broken rules

I broke my rule. I watched the new X3 trailer online.

I was actually heart-palpitatingly nervous, waiting for it to load. You know that uncomfortable twang of pain that resides right behind the breastbone? Yeah, that. Which is ridiculous. It’s a movie. I feel a bit like the Vonnegut quote I’ve got on my page: Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae. It’s a movie. My world is not going to come crashing to an end if it sucks.

But *man* I’m going to be disappointed.

And the worst part is that the trailers look like it might not suck. The trailers, in fact, look pretty good. And it’s *killing* me, because I do not want to have hope. It’s worse than X1. X1, there was no reason for hope. X1 you could just assume, blithely, that you were about to go into one of the worst travesties ever known to comicbookdom. X1 had the unusual position of “My God, it didn’t suck!” meaning, “Wow, that was actually *good*!”

X2 could not, then, of course, possibly live up to that. Not after X1 unbelievably not sucking. But there was hope, because it was the same director, and Bryan Singer obviously *got* the X-Men. And then they opened with Nightcrawler, and it became clear that X2 had not only lived up to X1, it might’ve even surpassed it. At that point it became clear that if Bryan Singer did X3, it was going to rule from orbit.

Unfortunately, he’s not directing. Poor Brett Ratner is aware the entire X fandom regards him as the Antichrist. He’s going to have to pull something so astoundingly stupendous off in order to not be the most loathed man in the history of comic book movies (ok, Joel Schumacher roundly deserves that title) that it’s almost impossible for him to succeed.

But the trailers don’t suck.

And it’s *killing* me.