Of the five X-Men movies, none of them fit together very cleanly (even X-Men, X2, and X-Men: The Last Stand). There’s no way to make it work, just like there’s no way that a 75-year old Mystique should be able to do the things she does in the first X-Men movie.
While I completely agree with this statement, I would point out that it’s unclear if Mystique ages at all. She can completely rebuild her own body at any time, and even make clothes. If she turned herself into a child (which she did in X3), there’s no eral reason to believe she’d still have any effect of aging apply to her.
She’s dosed with the mutant cure in X-Men: The Last Stand and reverts back to her “real” self… who looks like an early-30s Rebecca Romijn.
We only see a brief glimpse of her, which wouldn’t really have anything to do with her abilities with mutant powers intact anyhow. She may age very slowly. Or she may not age at all and her appearance sans powers could simply be her physical age when she got enough control to stop aging entirely. If she did keep aging, she probably wouldn’t have looked like Rebecca Romjin at 30. She’s look like my Grandma.
Huh? Forget the comics for a second (where Mystique’s slowed aging is fact), but in the movies she is shown as a young girl born in the 1940s and as a woman of about 33 in the year 2010.
It’s just one more inconsistency in a series that’s full of them.
No, that’s my point. Stop assuming you understand how it works beforehand: look at what the movie shows her doing. The evidence is that she doesn’t age, at least not in the usual scale, and we shouldn’t apply normal human aging patterns to her. It’s no different than with any mutant in the movies, except her powers affect her body more… completely.
I am talking about what the movie show. In the third X-Men movie, Mystique is given the “mutant cure,” which removes all of her shapeshifting abilities. At the time of the injection, she’s blue-skinned. As it takes effect, the blue skin falls off revealing a 33 year old Rebecca Romijn underneath. We are given no indication that this is anything other than her “real” human form and she is never identified as the mother of Rogue or Nightcrawler (which would lend credence to the not aging thing).
So the Mystique we see in First Class doesn’t jive with what we know about her from the original trilogy. You can’t fight that.
The same actually applies to Beast as his character would be 70 years old in X-Men: The Last Stand and we’re never given any indication that’s the case either.
No, you’re still missing the point. You shouldn’t assume that if you de-mutant-ize someone with massive physical changes, they will somehow revert to exactly what they’d be if they had never been a mutant. Wolverine ages very little - maybe not at all anymore. If you hit him with the mutant cure, he probably wouldn’t turn to dust before your eyes. he’d jsut start aging normally from then on. Likewise, Mystique may not have a normal lifespan or aging at all in her mutant form, and only reverted to an apparent human age. But the medical specifics of her shown human body may not be the same as if she’d never been a mutant in the first place.
On the other hand, introducing time travel and alternate time-lines may be the only way of getting the whole series to make sense – or at least partially explaining the internal inconsistencies.
I’m not saying that’s what they’ll do, you understand…just tantalizing you with a meagre hope.
One of us is certainly missing the point, I’ll give you that.
What third X-Men movie? I don’t remember any such movie existing.
I agree with you that they don’t fit together. I’m just pointing out that your specific example isn’t reliable.
That’s exactly correct, Alessan. It never existed. Ever ever. 
In any case, X3 irked me on many levels, but the biggest issue was something Hollywood has been doing for years now: plot stuffing. As in, they took a perfectly decent story and tried to stuff so much plot that it exploded. I’ve pointed this out before, but there were two good stories there (which became one bloated flick): you could have had one team working to stop Magneto, and one team working to find Jean Grey. I think it would have been very cool to both re-use some footage, but film the same scene from different angles representing the different perspectives of the characters. You could have X3 and X4, which take place chronologically at the same time and some of the same events, without feeling stale. This would also mean they wouldn’t have to throw Cyclops under the bus, and would give them time to actually explore the characters more.
But she doesn’t have a “real” human form, because she’s not human. What we see in X3 is what she looks like with the effects of her mutant genes suppressed. If one of the effects of her mutant genes was to retard the aging process, she would not suddenly age up until she looked like a normal seventy year old human - she’d simply start aging normally from the point where she was injected with the cure.
Look at it this way: The reason people get gray and wrinkly when they’re in their seventies is due to the accumulative effects of decades of minor cellular damage to the body. If Mystique’s mutant power prevented that decay, or reversed it as soon as it happened, then when she lost her powers, all that minor damage wouldn’t suddenly rush back in, no more than if Wolverine got injected with the cure, he’d suddenly sprout every wound he’d ever closed with his healing factor.
But the cure shed her blue skin as well. The simplest explanation is, that’s how old she’s supposed to be. The fact that she’s never recognized by any of the other characters in X-Men point to this being a hole in First Class as well.
(1) Just because it’s the simplest explanation doesn’t mean it correct. In this case, there’s a perfectly logical explanation which DOES take into account the entire (supposedly connected) story. Likewise, her blue skin isn’t natural. It’s a result of her preferred form. But it’s no more “normal” for her than any other form.
(2) I don’t recall of of them appearing in the later movies. Xavier and his friends certainly knew about her and recognized her on sight. The fact that she’s a shapeshifter makes it a lot harder for them to pick her out of a crowd, you know.
You completely skipped over the point that Miller was making: she is “supposed” to be as old as the effects of the ageing she has experienced has made her. For quite a while her mutant powers made it so she did not experience any ageing. When those mutant powers end, her actual age is the ageing that her mutant powers allowed to occur (whether gradual, or at a normal rate and then stopped altogether).
The analogy to Wolverine is a good one, because he has lost his powers many times in the comics, to the same effect: he does not suddenly age up to his actual age when he loses his healing factor.
This is the last I’m going to say, but the bolded part is my entire point. The movies are not the comics and, as far as the movies are concerned, Mystique was shoehorned into First Class as Xavier’s beloved sister in the face of all logic and how it would relate to the first three movies (including her aging and the fact that Xavier never recognizes her).
Yes, I agree. You just used bad evidence to make your point.
However, pardon me on this, but when did Xavier ever meet Mystique in the first three X-men movies? I’ve racked my brain and the only time he ever might have seen her she was in disguise. And she’s been able to fool telepaths more than once in different comics, unless they were specifically looking for her. In fact, I can’t recall Xavier ever actually meeting her in person in the movies; any time they were even in the same building, he was either incapacitated or she was avoiding him.
I read last week Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan and Hugh Jackman had all been cast in the new movie, and I must admit, this has piqued my interest a little. It sounds like they are attempting to do what you are suggesting. It’s ambitious, but I’ll be impressed if they manage pull it off
I’m kind of expecting (and really hoping) that Hugh Jackman’s part in the next movie is comparable to his part in First Class. That was one of my favorite scenes in the movie.