Posted by Lucifer Lyndon Razoodock at spider-mtc-tc024.proxy.aol.com on July 16, 2000 at 14:04:45:
In Reply to: 'X-Men' and San Diego posted by Kevin on July 16, 2000 at 13:09:05:
: Kudos to Bryan Singer for taking a great deal of shit from the studio t get it made. He turned out to be right, and that's the best revenge there can be.
I've said before that I believe the ViewAskew editing team usually do right by their own concepts when they whittle them down, but I'm not so sure that truncating worked such wonders for "X-Men."
Enjoy it though I did (and the editing really did take the ballsy route of nearly making it a "Weapon-X" feature). I felt that it had a great first act, a hackneyed, occasionally ill-staged third act...and absolutely no second act...
July 16, 2000
BY ROGER EBERT
Q. I came across an article on the Dark Horizons Web site that said the original running time of "X-Men" was 135 minutes, "but around 45 minutes was removed to make it faster and pacier. A lot of slower, non-action, character development scenes were chopped." I'm discouraged. I am not an X-Men or even a comic book fan, but I was psyched to see the film version. But why? The best parts about a comic book, or any story, are the characters. If you take out the character development, subplots and their history, what do you have left? Eye candy! Forty-five minutes out of 135? That's a third of the film! The length of a film doesn't make it any better or worse, but the story should never be compromised.
J. Nino, New York
A. That may help explain a problem I had with the film, which is that it was too much setup and not enough payoff. By the time the characters were introduced and their superpowers demonstrated, we were already at the halfway mark.