men films. I only went up to 2014, but that appears to be basically contemporary - Rogue One is from 2016 and the MCU apparently has a formal division into phases of which "phase 2" centers on 2014.
The X-Men films have the property you want, with plots and characterization included in the movie instead of relying on you to bring them with you in your mind.
(Are the later films good? They're not great, but if you watch one you'll come out with a sense that the movie had a plot, the things that happened were related to that plot, and the characters had reasons for the things they were doing. The films are quite inconsistent with each other, but they're very coherent considered individually.)
The MCU films of phase 2 have already lost it. (For context, phase 2 starts with Iron Man 3 and is mostly garbage with the exception of Winter Soldier, concluding with Ant-Man.)
My conclusion is basically just that someone at the MCU decided "we can save on the budget if we stop using writers".
Nice idea for a very niche audience.
I was wondering Since all movies have subtitles, can't this be done if you give gpt4/chatgpt the whole subtitles and ask it to identify identify the start and stop time in the above subtitles where "The President of the United States meets the X-Men, as they try to convince him to work together against the growing mutant threat". Just a thought.
> natural selection needs something to select, after all -- and where did that thing come from?
Random mutation. You can blame cosmic rays, transcription errors and a few more problems that cause random mutations.
Note that this random mutations usually cause very small changes. For example making the neck a 1% shorter or longer. In some cases, the longer neck helps to get to the food and not starve. You need a lot of 1% small changes to get a giraffe.
It's not like in the X-men movies that a mutation gives you fully formed wings.
Note that most mutations are bad, you get a 99% less efficiency eating sugar, or 50% less calcium in the bones or other very bad stuff. Or a dead cell or a crazy cell that is the seed of a cancer. So sunbathing under an X-ray lamp all day is a very bad idea.
Heck, just look at Hugh Jackman in the first X Men movie vs more recent X Men/Wolverine movies.
He's Jewish, and a Holocaust survivor. It's central to the character's backstory from nearly the beginning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto_(Marvel_Comics)
And it's in the opening scene of the first X-Men movie (2000). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI7SEIKaKwE
And is a recurring theme in others. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY2eW2cXcNg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu8g3Z2Hles
(comment cont)
> "yet there are many such cases which fit a pattern that a small percentage of humanity can run around among our minds like hackers on the internet."
As I said about X-Men films and Magneto compared to wiggling a playing card, look at X-Men films depictions of Professor Xavier and his mind control abilities. Now look at the speeches of Martin Luther, or populist politicians, or the stage presence of popular singers and entertainers, look at the crowds of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands fired up by their words, convinced by their rhetoric. Look at the effects on civilisation of preachers and religions, the Cathedrals the lifelong devotion, at the effects of silver tongued cult leaders. The visible effect on people's behaviour is enormous, visible and unmistakable. Now compare to the ide that "a small percentage of humanity can run around among our minds like hackers" and the evidence is no different to background noise; suspiciously, almost by design, no different to a story that is unprovable or undisprovable. Did the playing card wiggle, are you a true believer or have they got to you? What does it have in common with the rules of thumb I considered earlier - are hackers awesomecool and using modern buzzwords? Check. Would it be secret insider knowledge that feels superior to know? Check. What are they doing with their power, are they Jeff Bezos amassing wealth or Elon Musk trying to reach Mars or Putin trying to amass power? No, they're ... making scientists think quantum entanglement cannot communicate information and telepathy isn't real. Hmm.
Of course I can't /prove/ these things didn't happen or don't mean anything. But then the stories which can easily be disproven ("the moon is gone!") have no reason to stick around.
I still fear ghosts even though I no longer believe in ghosts. I am God-fearing even though I no longer believe in the Judeao-Christian old man in the sky I was told about from birth. Scary stories have a sticking power in the mind, and it makes sense that avoiding harm is more useful to a living creature than gaining pleasure, and false positives have small cost.
> "Thought control now regulates our minds, even our ability to think (or not think) of a topic may be influenced by these controls without our awareness."
Like the idea that there is no free will; it would mean I have no ability to change my belief in free will, so it's irrelevant if true. If thought control is regulating my mind without my awareness, none of this matters - none of what you write or what I write makes any difference to anything or anyone. I see a kind of thought control - women in abusive relationships, people in cults, people talked into believing things or not believing things - without needing telepathy involved. Why should I think that telepathy is more real than story?
> "The entanglement conjecture is not really “telepathy” by modern language it is “teleportation” and “wormholes”. Yes, I speculate to you the wormholes are in our heads, only it is information not matter which passes through."
I speculate to you that the entire Sun is not powerful enough to pull the Earth into it, and the amount of energy required to twist spacetime so two distant places are touching in a wormhole would be literally mind-blowing. But why, and how, might I have a wormhole connection to you, of any kind of entanglement or spacetime warping, when we were born so far apart and don't know each other? Why am I more likely to have a connection to your neurons than to the neurons of a nearby cat or a c-elegans parasitic worm inside a cat or to the neurons in your digestive system? You want to "burst my top-of-the-food-chain centrism" but you are prioritising humans as special and different when we are vastly outnumbered by other creatures with similar biology.
To paraphrase Tim Minchin, there are a lot of mysteries in the world. Every mystery humans have untangled or explained has turned out to be: not magic. Paranormal things retreat into the ever-smaller gaps where the unexplained still exists, like the God of the Gaps. Radioactivity stayed where it is, when we found it, we found it. The paranormal was once crashing accross the sky in Thunderclaps, then it was faeries appearing in the garden and distant reports of sightings, ... nowadays the paranormal is hiding down at 0.000000000001cm excitations in subatomic fields? Where's the telekenesis that can move mountains, where's the clairvoyance that can predict lottery numbers, where's the mind control that can read thoughts in words without torture? Nah mate, see that neuron wiggle a little? Do you believe that could happen by chance? That's the real paranormal, that is. It's a secret only those of us in the know, know, y'know? If you don't know, sorry but you're a controlled fool and hooray because that means I'm better than you in an exclusive club you can't join. Y'know like we're back being 5 again and I'm showing you the trick where you stare into a mirror until the persistance of vision effect makes you look weird and telling you that's an image of you in old age, and you're gullible if you believe and a fool if you don't.
> "I enjoy these stories about voices diagnosing illness. Some favorites"
I also enjoy those stories. Take this guy[3] where the title is "brain injury turns man into math genius" but the text of the article is "He started sketching circles made of overlapping triangles, which helped him understand the concept of pi, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter." which is middle school math for tens of millions of children around the world every year, and not genius anything. The topic says he sees complex geometric shape, but the descriptions says he sees straight lines over things. The topic says he's an aqcuired savant but the decsription says he gained an interest in math and went to college to study it. Something unusual happened but it has been hyped into a much more enticing, engaging, meme-worthy story.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-34583642
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3904192/
[3] https://www.livescience.com/45349-brain-injury-turns-man-into-math-genius.html
I happened upon a YouTube video about the Collatz Conjecture, a math problem unsolved for decades, and in the comments are people posting their proofs, enjoying puzzling over it even though they get nowhere. And there are people posting that they have a proof, understand and know the answer. It is possible that someone on the planet really does understand what nobody else does, but it is far more likely that these people have an inferiority chip on their shoulder, want to join in, want respect, or are trolling. Since there are a lot more people on Earth feeling low, excluded, or enjoying teasing others than people with world class mathematical insight. And since people with worldclass math insight about the Collatz Conjecture won't be the ones watching "introduction to the Collatz Conjecture" videos on YouTube.
Worse than that, the union of all the people who claim to have insider information about some amazing ability is enormous. Yes you are convinced by quantum entanglement wormholes, but why aren't you convinced by Royal Raymond Rice's machines? Why aren't you convinced by Hollow Earth or Flat Earth? Why aren't you convinced by the Cottingley Faeries? By Breatharianism? By Kirlean Auras, by Lovecraft's Edler Gods, by the Michael Prophecies, by ghosts as traumatic mental energy encoded in nearby rocks, by... every other thing. It's the same question as "Why do you believe in Christianity instead of Hinduism/Jainism/Shintoism/Daoism/Islam/...".
We can all write stories of things which are not real; we can't discern whether other people are telling stories or truths; there's a limited amount of truth, but an infinite amount of stories. That makes it far more likely that any given claim is story, not truth. The only way we have to separate them is to look for evidence of truth.
Rules of thumb:
Would it be really awesomecool if UFOs exist? Yes? That will bias one towards thinking they exist, and one should notice this and counterbalance away in response. It's easy to be tempted by things we want to be true.
Would it be really awesomecool if telepathy existed and also be convenient and remove some of the drudgery of life, the waiting until meeting someone before talking to them, the traveling to where they are, the limitations of words? That will double-bias one towards it because the easier way is tempting, and one should be double-suspicious of one's reason for believeing.
Would it be really awesomecool if one had insider information and knew the Truth(tm) about aliens, UFOs, the Pyramids, the Lord, when other people don't, giving the insider a feeling of superiority? That will double-bias one towards believing it, and one should be double-suspicious of their motives.
Would it be really awesomecool if one could control other people's minds, and it would tickle a power fantasy; coolness, secret knowledge, insider status, and amazing power if it was true? That will quadruple-bias one towards it and makes it even more suspicious and story-like.
And you came back to me with "you have been rooted" "sorry to burst your bubble" "you're late to the thing I knew ages ago" "there's a secret power fantasy" " {respected group} are all fools compared to {secret insider information}".
I may be late to the party, but I worried about Spontaneous Human Combustion and watched the X-Files, and looked in the sky for UFOs and feared ghost sightings and thought it was cool when reports came in of an invisible force-field blocking a car from moving in a car park, I had a subscription to the Fortean Times and couldn't help but notice how the ghost reports and paranormal reports were a tiny fraction of it, and most of it was a double-headed snake or a shadow seen at night in a remote village which maybe was a wild animal but maybe was El Chupacabra.
Time moves on. The world stays the same. Terence McKenna's talking to the mushroom didn't warn clairvoyantly warn him about dying of brain cancer, the High Altitude Active Auroral Research Project (HAAARP) which was supposed to be a front for mind control, wasn't. The YouTube videos of people hearing trumpets in the sky around the world, was a hoax. Cameras with easy access to double-exposure and out-of-focus gave way to a world where high quality smartphones are sold by the hundreds of millions every month, and BigFoot has become an expert at avoiding all of them.
The patterns of paranormal stories become clearer - they give the believer a reason to feel unique, special, superior. They compelling and tempting and cool, within the limits of their time. They are unprovable and unrepeatable physically. They are irrefutable and un-disprovable logically. Nobody talked of the Cottingley Faeries being involved in Quantum Entanglement. When you watch an X-Men film and see Magneto lift a sports stadium or a battleship and then you look at real-world claims of telekinesis where someone tries to wiggle a thread or tip over a balanced playing card, the difference is stark. When you look at things like the woman who claimed to be able to smell Parkinson's disease[1] she was asked to smell the t-shirts of 12 people and correctly sorted 6 with Parkinson's and 6 without, first time, no excuses about how the spirits weren't right or the sceptical energy changed her ability, or how it only worked when her Chakras were aligned. When people claim to have super face-recognition ability[2], tests show they actually have.
You know what happens when I read your link about the voices and "While she was abroad, and still taking the thioridazine, the voices returned. They told her that they wanted her to return to England immediately as there was something wrong with her for which she should have immediate treatment"? I get a spine tingling feeling and mild dread. A desire for something more than mundane reality, escapism, other worlds, possibilities. I also get that when reading HP Lovecraft, A Shadow over Innsmouth. It doesn't mean I believe in people who have been interbreeding with nightmarish aquatic deities to gain immortality. I have fairly clear memories of places I dreamed about, more clear memories than of some places I have actually been. I don't think that's telepresence or alternate realities because the same brain which is remembering where I have been is generating hypotheses and imagineering and storing memories of predictions so I can know what I think will happen; it's much simpler if those two things overlap than if there is clairvoyance and remote viewing involved.
Philip K. Dick saw Rome. Did you see the Red Dwarf quip where Rimmer observes that everyone who claims a past life was Alexander the Great and nobody was Alexander the Great's Chief Eunuch? Why did Philip K. Dick not observe ancient Mesopotamia, the Okavango Delta, the Inca societies, the Aboriginal Australian deserts, any of hundreds of millions of years of pre-historic Earth jungle tribes, Belgium in 1839 or West Africa in 1600BC? Why Rome? And why did the woman hearing voices hear people from Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital (which she had heard of) when she was an adult, why didn't she hear voices from former employees of The Department of Neurosurgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Utah? It follows on with "Her children were well, so she had no reason to worry about them" which makes one wonder why the voices were so clear and precise and informative but still vague enough that she had no idea what they wanted to communicate. The end of the link has "There was a group at the case conference who offered a different opinion. Their view was that, the total lack of physical signs notwithstanding, it was unlikely that a tumour of that size had had absolutely no effect on the patient. “She must have felt something,” they argued. They suggested that a funny feeling in her head had led her to fear that she had a brain tumour. That fear had led to her experience of hallucinatory voices. She may have unconsciously taken in more information about various hospitals than she realised, and this information was reproduced by her mind as part of the auditory hallucinatory experience.". If it was a common everyday experience for people to hear voices telling people new information, that would change things. But we're looking at it wondering if it's true or if it's a story and how we might tell from outside, and we have one hypothesis where she was alive for decades and remembered the address of a hospital, and another hypothesis where there is an afterlife, it interacts with the world, spirits from the other side can see into brains with the precision of a computer aided tomography scanner, can communicate with auditory hallucinations in a language the recipient understands, and - despite existing in an afterlife where they are capable of conscious thought and willful intention(?) - still think it "helps" to keep someone alive (why, in that case?).
> "Known states may be pushed through entanglement, we just don’t know how."
No, they may not be, by definition. If you take a pair of gloves, put the right hand glove in one box, the left hand glove in another, shuffle the boxes and send one to Timbuktoo, you can open your box and see a left hand glove and know the person in Timbuktoo has the right hand glove. That doesn't mean you can put the glove on and somehow poke the person in Timbuktoo.
(comment too long; cont).
The movie industry would cease to be an industry otherwise. It would become all indie movies, Cannes and the like and maybe some state sponsored propaganda. So no Spiderman or X-men for you, just movies about real life, Sweedish movies about the super rich getting marooned on an island after a storm and ending up at the mercy of the housekeeper.
> I hear a lot about comic book movies and those are getting extremely samey (or maybe they already were)
They weren't. Compare Spider-Man 2 (2004) and Batman Begins (2005). Compare X-Men (2000).
All of those had a story to tell. Recent superhero movies... not so much.
And what are X-Men the movies about? Transphobia no doubt
> Then there's "it's all remakes now"—but 1) it's not,
It really is, if by "remake" you mean all ways of leveraging existing IP. Here are the top ten box office films of 2020:
* Bad Boys for Life (sequel) * Sonic the Hedgehog (videogame) * Birds of Prey (comic book) * Dolittle (book) * The Invisible Man (book) * The Call of the Wild (book) * Onward (original) * The Croods: A New Age (sequel) * Tenet (original) * Wonder Woman 1984 (sequal, comic book)
Two originals. Now go back 20 years:
* Mission: Impossible 2 (sequel) * Gladiator (book) * Cast Away (original) * What Women Want (original) * Dinosaur (original) * How the Grinch Stole Christmas (book) * Meet the Parents (remake) * The Perfect Storm (book) * X-Men (comic book) * What Lies Beneath (original)
Four originals. Go back another 10 years:
* Ghost (original) * Home Alone (original) * Pretty Woman (original) * Dances with Wolves (book) * Total Recall (short story) * Back to the Future Part III (sequel) * Die Hard 2 (sequel) * Presumed Innocent (book) * Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (comic book) * Kindergarten Cop (original)
Five originals. Another ten years to 1980:
* The Empire Strikes Back (sequel) * 9 to 5 (original) * Stir Crazy (original) * Airplane! (original) * Any Which Way You Can (sequel) * Private Benjamin (original) * Coal Miner's Daughter (original) * Smokey and the Bandit II (sequel) * The Blue Lagoon (book) * The Blues Brothers (SNL sketch)
Five originals again. I'm going by top box-office gross here because I think that's a good proxy for what is successful. You can look at other years, but there is a very clear (but not overwhelming) trend towards movies based on familiar content. It's not clear whether studios are leading audiences or vice versa. Probably some iterative process of both.
There's also a clear trend away from dramas. I think that's because drama (and non-slapstick comedies) tend to rely heavily on specific cultural norms for their effect which makes them translate poorly. There is a very clear trend especially in the last decade or so of Hollywood focusing on movies that will also do well in China in particular.
Another point to consider is that many 4K 35mm movies, are actually upscaled from 1080p or 2K scans.
Here's a good list to check whether a film is real 4K or not.
https://www.digiraw.com/DVD-4K-Bluray-ripping-service/4K-UHD-ripping-service/the-real-or-fake-4K-list/
I've now remembered that the X-Men films from 20 years ago did look pretty good in 4K HDR. And apparently they are "real 4K". Also the 4K remaster of The Fifth Element.
Nerds conquered the Earth when IBM enabled WW2 (including the Holocaust) using automation. Neither US nor German war efforts could have scaled to that degree without them.
If you want to disagree with that example, I would also offer Star Wars, Star Trek, Steve Jobs, or the X-Men movies as examples of nerd culture becoming mainstream, dominant culture.
it hasn't fully kicked-in in the mainstream yet, but I agree that it is going in the direction you are describing, and movies map to it quite nicely.
Just take a look the change over time in looks of Wolverine from the first X-Men movie to the most recent movie featuring him (all played by the same actor btw, Hugh Jackman). Back then, even though he was obviously fit and muscular, he had a physique that was fairly easily attainable by an average male without sacrificing much. Over time, it got to the point that there is no way an average male would be able to gain such physique without being obsessively controlling with the nutrition and spending all of the free time outside of work at the gym.
Entertainment. I guarantee anybody in your average household is a fan of something Disney outright bought the rights to. Whether its Marvel (if I hear about another reboot of X-Men or another Avengers movie imma pull my hair, OTOH I did like Guardians... Yikes even I am falling for it!) then theres Star Wars which has a huge following of people from all ages. The typical Disney public domain rip offs as well. The insane amount of music they own the rights to.
Here in Florida its scary how much power Disney has. They also own the media to a point and you find it hard to see anybody speak badly of them within the media. The amount of things I see covered up that never winds up in the media genuinely scares me. How is it possible the media keeps specific things quiet for Disney.
Ken Loach said this of superhero films: "They're made as commodities like hamburgers, and it's not about communicating, and it's not about sharing our imagination."
Superhero films are just a genre, like any other. It's a constraint that lets you better express other themes or ideas.
Think about the best superhero films vs the worst ones. The good ones were all about something, not just people running around in costumes. And all the bad ones were just people running around in costumes.
Nolan Batman: does power make right? (all) who has the right the enforce justice? (bb and dkr) does peace by force breed a worse evil? (dk) how far can you push people before they embrace their darker haves? (dk and dkr)
Captain America: what is patriotism? (all) can you trust authority? (WS) the risks of concentrating power (WS) is rehabilitation viable (WS and CW) is safety more important than liberty? (CW)
Wonder Woman: is it better to be a part of society or apart from it? is the world worth saving? do woman have the power to shape the world?
Captain Marvel: can a woman succeed in a hero role without a male romantic/sexual interest to feminize her? also, the power of propaganda to literally shape how we view others (and especially, "The Other")
Black Panther: can black culture be identified with modernity and success? what is the role of tradition and culture in modern society? does our true power come from external sources or from within?
Spiderman (HC, FFH, IS): how much would the events of the Avengers films actually affect daily life? (HC, FFH) what are the consequences of casual implementation of government policy? (HC) what does it mean to be a superhero? (IS) what is identity (IS) how much of life is driven by deception (FFH)?
X-Men: what does it mean to be an outsider/The Other? (1, 2) can The Other become part of society (2, FC, DOFP)? Contrast with the universally derided 3, Apocalypse, and DP, which don't appear to have any driving themes.
Aquaman: can man and nature exist together in a non-destructive state? can mankind save itself?
Joker: what is sanity? how thin is the line between thought and action? does inequality justify class-based warfare? does abuse justify retribution?
Contrast with the DC Justice League ensemble films, which don't have any themes. They just have people in costumes stand around a fight CGI villains. Snyder's Superman films have a concept (what if Superman killed?) but no themes (since they backed away from actually exploring any of the religious themes likening Superman to Jesus).
For those of you who haven't had to suffer through Ken Loach's works: they're all pretentious, insufferable dramas that claim to be about something. But they're trying so hard that they have to hit you over the head over and over and over again so that you know that they're supposed to be about something. Because if his works didn't explicitly tell you they were about something you wouldn't know from the play/show/movie that it was anything deeper than the poorly directed, poorly acted crap in front of you.
Disclaimer: never heard of the book before today and will never read it (no longer in the Y segment of the YA audience). I'm basing my opinion on the info in the article and similar issues in the past.
> racial stereotypes and careless borrowing from other cultural traditions
It's time to accept we live in a world where you can't "win". Someone will be offended no matter what you do. First thing that popped in my head was if Dune would have still had a chance in today's world where each generation was raised with the increasing expectation that all opinions are equal and maybe their's is a little more equal.
The quote above disqualifies 95% of Hollywood movies. Russian/Chinese hackers? Arab terrorists? Damsel in distress? "Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist" guy with tall blonde assistant? Mutants with superpowers being discriminated against?
I guess this backlash comes from people wanting to think they're changing society but don't bother picking their fights, they just join one that seems easy.
> a false oppression narrative that equates having legitimately dangerous magical powers that kill people with being an oppressed minority
Same person probably kept quiet when X-Men was pushing the narrative in order to protect their social media standing. The hypocrisy of going only after the "easy target" and for the wrong reasons undermines whatever point one might try to make.
That's rather questionable assertion. Many people would not consider anything that's made by a "DJ" to be music, let alone high-brow one.
It also might be that you have only now discovered that there is something better than beyonces and x-men movies. That doesn't mean that there weren't anything good before, just that you haven't seen it.
The real joke of 'seacouver' is the an old adage for filming TV in Canada: Film in Vancouver, but never admit so in the script. If you want to tap the US market (who doesn't?) then the story cannot ever be set outside the US. The few shows that did (The Crow series etc) died quick deaths. X-Men went out on a limb by repeatedly saying Wolverine lived in Canada (Rouge finds him there). That was a risk. Everyone assumed they would have put him in Alaska. X-Files set a short arc on a train heading to Vancouver, but even there the bad guys were Japanese. None of the main story could ever happen in Canada.
Sell also Scrubs, filmed in LA but set in "San Frangeles" although never admitted in the script. They wanted to avoid the LA/SF/NY trend of mentioning place names and expecting the whole world to know what you are talking about. For the longest time I thought scrubs was set in Florida.
Comcast just wants to be hated more by consumers... I mean Disney owns Marvel and as fan they need to control/movie rights to X-men, Deadpool, etc. I’d love to see a Wolverine vs. Hulk type of movie.
There are plenty of examples.
This is one of the reasons why I actually like the X-Men movies a lot (at least the 1st ones), while I hate most superhero movies. I find the character of Magneto, with his backstory and his relationship with Xavier really interesting.
I've idly wondered how you could interpret all the mutations in X-Men, but I don't know enough about the families or inheritance to make any reasonable guesses (I've seen a few cartoons and movies and that's about it). I know mutants generally have mutant kids but don't the powers differ? Which doesn't make much sense and I can't retcon it.
I have noticed, however, that in _My Little Pony_ (which I've finally gotten around to watching), it seems like earth/pegasus/unicorn traits are not races or subspecies analogous to human races but instead likely follow a polytomous liability threshold pattern. Why? Because we see the Cakes, two earth ponies, manage to have a pair of pegasus and unicorn fraternal twins, and when queried, mention they have some pegasus/unicorn ancestry. Since the pony type is mutually exclusive (we never see any pony who is both pegasus and unicorn, aside from the alicorns who are special magically-created cases), I don't know of any kind of common Mendelian trait pattern which would give a single type, normally breed true, and allow two earth pony parents with mixed ancestry to have kids who are both unicorns and pegasi (one non-earth-pony offspring would be fine as it would simply indicate a recessive discrete trait, but two different others? I don't see how that works unless you postulate some sort of multi-locus Mendelian trait with dominance of earth trait by both unicorn and pegasus, I guess?). Whereas if it's polytomous liability threshold, then that would be possible albeit unlikely, since they could inherit different fractions of ancestry and get pushed across different type thresholds.
Commercially successful but mediocre. Dialog in X-Men is still widely mocked (Whedon and Singer), X-Men 3 was horrible, Abrams has never made a great movie (getting the Trek and Wars franchises is a lot of help). I find very little about what Whedon writes believable (maybe that's why he does superhero movies). It's all lowest common denominator snark so they can make a billion dollars.
Not sure why am going after you on this, but surely there are better examples than those guys.
Everyone's definition of "good movies" differs, and that's excellent. I, for one, consider the average MCU movie to be a step above even very good movies like Logan and some of the recent X-Men titles.
From a geek standpoint, I can't wait for these universes to be merged.
The X-Men franchise is the 7th highest grossing movie franchise of all time, bringing in almost 5 billion USD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films. Add that to the 13.5 billion for the Marvel Cinematic Universe and you can see how valuable this can be.
I suspect that’s part of it but you don’t spend billions of dollars just to make a few X-men movies.
Because I watch too many X-Men movies
They're better at keeping them under wraps. Check out the allegations against Brian Singer, director of the X Men films.
> To have countries not repeat mistakes like this would need a new approach?
The old approach is the best approach. Novels and movies are a good way of passing this information in a way that appeals to our intelligence and to our feelings.
And I'm not only talking about "Schindler's List", but also on the topics in X-Men commercial movies.
What we can't experience ourselves, we can learn it from books and movies. Oral history did that for millennia, and it survived in myths and religion even beyond it was intended. Each time you recommend a good book that teaches a lesson, you are part of that chain of shared knowledge.
Adapt? Really? It doesn't seem so. They are in their own world, and don't care.
But no wonder when you read about the crazy head of Sony Pictures, the woman that got kicked because of the scandals that got made public (emails leaked). For example we can "thank" her for that the Steve Jobs movie lost the The Social Network director and is now such a boring piece of movie.
We don't need hundreds of super hero movies, such a mass is stupid. Where are the funny movies, the action movies, the adventure movies? We want less CGI and more real action, or CGI looking like real action.
We want movies not boring hour long series, we have no time to waste hours for a stretched story arc.
The Accountant, (second half of) Bourne 2016, Jack Reacher 2, Mission Impossible Rogue Nation ... were good movies. But it gets harder and harder to find a few movies per year that are watchable. The last two X-Men movies were so bad, so many CGI effects, so dark, so little content that made the previous X-Men movies great. Were are the Die Hard 1-2, Air Force One, first three Tom Clancy movies of this decade - right, directors and script writers forgot how to pace a movie, as constant action is just wrong, you need intense action then calm situations and then action again and a bit humour does't hurt (something almost completely forgotten). I just saw a 1968 action movie and it was so much better (Steven Spielberg mentioned it's his favourite movie he sees up to), this decades Hollywood is in a sad state.
The fantasy mutants in the X-Men movies are "specially abled". Real people with actual disabilities are not.
Fucking pissed me off to the max, actually. This week, they did X-Men lenses and REMOVED the face swap and picture swap features for the entire day. If I wanted to use lenses, it had to be X-Men for the whole day. What PM green-lit that shitty decision?
I closed Snapchat and didn't use it for the entire day. I'm boycotting the X-Men movie out of protest.
I was thinking X-Men. In the last movie, didn't they have robots to detect mutants underground? LOL.
My family was always a bit mystified with my preoccupation with comic books when I was younger. I always gravitated toward the Marvel characters back then. It's incredibly gratifying to see how popular the movies, based on my childhood heroes (Iron Man, the Avengers), have become. Of course the X Men and Spiderman franchises have done well, it's good to see the other parts do well. I do not have much hope for the Fantastic Four reboot, however.
Because of this, Marvel has started to phase out entire classifications of characters from the comic mainstream. For example, mutants (read: X-Men) are losing favor to Inhumans, a similar group of characters.
The Fantastic Four series, one of the longest running in comics, is ending shortly. Speculation is that it's because of Fox's ownership of the Fantastic Four film rights.
It's a slightly strong-arm tactic, but also in the best interest of Marvel's bottom line. Why publish comic books with characters that appear in movies that you don't own.
Had Sony not been hacked, they would likely still control Spider-Man.
I think the first Mortal Combat movie did a lot to make room for the first X-Men movie.
(both have a lot more necessary digital effects and fantasy elements than the other comic book movies that were being produced at that time)
The Doom movie was only mostly taken seriously, but it made a real attempt at fleshing out a story rooted in the game, and at least wasn't hugely hindered by a limited budget.
Hilarious. As a comic fan as a kid, I always wanted to see my X-men, Avengers, Stark, et. al. on the big screen. I had no idea how nightmarish it would turn out. A lot of it has to do with growing up, but as I sit with my kids through these movies I can't help but think: Every one of these movies is nothing but a goddamned Mighty Morphin Power Rangers episode.
Try to actually think about it. What movies fit that formula?
Iron man - no, an arrogant man built his own powers Thor - no, an entitled boy temporarily had to cope with the absence of his powers to earn them back The Hulk - no, he is not a great wizard, he is trying to cure himself Captain America - you could make an argument for it, but no, he auditioned for his powers Batman - no Guardians of the Galaxy - no Spider-man - OK, especially in "The Amazing Spider-man" they played the destiny card Superman - sort-of, but he grew up with his powers Green Lantern - yes Daredevil - sort-of, but his wizards power is "not actually blind" X-men - sort of, but their powers are a civil rights race analogy
Most comic book movies do not fit the boy-who-thinks-he-has-nothing-is-actually-a-great-wizard formula and those that do tend to be less successful.
I'm not into comics but still saw The Avengers anyway and thought it was... OK? It passed the time on a flight but I honestly don't understand the excitement over it. I actually found the X-Men movies far more interesting because they deal with topics like prejudice, segregation, etc., while still having the explosions and action pieces you expect from a summer blockbuster.
Edit: and the recent Batman trilogy. Untouchable by comparison.
I'm predicting an entire X-men reboot done more in the style of the Avengers movies. To date, the effects, casting and story for the X-men movies, while fine for the time, have been a big downgrade from the entire Avengers line-up.
> hype and fan expectations make Avengers 2 an inevitable let-down
I'm hoping it isn't. The second Captain America movie was a huge upgrade over the first IMHO, and I thought Thor 2 was at least as good as the first one. The Iron Man movies have been relatively good as well (sure they're going down a bit, but they're at least entertaining).
If the 80s were the action star decade, the 2010s are the Marvel movie decade.
Well even in the screenshots it says you can go pee in the first few minutes of X-Men because it is "just silent exposition".
Now I haven't seen the movie, but that doesn't sound unimportant...
Xavier and Magneto were a direct allegory to MLK Jr. vs Malcolm X, and general 1960's American racial issues (early comic books involved mutants getting lynched). This was the direct intention of the original writers way back in 60's when it was first written.
Interestingly, the recent X-Men movies don't generally fall into the SFC archetype, at least no more than is required by the nature of the X-Men. Most of the on-screen characters are just "shoots X out of their Y" - Storm, Cyclops, Pyro, Iceman, etc. Of the 3 characters of any gender with any depth at all (Wolverine, Magneto, Rogue), the female is definitely not an SFC.
I don't understand what you are saying. Do you mean while Storm is "strong", she has no depth, whereas male X-Men character are both strong and having depth? Or what is the problem (apart from judging society by a Hollywood movie about superheroes)?
I used to think all the fuss about women being treated differently was in large part an exaggeration in this day and age. But then a few months ago I woke up from a dream vision of Storm (from the X-Men movies) being 'strong'. Weird because I've never even seen the movies. But the "strength" was forced and farcical in the absence of actual depth of character.
What struck me was that that was a fairly subtle observation, nevermind examples of e.g. discrimination that is much more obvious. So that vision raised the question of what else had eluded my perception, and made clear that there is still a lot of progress to be made.
One of the issues is that there is no such thing as a real name. There's the obvious difficulty: the "real" part, which can be defined any which way and by picking one reality can exclude other valid realities. But there's also the fact that not everyone has a name. See the third comment on http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
One of those possible realities is that "real name" is defined as "legal name" and you'll find a long history of people rejecting that: hacker nicknames, author pen names, rebels' noms de guerre. (A survey in film: The Matrix, "Goodbye, Mr. Anderson" "My name is Neo."; X-Men, "What's your name?" "John." "What's your real name, John?" "Pyro."; Pirates of the Carribean, "Captain. Captain Jack Sparrow.")
Authenticity is a wonderful sounding goal, but it still doesn't provide a very strong comprehension of your goals. So if you get past the problematic concept of a "real name", you still don't have enough to really design for it. For instance, it's arguable that "Yuhong Bao" is less authentic than writing it in Chinese. It's also arguable that it's more authentic.
What's in a name? A name is just a pointer. The functional difference between a real name and a fake name is, in the end, just taste.
When I saw the first X-Men movie where Magneto tried to kill all the humans, I told my wife "I hope the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants likes subsistence farming"
I wonder if the constant shifting of VFX houses to new countries and employees coming and going from the field is why we are seeing uneven results in movies? Most special effects-laden movies have a few CGI shots that just look awful. And you would think that VFX would be steadily improving in quality, but while we often see more impressive results in terms of what can be done the accuracy of them isn't always holding up and the realism and reliability isn't improving at the same rate that technology and new techniques are.
This could end up with Hollywood shooting themselves in the foot. Movies are getting more and more CGI, but CGI that breaks the suspension of disbelief can really ruin a movie.
A lot of people complained about the VFX in Wolverine, for instance, but shouldn't the VFX in that have been better than the X-men triology? Well, when you have seventeen different companies doing VFX shots for a movie, you're going to get uneven results. There was some really good VFX in Wolverine, but there was some really bad stuff too, and I'd have to believe the studio going cheap is what led to it.
How did you decide that piracy is a major problem? As near as I can tell from real data (like that pirated version of X-men) piracy seems to have no effect on theater sales.
I do like your final sentence very much: after all, isn't that what professional film reviewers do? They typically don't pay to watch a flick, but the word-of-mouth they (try to) generate gets others to go.
This should be interesting. Imagine the cross over possibilities - Mickey Mouse Clubhouse + X-Men for example: "It's the Mickey Mouse X-Men lair, come inside there's Mutants inside!" and "I think we need a Mousektool! Everyone say "OH XAVIER!!"".
I really hope they don't change the way the films have been going - Iron Man was a perfect example of what's possible. Then again, I hope they nuke the Spider Man franchise from orbit - it's the only way to be sure.
The gist of the article is this: "Documents say AT&T and Verizon told investigators they believe they were being defrauded out of $6 million in a three to four month period by a group of investors working together, including Faulkner, Simpson, and three others.
The documents say those individuals profited more than $1 million."
$6 million in fraud .... now that's a reason for raiding a data center that makes sense. As much as people may despise the RIAA and MPAA, the leak of the X-Men movie is not a reason to take down a data center.
(Previously, the headline implied that the raid was part of an investigation into the leaking of the X-men movie.)
As a long-time-lurker-first-time-commenter:
I understand that the x-men movie and Hacker News have a lot of audience overlap. That said, this feels more like a reddit/digg post. I know, I know, it's a subjective judgement, and I'm new. And the scope of HN isn't limited to tech. still....
I finally created an account so that I could flag stuff like this that I personally wouldn't like to see here, but I don't see the option, probably because I don't have any karma. Is there a doc somewhere that states what actions are available to users at any given karma level? Am I so blind that I overlooked something obvious in my searches?