X-Men/Deadpool 3 - April 24

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, so let us talk about the X-Men ’97 instead. Um. This is akin to using capitalism to distract from feudalism, or reverse, or something along those lines anyhow. Shall we try again?

As we have been talking increasingly in those previous weeks, X-Men ’97 are fan service; the scriptwriters and co. behind them are outright adapting the older comic storylines for the episode plots. For the entire season’s plot too, for that matter. AoS had its’ own share of flaws, but at least it tried to be original, for the first 2-3 seasons of its’ run anyhow. X-Men ’97 does not. Rather, it has plenty of fan appeal; in this week’s episode, ‘Bright Eyes’, we saw a Steve Rogers/Captain America; last week, it was Ronan the Accuser. Therefore, where is Uatu? Shouldn’t he be watching – never mind. He is probably watching the live-action adventures of Wolverine and Deadpool instead.

Now that trailer is something else. Not unlike the X-Men ’97, it is a classic – it is shaping up to be a tale of redemption and resurrection; Deadpool flat-out proclaims himself Jesus, aka the Savior, and he’s saving Wolverine. Well, a Wolverine, but the fact that HJ is playing the character also clears up some things, doesn’t it?

Let us roll back a bit. To date, humanity has invented only two versions of religion: polytheism and monotheism. The two models are simply different, and it does not matter which is better or worse, but what matters is that salvation and damnation, temptation and redemption, and all the other ‘tion’ words matter only in monotheism; in polytheism, not so much. By talking about salvation, Deadpool, and ‘Deadpool 3’ flat-out tries at least to tap into monotheism, which in US means Christianity, at least the Protestant version of it. Pause.

The problem is that these days the U.S. does not acknowledge itself as a Christian country, not how it did before, before the 1990’s, at least. The entire wink-wink nudge-nudge approach does not work too good either – for example, Ms. Meg Cabot’s novels have plenty of Christian/Protestant moral values, (and they are not half-bad from the technical point of view), but because she never openly admits this, her novels fall flat, and instead of being mouthpieces for those values they… do not. They may be making Ms. Cabot plenty of money as people are buying and selling them, but not much else, and the same will go down for the ‘Deadpool 3’ film as well – it will make Disney/MCU/anyone else a lot of money, it will help establish the mutants in MCU somehow most likely, but the Christian imagery, motifs, and what else have you will just dissipate, and that is it. Still better than X-Men ’97, who don’t even have that. The ‘Deadpool 3’ film is clearly having a lot of effort behind it, effort and money, and so it will deliver, much more so than the ‘Madame Web’ movie had, for example. (The latter had potential, in fact, but it was squandered).

Therefore, to sum up, whereas X-Men ’97 is purely entertainment and fan service, ‘Deadpool 3’ is setting itself up as something more – much more than that. Will it be able to achieve this is another question, we just have to wait and see.

For now though, this is it. See you all soon!