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

[mneme]

I loved the opening Nightcrawler sequence -- scary as heck, and a nice intro to -why- much of the world is scared shitless by mutants.

I missed the phoenix symbol on the water, I think, though I was looking for something like; will have to see the movie again (darn! :).

I liked the fact that unlike the comic, Wolverine Killed People.

I though that Iceman was -way- underused; I know they're inverting him (along with Rogue) relative to certain other X-Men (um...Logan and Ororro are back-dated), but based on the power and control he's shown so far, it seems concievable that he could at least -try- to something about a raging river, even if they had him fail and Phoenix take over.

I also found the reasons she needed to get off the plain a bit hard to follow, though if they were trying to hint that full use of her powers was tech-disruptive, that might explain it (as well as the lack of control -- she might be able to lift the plane...but for how long? A: she doesn't know, which is a problem).

If I were setting things up, I'd make the next movie "X-Men: Phoenix", and the -fourth- "X-Men: Dark Phoenix", (especially since the full DF story includes whole organizations that haven't been introduced, like the Shiar, the Blue Region, Mastermind; even if they change things around, they seem to like keeping the scope of the X-Men stories, and it involved the destruction of -worlds-), but who knows what they're thinking?

[avram]

I could see them introducing the Hellfire Club, but the Shi'ar seems like a bit of a stretch for how they're doing things.

And in a way, they've already introduced Mastermind -- did you notice that Stryker's son, the guy who seduces people by projecting illusions into their minds, was named Jason? Though I don't see how he could have survived the collapse of the dam without aid from some other mutant; maybe Magneto could have stealthily yanked him out.

I'm wondering if they're going to introduce the Sentinels at some point.