Roll Player Adventures
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Your Roll Player characters have been called to adventure! In Monsters & Minions, you went to war...
Dune: House Secrets
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Featuring the co-operative game system used in Portal's award-winning Detective: A Modern Crime...
Space Kraken
8.0
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Space Kraken is a Rogue-like Sci-Fi Dungeon Crawler for one Solo Player; the game also comes with an...
Oceanhorn ™
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SET SAIL AND EMBARK ON AN EPIC JOURNEY Grow from a boy to a legend. 5/5 - TouchArcade - "Must-have...
Archaeology Magazine
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ARCHAEOLOGY magazine offers compelling storytelling about the human past from every corner of the...
The Beekeeper of Aleppo
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'This is a novel of international significance. Courageous, provocative, haunting, it will open our...
War Syria Refugees
Becoming
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An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States. In a...
Non-Fiction
tapestry100 (306 KP) rated Extraordinary X-Men, Vol 1: X-Haven in Books
Aug 2, 2017
I won't lie, I miss the X-Men of my younger years (late 80s/early 90s). I've been trying to reconcile their fall from popularity and the direction their stories have been taking in light of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (don't get me started on the X-Men movie franchise **shudders**), but I've been sticking with it. This book, my first post-Secret Wars X-Men experience, has left me torn: even tho every aspect of this book has already been done before (mutants being hated for being different; mutants needing to go into hiding; mutants being on the edge of extinction for about the third time in a decade now; Sinister conducting his weird experiments and playing around with famous mutant's DNA), it did leave me wondering what was going to happen next, so that's at least somewhat good storytelling, right? Right?! Sigh.
There are things I don't understand in this post-Terrigen bomb/Secret Wars world: what exactly is the difference between being an Inhuman or mutant and why is one seen as seemly being acceptable by the populace at large? Other than needing to push the Inhuman as the new version of being a mutant in the MCU, I see no distinction. What does it matter if the Terrigen mists are making mutants sterile? Don't normal humans give birth to mutants, as well? Maybe it's changing the structure of the entire world's DNA? What if a human with dormant Inhuman genes gives birth to a mutant? What would the Terrigen mists do to the mutant? How long does the Terrigen mist linger in the atmosphere? I'm hoping some of this is addressed at some point.
Lee (2222 KP) rated X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019) in Movies
Jun 7, 2019
Dark Phoenix start off well though. It's 1992, and the X-Men are currently riding high on popularity, with Charles Xavier even having his own hotline to the president. A trip up into space to save some astronauts in peril is impressive, with the X-Men working effectively as a team under pressure. In fact, these team moments are the best thing about the movie - all working together, with every character getting a chance to utilise their specific set of skills.
The worst thing about Dark Phoenix is the script - awkward, cheesy or just plain boring. Moments that are supposed to be emotional, intense or poignant just come across as dull and frustrating, making the heavy handed soundtrack all the more noticeable. Many of the cast do their best with what they've been given, but it rarely works. Add to that a completely pointless villain (Jessica Chastain) without any clearly defined motivation that you can get behind, and the negative elements far outweigh the positive for me. Who knows what form the X-Men may eventually take within the MCU, but hopefully they'll be utilised to their full potential once more.
