Just saw this myself.
(SPOILER)I figured that she had most of it cut and edited to show off to the authorities, and just recorded the bookends the night she died.Originally Posted by krissy
Overall, I thought it was a good film. Very different, but still good. It did have some very major problems, though.
LauraFirst, why did they make Laura a non-character for the first two thirds of the movie? It really hurt her characterization overall. First she's a Helen Keller like individual, raised in a lab, cut off, with no chance to understand basic human interactions... And then all of a sudden it turns out that she's a completely normal person who apparently just decided to steal, ignore social conventions, and creep people out for the heck of it. So, instead of being someone shaped this way by their situation, she's just a jerk.
The other really big problem I have is the setting:
2029This was a VERY odd choice, in my mind. The movie is set twelve years in the future. Twelve. Yet, none of the setting makes sense or has any connection to our own world and timeframe. Maybe you could have made me believe that things happened this way up until the casino scene. Then that shows up all over Twitter and Facebook and whatever other social media we get, the authorities show up, and the entire attempt by the corporation to cover this activity (which is definitively stated as an illegal activity that was being hidden from the government) is destroyed right there.
This feels like a cyberpunk dystopia set far in the future, especially once they introduce commonplace corporate goons with cybernetic arms. None of it is grounded in our own reality. Now, in the reality of the film, it works. It creates a coherent and complete world, but it doesn't feel like our own.
For one thing, no one runs away. Yeah, you have guys with some cybernetics and prosthetic limbs with super strength, but nothing as ridiculous as say, the actual Cyberpunk RPGs (where people had carbon nanofibers woven into their skin, chainsaw arms, etcetera). These are, for the most part, normal dudes who are incredibly vulnerable to the mutants they're trying to take down. And these guys watch a single dude rip through a platoon without blinking and still think "I got this".
And, again, this isn't a government agency, and is, in fact, an illegal operation. These guys are hired thugs. They're there because they're paid to. Why the hell would any of them keep going? They've witnessed six or seven units entirely eliminated, and they still charge forward blindly. Why? The cleanup guys mop up six or seven mass murders and scenes of buildings getting completely ripped apart, and there are no whistleblowers?
It's a huge shift in world and tone from all the rest of the X-Men movies, which are based either in a historical setting, or in a reasonable facsimile of our own universe.
This new setting does work very well for the film overall, but it makes it nearly impossible to follow up from. I don't see how you can build a new universe around the new mutants or anything like that from this film. And, with it being set so close to the present day, it makes me wonder very much how they're supposed to continue the X-Men franchise at all. They have twelve years to transition to this new future, and after that... How do you make a film in this universe? How would a new mutants story work in this world?
If this was intended to close out the entire franchise, it would make sense, but that really doesn't seem like the intention.
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