X-Men 2

[avram]

After the play, my folks drove us over to my place, and Chris and I hung out for a while then saw the second X-Men movie. I liked this more than the first, mostly because it just felt more like an X-Men story than the first one did. More superhero action, more interaction with the traditional X-Men backstory, more actual characters from the comic. More behind the spoiler warning....

• Damn, that opening Nightcrawler action sequence kicked ass.
• Nice shots of Kitty and Colossus during the raid.
• Every time Jean pushed her powers and we saw flames in her eyes, I could see the plot of the next movie being set up.
• They did a good job of giving all the major characters cool stuff to do.
• The ambiguous sometimes-ally, sometimes-enemy nature of the relationships among the mutant groups was well-handled. (Mark Millar does a good job with this in the Ultimate X-Men comic, too.)
• I didn’t much like how Jean “died”; if she could fix the plane with her mind, why couldn’t she do it while staying on the plane? If she was powerful enough to split the water, shouldn’t she have been able to just levitate the plane with herself on it?
• Did you notice that very faint outline of the Phoenix symbol on the water at the very end?

Comments

[camfangrrl.livejournal.com]

The "why did Jean leave the plane" question is all over the place, but the most credible answer I've seen is that the plane would be unable to operate with her on it if she was using her powers to enough of a degree to hold the water back. The key is in the opening scene at the museum. It's there that she starts feeling her, shall we say, new capabilities, which she dismisses as a headache, but you can see how she disrupts all the electronics in the place, with the monitors going wonky. The same was true for the plane, you saw how everyone was trying to get its functions working and failing. So she saw that it was better for her to get out of the plane, and stop disrupting its electronics, and while out she could split the water and give everyone else a way to escape.