X-Men: The Last Stand

Okay, so I finally went and saw the third X-Men movie on Thursday and then again today(yay for having a friend who's one of the managers at a theater :). I think that I was kind of putting it off, even though I'm a big fan of the X-Men series, because I really like what Bryan Singer did w/ the first two and didn't think that the new guy, Brett Ratner could do as good of a job. Well, I was right, but Ratner did manage to exceed my expectations a little. What I loved about Singer's directing style was that he really worked to give the audience an insight into the characters' lives. Like when John/Pyro was at the Drakes' house in X2 and we saw him looking wistfully at the family pictures, so it almost makes you think that he may have had a rough life which might've led him to teaming up w/ Magneto. And then in the deleted scenes, there was a little clip w/ Jubilee that Singer really wanted to include, but couldn't for the purpose of time.

Anyways, I went into this new movie w/ fairly low expectations. I do agree w/ what people said about Ratner trying to fit too much in. The movie was only a little longer than an hour and a half, so there was room to elaborate on the material that was already in it. I wouldn't have minded a bit if it was like two to two and a half hours long. I mean, Return of the King was a good three hours. Quite a few new characters were introduced and I felt like we didn't really get to know too much about them or their powers, they were just kind of there. Several of the previously established characters were hardly used at all. Couldn't they have allowed Jubilee to graduate to being one of the X-Men like Colossus did? What about Artie, Siryn and the blinking boy who can control the TV, they were only shown in the classroom w/ Xavier near the beginning of the movie for barely a minute. I've always felt that Cyclops has been underused throughout the movies, so...whoops, I'm attempting to not include too many spoilers in this blog, so let's just say that once again, Cyclops was hardly in the movie. Some good points: great special effects; nice storyline about Jean/Phoenix; Ratner did a good job of leaving it open for a possible fourth(though I'm not really expecting there to be one); and Eric Dane, who played Multiple Man, was extremely pleasant to look at. Bottom line - a bit of a let down, but not a complete waste, for what's thought to be the final installment of the X-Men movie series. Of course, we can blame Singer for up and leaving to direct Superman Returns. I do have to give Ratner props for doing as well as he did, because it has got to be tough to do the final movie in a series after the original director did such an amazing job w/ the first two movies.