Bravo, Mr Ratner.

[owlbeer]

Yeah, the subject heading is rather sarcastic.

I may have walked in affected by the bad reviews I’d read, but I did walk in with pretty low expectations and the movie still managed to disappoint me.


With the first two, I felt something for these characters; with this one there were only a very, very few moments when that was true, and nearly all of them starred Ian McKellen. The lack of any real emotion was I think the film’s main flaw, and why it paled in comparison to its predecessors. I mean, Scott and Xavier died! I felt next to nothing. Bravo, Mr Ratner. Also, yeah, Jean died too but by that point it was going to be kind of hard to get me to care.

They tried to do way too much and yeah, comics are like that, but it didn’t really work. They should have concentrated on either Jean or on the cure, mixing them together meant that both didn’t get the treatment they deserved and we got the whole moving-from-one-special-effect-loaded-set-piece-to -another feel. The pacing was just, bad.

I didn’t mind Kelsey Grammar as Beast, but I didn’t love him either. The fighting scenes were pretty cool and yeah, ‘my stars and garters’ was a nice shout-out, but he never really sold me on the fact that he was Hank. Also, as someone else no doubt mentioned, he’s a scientist, not a diplomat, but that really was a minor point.

There was some nice Xavier/Magneto though. The first scene, last scene, Magento’s somewhat strangled ‘Charles!’ when Jean killed him and in a way his scene with Pyro, but a lot more could have been done with that. Someone described the plane scene in X2 in a comment I was just reading. *sighs wistfully * Also, as cool as the post-credits scene was, I was hoping when I saw Erik playing chess that Xavier would join him somehow, or be hidden in the reveal, because that would have rocked.

In terms of Charles and Erik characterisation though … eh. I did like they showed a little bit of Charles’s more controlling side but I think his death was somewhat pointless. With Magneto, I did like the scene in the church but at the end with the whole ‘what have I done?’ Eh.

I also liked Pyro, which is actually not the greatest sign as I was pretty ‘shrug’ about him in X2, but I thought most of his scenes were pretty good. I thought his characterisation was actually fairly consistent from X2.

Same with Bobby actually. I quite liked him and Kitty. Not enough to ‘ship or anything, but I was content enough to watch them. Kitty was one thing I actually thought they did pretty well.

I’ve never been a huge Scott fan but he did get shafted in this story. Badly. James Marsden did well with what he got, but I think they could have gone a lot more places with him and his angst instead of killing him off inside the first half an hour.

Rogue? Logan? Storm? Big shrug really. I did think that Rogue getting the cure was pretty stupid though. For her to consider it? Absolutely. But to get it? Whole ‘nother story.

Angel? His scene when he was a kid wasn’t too bad, but other than that … I really didn’t care, but then, I never really cared for the character in the comics either.

The acting was on the whole not too bad but the dialogue was clunky.


The more I think about it, the more disappointed I am, but I’m also tired, so that might be it too.