This latest in the series of X-men movies takes off where the last one left off.
A quick reminder, the person who had put the Adamantium (the super duper hard metal) onto Wolverine’s skeleton had recreated Cerebro and was using a captured Xavier to try and kill all the mutants in the world. Of course, the X-men are there to save the day. In the process though, Jean Gray dies. That is basically where it ends.
Now one comment from someone who has read comic books all his life and X-men comic books off and on during that time, the first 2 movies had some significant differences from the X-men basic story but in my view they were mostly forgivable and worked into a movie version of the story. This new movie takes everything off the deep end from a comic book fan’s point of view. The story so radically diverges from X-men comic book mythos that for fans it can really be hard to get past (for me, it was very distracting).
Now back to the movies, the core principle of the movie is that a company has found a “cure” to being a mutant. Of course there is a few words put to the fact that being a mutant is not a disease and hence the word cure is just plain wrong. To me, it would have been more interesting to spend a bit more time on that argument. An off shoot that they delved into a bit was that a mutant friendly government was still willing to use the “cure” as a weapon against mutants. That would have also been interesting to explore more.
I liked the introduction of Beast/Hank McCoy though the voice of “Frasier” was kind of distracting even though I thought the performance was pretty good. It would have been nice to see Night Crawler next to him though – two furries.
As other’s have pointed out in other reviews, I thought the role of Storm being so dominant in the movie (just to please Halle Berry though I actually generally like her) was too forced. I also thought that Jean Grey killing Scott was inexplicable no matter the movies reasoning (I could see anger reasons for Xavier but not Scott).
The resolution of the movie with 6 against a whole bunch seemed stretched. The little bit you had to wait through the credits to see at the end was a bit of a surprise but was definitely forced. I love when artists get creative but it seemed that they left their creative hats at home when they put this one together. The performances were fine but the story was just poor.
With the criticism, it was still fun to watch – probably due to the visual candy.