Do You Know What Happens When a Morlock Gets Hit By Lightning? (Major X3 Spoilers Contained Within)

Apparently you get a really crappy X-Men movie. I had fully intended to give my review of this movie both a geek and non-geek perspective, but my inner geek is so pissed off that it won’t let my inner non-geek have any say at all. My inner non-geek has been bound and gagged and thrown down the storm cellar. That is how pissed off X-Men 3: the Last Stand made her. She’s gone homicidal. Well, maybe it’s just felonious assault and wrongful imprisonment. That said, I don’t think I can actually work up an actual review, so what follows is a list of things that pissed me off and the much smaller list of things I actually liked.

Warning: Major spoilers follow, so don’t continue reading if you haven’t see the movie yet. And if you haven’t seen the movie yet, please come back when you do and let me know what you think, especially if you can come up with a reason for me to not hate this movie. Anyway, here we go:


Things That Pissed Me Off:

• Halle Berry as Storm – this has been a consistent problem with all the X-Men films, but I think it bears repeating.
• It was even more about Wolverine than usual – he even managed to co-opt Cyclops’s grief. Wolverine is apparently the Lana Lang of the X-Men. Also, he cried a lot in this movie. It was very jarring.
• The fact that they turned the Dark Phoenix into little more than Magneto’s thug. Remember how lame they made Bane in Batman & Robin, just standing behind Poison Ivy all the time? That’s pretty much what Dark Phoenix did for most of the movie.
  It’s the Dark Phoenix Saga, but we don’t get to see the Phoenix Force once. She’s just a chick in an ugly red outfit that apparently commands some really fierce winds. Dark Phoenix was completely unimpressive.
• The pointless Rogue/Bobby/Kittie love triangle. I know they read Astonishing X-Men. How could they not realize that Kittie and Piotr are OMG!Meant2B4Eva!? Also, it was just shoehorned in there for pointless teen angst melodrama.
• The fact that they made Juggernaut a mutant and the fact that he looked really fucking awful. What they hell were they thinking when the let that helmet make it on screen?
• Wolverine not asking about Cyclops until after almost having sex with Jean on the exam table. I just love how he and Storm just completely ignored the fact that Cyclops was just gone. His visor is floating around and nobody cares. That’s teamwork people.
• Speaking of teamwork – it seems that someone needs to explaining what it is to Storm, because the Fastball Special is indeed teamwork.
• Uhg! The Sentinel in the Danger Room sequence. First of all, I don’t buy that Wolverine could take out a Sentinel all by himself, at least not that quickly. Second of all, it looked like crap.
• They made Psylocke and Multiple Man villains, and they didn’t even have the decency to let us see Psylocke’s psi-blade.
• How unceremoniously they killed of Cyclops. I don’t know whether to blame FOX and their spiteful ways, or Halle Berry and her insistence on having a bigger role in this installment if she was going to come back. I’m inclined to blame them all and hate them equally.
• The slightly less, but still unceremonious killing of Professor Xavier. Having Wolverine fall to his knees crying did not make it a dramatic moment. It just made it funny.
• The fact that they took away all of Professor Xavier’s ethics. Putting up mental blocks in Jean’s mind? Setting up shop in someone else’s body? So wrong. I know Xavier acts like a douchebag in the comic books now, but it has been earned and developed over years. The Xavier of this movie apparently never thought anything of playing around in other people’s heads. He’s why people are anti-mutant.
• Did Storm kill Callisto? Why not? Apparently none of the ideals of the X-Men have any meaning in this movie anyway. In the comic books, Storm defeated Callisto without her powers and refused to kill her, even though it was technically a battle to the death for control of the Morlocks (which Storm needed to win in order to save the lives of her fellow X-Men). It was Storm’s defining moment, and established her as truly worthy to lead the X-Men. This movie just insisted on making a mockery of all the great X-Men moments though. Why should Storm come off any better? She’s already being played by Halle Berry.
• Rogue taking the mutant cure. What the fuck? For the sake of their stupid Dawson’s Creek subplot? Bullshit!
• Beast using the mutant cure on Magneto. I assume this was the plan that they worked out as a team. So as a team, Storm, Beast, and Wolverine decided to go against everything Xavier stood for and for the cure on someone?
• Jean Grey does not have a split personality. She is possessed by the Phoenix Force. Jean Grey is not just some crazy freak. And in the end, they even take a way her moment of self sacrifice to once again make it all about Wolverine. I hated that the most. Maybe. No, I still hated them killing Cyclops the most. The character assassination of Jean Grey comes in second.

Things I Actually Liked:

• Angel – When he was flying he looked good, and the character was true to form. Warren is a rich kid, dearly loves to fly and would never give up that freedom, and he even got to have an unperverted hero moment hero moment when he saved his father.
• Kittie Pryde – I thought the actress was pretty good and the characterization, what little there was of it, was good too. Don’t know about her calling Juggernaut a dickhead though.
• Leech – I just liked that they even mentioned him, let alone had him in the movie.
• Beast – Kelsey Grammer was great. And they had him say “Oh my stars and garters.” That made the geek in me smile. I also thought it looked really great when he was fighting. It was all very Beast-like. And Wolvie called him furball too, which I also liked a lot.
• The Fastball Special
• Bobby getting all iced up – it looked like crap, but after 3 movies, it was about damn time we got to see Iceman really be Iceman.
• When Wolverine was fighting that guy whose arms kept growing back, and then he just kicked him in the groin and said “Grow those back.” Heh. That was Wolverine.
• The fact that they killed Cyclops so early in the movie – yes it’s my most hated thing about the movie, but the fact that he died so early meant that they couldn’t have him do something completely out of character like join Magneto or something. I really think they would have done that.
• I suppose it was a good summer popcorn flick if you didn’t care about any of the characters or the stories the movie was supposedly based on.

OK, so did I miss anything? Is there good stuff I overlooked? Is there bad stuff I blocked out? Am I completely off? Let me know what you think.