X Isle ends worse than expected. The screenplay or treatment adaptation got to the point where the original writer was hoping the director would love to do an Aliens but robots sequence. Instead, in the comic medium, it goes from discovering the evil robots with tentacles who are actually just doing their job (zookeeping) to the alien nav computer revealing all the secrets and someone saying the robots are getting closer. It’s awful comics, which is too bad since this issue’s got the first time artist Greg Greg Scott gets to do an actual comic page and not (at best) a movie adaptation.
When the robots wake up and start collecting the loose animals (including invading humans), one has a cute but cruel scene. But with word balloons and motion implied between panels and reaction shots. Oh, Scott does reaction shots other places this issue, but they’re between two indistinguishable white men. Tim Allen and someone dramatic or Ashton Kutcher and someone dramatic, playing against type, maybe. Ashton is whining on about how coming to save Tim Allen’s daughter got Sam Jackson killed last issue, and now it’s going to get Ashton killed this issue. Tim Allen tells him to man up or something so they can rescue the obnoxious daughter, who’s fighting little monsters who want to eat her and talking about how she needs to live to lose her virginity.
Every line of dialogue is terrible in this issue. Maybe co-writer Michael A. Nelson just gave up. Hopefully, he just gave up, and this dialogue isn’t supposed to be good work. The art’s not bad overall, but it’s not impressive. Besides that robot sequence, those two pages were better art than the rest of the book combined. For a moment, I thought it was going to get good. It reminded me of the Lost in Space movie, and I was thinking, you know, it’d be better than whatever they’re going to do.
What’s so strange about X Isle is it’s a lousy spec script. It’s a bad treatment. But it’s targeting a Roland Emmerich-type who wants to cash in on “Lost” being a hit on TV. But not Roland Emmerich because it’s relatively low budget. It’s like a Sci-Fi movie spec script, actually.
Maybe I’d have watched it with Bruce Campbell in the lead? As Tim Allen?
Otherwise.
It’s pretty bad. X Isle’s pretty, pretty bad.
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