Over the years, thousands of characters have appeared in the books published by Marvel Comics. Few, however, have been able to match the success of the X-Men. It took a little while for them to take off following their creation in 1963, but since then they've developed into one of Marvel's biggest cash cows, with no less than six comics related to the X-Men currently being published.
And it's no secret that they've seen success in pop culture beyond comics too. The most obvious is the five movies produced by 20th Century Fox, but the X-Men have also been adapted into video games, toys, and cartoons. People forget, however, that there was almost a live-action television show based on the X-Men. The massive boost in popularity that the X-Men enjoyed during the '90s (which was probably due to that awesome Saturday morning cartoon that ran from 1992 to 1997) led Fox to try their hand at a live-action X-Men TV show.
Rather than the X-Men at large, the show would instead focus on the "Generation X" spinoff created by writer Scott Lobdell and artist Chris Bachalo during the "Phalanx Covenant" storyline that ran in the X-Men books during 1994. The comics' version of the team was popular enough that their book would run for 75 issues between 1994 and 2001, but the show would not do as well. It began simply enough, as a made-for-TV movie that aired on Fox on February 20, 1996. But the ratings for the movie were so bad that plans for the show were dropped. And after seeing how awful the movie was, maybe the show not taking off was for the best.
Generation X takes us to a world where, much like every other depiction of the X-Men, humanity is split into two classes. There are the normal human beings, and those born with a genetic anomaly that grants them a particular superpower. These "mutants" are feared by the general public, loathed and shunned by a society that doesn't understand them.
Some of these mutants eventually find their way to the Xavier Institute for the Gifted, a very selective private school where teenage mutants can learn to use and control their developing mutations. As the movie begins, the Institute's headmasters — powerful telepath Emma Frost (Finola Hughes) and Sean "Banshee" Cassidy (Jeremy Ratchford), who possesses an intense "sonic scream" — have recruited Jubilation "Jubilee" Lee (Heather McComb) and Angelo Espinoso (Austin Rodriguez) into the school's ranks.
As Jubilee and Angelo grow accustomed to their new surroundings and acquainted with their classmates, an enemy soon presents himself. Five years earlier, Emma worked with a mad scientist named Russel Tresh (Matt Frewer). She'd had him fired from a prestigious institute because of his unethical experiments on mutants, and he's spent the intervening time swearing revenge. In those five years, he's developed a machine that allows him to enter someone's dreams and leave subliminal commands. It starts innocuously enough, with Tresh using his machine to get kids to play more Virtua Fighter at an arcade. But being a mad scientist, his sanity quickly slips away and world conquest starts looking like a pretty good idea. When he discovers that Emma is teaching a class of mutants, Tresh decides to use that to his advantage and use her students to perfect his machine.
If anything can be said about Generation X, it's that it most certainly fits the "mid-'90s action/fantasy TV for teenagers" mold seen in shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It's just so aggressively mediocre that it's no surprise it didn't get picked up as a series. Much like what would have happened if that Justice League of America pilot got turned into a series, it probably would have ran for six or seven episodes before getting cancelled or shuffled off into syndication, airing on local UHF channels after Saturday afternoons reruns of Xena: Warrior Princess.
Helming this dumb little pilot is Jack Sholder, whose directorial output has mostly been within the realm of the horror genre. And all I can think to say is that his work here is really, tremendously bad. The camera's always moving or sitting at some cockeyed Dutch angle, which gets really old really fast. You just want Sholder to stop trying to be hop and stop all the wannabe music video crap. And it doesn't make the movie any less boring, either. Yeah, it's dull as dishwater. I can forgive mediocrity, but I can't forgive being boring. While some of this can be blamed on the lackluster script, Sholder should take some of the blame as well. For all his tilted camera angles and neon-colored lighting, he doesn't do anything to inject any energy into the movie.
But like I said, the writing is just as bad as well. Penned by Eric Blakeney, the script is just boring and uninteresting. The characters are just plain hollow, while the plot is stupid and goes nowhere. It takes forever for the story to actually start rolling. We get nearly halfway into the movie before anything even remotely resembling a plot kicks in. And because of that, I found myself struggling to care about anything in this movie. There was only so much I could tolerate before I wanted to just give up and find something better to watch, like paint drying or grass growing.
And then there's the cast, many of whom are underutilized and nearly all of whom are forgettable. Finola Hughes plays Emma Frost as a typical '90s TV bitch. There's nothing impressive or special about her performance, and it feels like she was trying to audition for Melrose Place more than anything else. And if Jeremy Ratchford's Irish accent sounded any faker it would border on silly. Ratchford's not bad here, but that accent is so bad, so unconvincing that you can't take him seriously.
Austin Rodriguez is trying very hard, which I respect, but he ultimately falls flat. It's like they hired Taylor Lautner or something. Randall Slavin, on the other hand, spends more time looking like a cross between Billy Idol and Matthew Lillard's character from Hackers than he does actually acting. In regards to Heather McComb's performance as Jubilee, I just rolled my eyes every time she spoke. They couldn't have hired a better actress? Hell, they couldn't have hired a better cast? They probably would have actually replaced some of the actors had it become a series, but still, you couldn't find anyone better?
But if you're going to watch Generation X, watch it for Matt Frewer. His overacting is absolutely astounding. Imagine Robin Williams cranked up to eleven and covered in a fresh sheen of mid-'90s neon. You can actually hear his overacting in scenes he's not even in. He's a ton of fun, making him the one bright spot of this whole awful movie.
Did you think X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine were the worst X-Men movies? Then you haven't seen Generation X. It's to the X-Men what The Star Wars Holiday Special was to Star Wars. The movie is 87 minutes of crap that simply isn't worth your time. That's probably why it has to get any sort of DVD release that I'm aware of. I had to download a bootleg from the Internet, and I still feel like I overpaid. So yeah, don't feel like you should be in any rush to check out Generation X. It isn't worth it.
Final Rating: *
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