Things that I noticed about the latest and weakest installment in the X-men series....- One consistent problem: a distorted and sometimes completely absent sense of scale. Magneto's great mutant army is about forty people, small enough to camp out in the woods? The fabled climactic 'last stand' war is simply a tiny battle of less than a hundred people, which lasts some 15 minutes or so? The X-men, with Xavier's entire academy at their disposal, somehow only have 6 members to their team, fully half of whom are clearly underage students? And so on and so forth.
- Dialogue that doesn't make any sense, or seems to hint at things that were never explained in the storyline. For example, Xavier's line to Logan, saying out of the blue "I don't have to explain myself, least of all to you!" - what the hell is that supposed to mean???
- Phoenix's great, uncontrollable powers seem to be 1) levitating and crumpling shit up, and 2) disintegrating people. Then after temper tantrums she stands looking sullen for 30 minutes doing nothing.
- Why kill off the greatest characters? Why? Why purposefully demolish the chance for a sequel? So ok, the Professor is back, but now in a different body. If he did appear in a sequel, it would have to be as a different actor, which just wouldn't work at all. Otherwise, they'd have to make up some half-assed explanation as to how he reconstituted his body through pure psychic will. Oh - and then they'd have to bring Scott back, which is relatively easy considering the circumstances of his 'death' are comparably murky to Jean's 1st death, and then bring back Jean somehow, and then find a way to restore Magneto's powers....
- Wouldn't Xavier or the others recognize the need to suppress the cure, especially AFTER the government begins to weaponize it and use it indiscriminately? Why oppose Magneto and his army, given that all they want to do is destroy the cure (well, AND the child - but certainly Xavier or Magneto could protect the child, given that he could be their key to defeating any other mutant who might come along)? Surely both sides could recognize that human-mutant relations are much better off without the problematic cure around? So then the fighting cause behind the X-men's grand Last Stand was what, exactly?
- The biggest strength of the movie was the appearance of a wide variety of new mutants (so many, in fact, that less than half had names). Perhaps it can be left at that.
- What about an antidote to the 'cure'? Can't science always find another way around things? And there's another point - this movie firmly establishes the fact that a mutant ability or identity is simply like a layer covering the human, that can be turned on or off as simply and as quickly as a light bulb. I suppose then that we can expect similar effects in subsequent storylines - more instant mutations and wild-typification (?), and more chances for CG moments.
- Overall, very problematic. Has Ratner effectively screwed up the X-men saga? Is this the end of what could have been a long-lived and respectable series? Let's hope not... perhaps Bryan Singer could come back from the dead via some psychic manipulation by the professor and restore the films to life....
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