Even though there are some noticeable “liberties” being taken in the movie(s), I really enjoy how the liberties don’t really ruin the central ideas and what-not with the X-Men.
I really liked little references/definitions like:
Stryker explaining that when you get Adamantium into liquid form, you need to keep it in that state. Because once it hardens, it’s indestructible.
As for favorite line in the movie, I liked this (series of lines):
LilShieste
Of course it seems familiar – but not because of the first X-Men movie.
They did the “put the knives down” thing in Edward Scissorhands.
And yet, Jean Gray had enough control to flip exactly the right switches, in the right sequence, on the Blackbird’s instrument panel to make it take off, while simultaneously holding back tsunami-like flood waters?
I don’t buy it.
Heh, a movie about mutants who have powers that really defy any true explanation and you choose not to believe this.
spoilers throughout this post
As someone who has never read any of the comics and actually thought that Jean was actually ‘dead’ at the movie’s end last night, I have a couple of additional questions to ask that may be kind of simple to some of you, but anyway:
Why did Rogue fly the plane?
Is it possible that Jean didn’t/doesn’t know that she’s a phoenix? I viewed her actions as desperate, no-other-solutions-available and thought she believed (like most of the audience) that she was in fact sacrificing herself.
Also, a couple comments: someone asked earlier in this thread why Wolverine’s extra keen senses didn’t alert him sooner to the fact that it was Mystique and not Jean who was coming into his tent. The obvious answer: if Rebecca Romjin is trying to fuck you, are you likely to do anything to stop her? Are you going to be thinking clearly about anything then? I was so appreciative that they gave her and Halle Berry lots more screen time in this movie. Her body is just amazing.
And I’d like to note that my own social security number has the same first three digits as are on wolverine’s i.d. tag.
Re: the Beast, I read one news story that said he was supposed to be in this film in his blue and fuzzy state, but the film makers decided not to include him for a couple of reasons. One was budget , the other was that with Mystique and Nightcrawler, they thought it would be too much to have yet a third blue mutant in the film.
Pablito asked:
I believe that Jean Grey, while sacrificing herself in the movie, did not (or rather does not) expect to be “reborn” as Phoenix.
Maybe someone else can help shed some light on this. 
LilShieste
[spoiler]Why, other than as a plot device, was the psionic death via Prof. X so darn slow in coming rather than instantaneous? Wouldn’t his targetting all mutants include himself, as well as the guy controlling him, thereby interrupting his attack and/or the control being held over him?
Remember, the Prof wasn’t trying to kill anyone. He was just, I guess, grabbing so tightly they started cracking under the mental pressure[/spoiler]
[spoiler]-- Mutants have to be mutants from birth, right?
Since the other part about was answered, I can respond to this question. Yes and no. There’s never been a clear dividing line between magic, mutant powers/psionics, and super technology in superhero comics. Basically, the Hulk, Spiderman, the X-men, and so forth are all about the same.
Its been explicitly said that mutant powers are basically a mental shortcut )psionics) to doing something and bending the universe. Mutants are just born with theirs. Now and then, writers might come up with an “anti-mutant device” which affects only mutants, or a “anti-gamma powers ray” that could stop the Hulk and Reed Richards, but this is pretty rare. In the end, Given the kind of stuff superscience pulls off regularly, altering one’s genetic code to “Mutant” from “Human” wouldn’t be too hard.
Of course, if you do it like Magneto in X-Men (1) and NOT USE PROPER TESTING PROCEDURES you can wipe out cities. So remember kids, always test your mutation beams on small, furry animals. You can always sue the Horrible Monstrosities That Should Not Be that result as pets, ninja, and cleaning staff. When they aren’t doing your evil bidding and terrorizing whole continents.[/spoiler]
Sigh. Not only did I post it four times, but then someone answered WITHOUT the spoiler box.
Don’t most mutants 'manifest" their powers around adolescence?
One other thing: A couple of people asked how Magneto could know that it was Mystique who helped him once he detected the extra iron levels in the guard’s blood.
That was pretty straightforward, I thought. At least in the movie, Magneto has exactly one (surviving) ally, Mystique. There’s no big underground network, yet. So he’s been expecting her to help him escape all this time, and when he notices something’s off, the only conclusion is that she helped him out. It’s apparent that he’s familiar with her M.O. as well.
Plus prevent Nightcrawler’s BAMFing out to get her. But the question isn’t one of control over her target, it’s the side effects. In her conversation with Cyclops at the beginning of the movie, he says that whenever she has nightmares, it causes everything around the room to fly around. I took that to mean that if she tried to hold back the flood from within the plane, she might also send the rest of the X-men flying into the walls or short out their brains or something. It’s not a super-air-tight explanation, no, but it’s not as if it makes absolutely no sense, either.
And I could be wrong, and the other explanation is that she still believes she has to be very close to something to have an effect on it. She’s always shown having to concentrate and get close to things before she can affect them, and when Cyclops shoots her with the eye-beam, it gets about a foot away before she repels it. (And sends it firing off all over the place, blowing up the dam, which gets back to the whole “control” thing.)
Could someone explain to a non-geek the “I love what you’ve done with your hair” line?
Great, great movie. I have to chime in to say that I also found the ending to be unnecessarily weak, what with the rather blatant sequel setup and all. Not that this couldn’t have been handled effectively, but it just seemed really glaringly contrived… I mean, really; it’s one thing to sacrifice yourself to save others if there are no alternatives, but there’s no need to let yourself die in a flash flood if you have:
A. a guy who teleports, and
B. two people who can freeze things on a large scale
sitting right next to you! WHY DID SHE GET OUT OF THE FREAKING PLANE?!
I wonder if there weren’t possibly additional scenes that expanded on Jean’s inability to control her rapidly developing powers, making her evident death wish at the end more plausible, that were edited out to shorten the running time. Maybe they’ll pop up on the DVD.
The white streak in Rogue’s hair is his fault, from his actions in the first movie. The comment seemed a little OOC, but I interpreted it as a sign of his contempt towards Xavier and his students. The Ultimate comic title is the most blatant about this, but he seems to see them as suicidal “race traitors,” who, by their willingness to negotiate and educate the enemy determined to destroy them, are just as culpable in ferrying mutants towards their destruction as humans. In other words, seriously misguided at best, authors of mutant extinction at the worst.
However, in one of the deleted scenes from the 1st movie (which appears in the X-Men 1.5 DVD), Rogue asks Storm if Professor X can “cure” her of her mutant powers. Storm replies something to the effect that the Professor doesn’t work that way.
Well, after seeing it, (and yes, I loved it!) It looks like they’ve tried to “merge” the Phoenix origins between the original origin in Uncanny X-men, and the origin in Ultimate X-men. You can plainly see both elements in the movie. This has me pleased, as that means that SOMEONE has been reading and is at least trying to get SOME sort of continuity set up.
As for Jean’s Leaving the blackbird, I was bugged about it at first, then came to this reason of thinking:
In the Movies, Jean Grey seems to almost have a self imposed limitation on her telepathy/telekenisis. Think of it as Luke Skywalker trying to lift the X-wing from the swamp of Dagobah. Or even Nightcrawlers fear of teleporting blind in the movie. Every time she uses it, she’s using hand motions etc, compared to Magneto, whio just wills his abilities. She HAS the ability to do ALL of what she did, but she doesn’t THINK she can. Add to that, the fear she had recently about using her power and not being able to control it.
I think that she exited the blackbird to in her mind “Be able to affect it better”, i.e. moving the blackbird out of danger and keeping the oncoming deluge from destroying the blackbird. All of the little things, like controlling the plane, preventing Nightcrawler from leaving etc, I think she was doing “subconciously”. As hey, a telekenetic wouldn’t NEED to operate the controls etc, OR be able to prevent Nightcrawler from porting out (which IMHO I feel was telepathic in origin, and along the strength of something Xavier could do.).
Now I know this doesn’t completely line up with Canon, but i’m looking at the movies as their own canon, and classifying it along the lines of Ultimate X-men, in that it stands on it’s own, rather than trying to reach back into 30+ years of x-men history.
And i’m glad I wasn’t the only one hallucinating the bird like shape under the water at the end. There just BARELY enough to be seen, and to give us old-timer fanboys an inside line on what’s coiming.
Overall, I was impressed with it, as like so many X-men stories, it’s not always a slugfest between the team and a baddie, but several things going on at once, all culminating in the end.
Damn, now I have to wait 11 days for Matrix Reloaded.
Did anyone catch the Stan Lee cameo? I didn’t. He had a cameo in X-Men 1, Spiderman and Daredevil. Maybe the legal stuff prevented him from doing it?
Brian
And speaking of catching something cute that wasn’t plot-related:
Did anyone else catch how, as in the first X-Men movie, the “X” in “20TH CENTURY FOX” at the very very beginning took just a little bit longer to fade-to-black than the rest of the letters?
IIRC the plane never stopped working. The engines were all still running etc, but the thrusters or something were said to have jammed. The Blackbird was supposed to be VTOL. Rogue managed the short hop from the initial landing site to the pickup point via the VTOL emergency landing system (we actually saw a light that told us this). It was implied that this was strictly one shot. It was then toast. The engines were then jammed and the VTOL capacity was gone. It couldn’t get off the ground, hence the reason why it could fly if it were made airborne again.
I doubt if a 9mm round would bounce off. It would flatten into a disk and the skin would prevent it from ricocheting. A lot of AP shells use soft metals to produce the same effect. And of course while wolvie heals fast, he was never supposed to be immune to being knocked out. Being shot in the head would still feel like being smacked really hard with a hammer. He recovered faster from the concussion than a normal person, but he still suffered the same effect: unconsciousness.
Magneto in the comics is quite the evil genius. He has more than enough brains to figure out what is likely to happen if he is captured, and to work out a contingency plan with Mystique years in advance. He may well have been scanning every visitor every day for extra iron. Magneto knew that Mystique had seduced the guard and injected him with the extra iron because he had told her to do it. He is not your average Evil Overlord ™
And of course after she accessed Stryker’s files Mystique did know where Magneto was. But even with her powers she couldn’t carry metal into the cell past security, and since neither she nor Magneto could fly without metal, the retracting drawbridge would simply have meant they were both trapped.
There would be enough iron in the blood to work that trick. A normal person has about 10 grams of iron in the blood and muscles. A massive injection could easily triple this without producing any severe symptoms. We don’t know whether the balls we saw were actually hollow, since Magneto could reinforce even an iron shell to be a hard as a solid iron ball. Of course this begs the question why he needed any additional input. At least in theory he should be able to extract a miniscule amount of iron from any human (or even his own body) and make an atom-thin iron object of infinite strength.
No. In the Marvel Universe normal telepaths etc can’t lift themselves. If they could they could fly, and Jean can’t fly. For the same reason Invisible Girl can levitate the Hulk with her force fields, but can never levitate herself without making a lift that remains in contact with the ground. Yes it’s a plot contrivance, but it’s the only thing that stops all these telepaths from flying around all over the place, since they can all easily lift a human weight.
I just assumed that the reason Mystique left the scars is she wanted Wolvie to know who she was. She she wanted to show him what she could offer. That she was the ultimate fantasy woman.
I saw X-Men 2 last night. Great popcorn flick. Fancy special effects aside, what impressed me about this movie was that the director and writers made a noticeable effort to flesh out the personalities of almost every character. Indispersed with the action were succinct character-building scenes that served to illustrate the motivations of nearly all the minor mutants. That’s pretty rare for an action flick, especially with an ensemble cast. (It’s was also quite useful, for those of us who haven’t read the comic books.)
For example:[ul][li]Mystique: “We shouldn’t have to [hide]”. Earlier, we see her demonstrate cunning and loyalty to Magneto. Another scene (eye contact) sets up the fact that she has the hots for Logan (before she actually jumps him…)[/li][li]Pyro. With three scenes, the director clearly portrays him as a “corruptible” mutant, so that it is no surprise when he flits off with Magneto. The kid portraying him does a good job with facial expression.[/li][li]Iceman. A slightly longer screen time sets out the fact that his parents don’t know about his mutation and his nervousness about telling them; later, we see his marked regret that his “coming out” went so badly.[/li][li]Storm. A conversation with Nightcrawler on the jet shows that something like the “evil” mutants, she has lost faith in humankind. She’s bitter.[/li][li]Nightcrawler. With only a few short scenes in which he actually speaks, aspects of his faith (including scarification! :eek: ) and kindness are made out. There was a good partnership established between Nightcrawler and Storm.[/li][li]Jean Grey. Received substantial screen time which demonstrated her growing unease with her powers. She was anxious about her power in the X-Men 1 and the first part of the X2 served to establish her continued fear. Again, without the use of lengthy passages of dialogue to establish her motivations, it was no great surprise to the audience when she makes the choice to “sacrifice” herself.[/ul]What I really enjoyed was how each minor character was built up with such short, bit-sized scenes with minimal dialogue. For the type of movie X-Men 2 is, the actors really do a good job.[/li]
The characters of Magneto, Xavier and Rogue receive substantially less attention – it is mostly assumed that we understand their motivations and character quirks – but this is understandable given the first movie was largely given over to them.
Things I didn’t like about the movie:[ul][li]Stryker’s mind control drug thingy was unconvincing, especially as applied to Nightcrawler and Cyclops.[/li][li]Lady Deathstrike could have received some more attention. In the end, she was a mere cipher for Logan to defeat.[/li][li]Xavier appears too calm in the final scene, considering he almost killed 6 billion people a few hours earlier.[/li][li]How the heck could a mindreader be trapped so easily in Magneto’s prison? Like he couldn’t tell something was amiss.[/li][li]The guy playing Cylcops was wooden… again.[/li](Without having read the comics) Is Magneto really so nuts? He really wanted to kill ALL humans? Like, who would grow his food, maintain the roads, collect the garbage, operate mines, etc.?[/ul]But anyhoo, great flick.