X-men 3 thoughts (chock full of hot spoiler-y action)

Things I liked about X-Men: The Last Stand
- The beginning. Man, that was some good beginning, with the ultra-powerful child Jean and poor Warren trying so hard to be not-a-mutant.
- The ending. Good God, that last scene with Magneto thrilled me. It was enough to make me forget how annoyed I was with the conclusion otherwise.
- The way Magneto left Mystique, naked and sobbing, on the floor of the prison truck. That said more about his character than any scene of him preaching about the human menace.
- How Magneto defended Xavier when Pyro said he wanted to kill him. (Magneto, why do you put up with that stupid punk? Is it just so you can turn cars into exploding projectile weapons?)
- Pretty much anything with Magneto was good, actually.
- Seeing the X-men's special fighting styles. There wasn't nearly enough of that in this movie, but when it was there, it was a joy to watch - especially with the new characters.
- Scott turning into another Wolverine, sort of, over grief for Jean.
- Hank! The intelligence! The one-liners! The fighting!
- Kitty! Such a spunky lass, and able to think on her feet! She'll outlive them all.

Things I didn't like about X-Men: The Last Stand
- Jean Gray's hair. Remember how in the first two movies, it was, like, kinda red, and it coulda been natural? Now it's RRRRRREEEEEEEDDDDDDD, in a way I've never seen in nature, plus it looked like maybe they had forgotten about the whole red hair thing until the night before they started shooting, and then they ran out to Meijer and bought six boxes of Crimson Glow, because in Jean's first scene, you can still see the hair dye on her scalp.
- Dark Phoenix's look. Come on, guys. Evil, veiny women with black eyes is sooo Dark Willow.
- When Mystique actually said, "Don't call me by my slave name." We get it, X-men, you're an allegory for racism, we get it.
- The cliches! They're all here, from "What have I done?" to "Then may God help us" to "If they want a war, we'll give 'em one" to "My ... God!" My favorite movie cliche even makes an appearance: "No, Dad. This is what YOU wanted." Give me Hank McCoy's oath, "Oh, my stars and garters!" any day.
- The movie didn't feel very cohesive. It consisted of a whole buch of cool scenes strung together in no very particular order - like when Bobby's at the mutant cure clinic looking for Rogue, and then Pyro is there, and then he blows it up or something, and then it's the next day and THEN Rogue gets in line at the clinic, which I guess wasn't so blown-up after all.
- 800,000 pointless new mutants. In this movie are probably a dozen new mutants, and so many of them have only three scenes: They show up and demonstrate their powers; they use their powers to provide a joke or a fight; they die. Sure, the scene with Multiple Man acting as a decoy was cool and all, but if that's really all he's going to do, maybe that scene could've just been a special feature on the DVD? And since Angel is so essential to the plot, maybe we could learn a little more about his plight - about how he's torn between wanting to please his father and being his winged self. And do we even know who that third mutant was who was hanging out with Callisto and Quill? Oh, well, she's dead now.
- Really? We needed the thing with the Golden Gate Bridge? That was essential to the plot and something Magneto would actually do, and not just an excuse to have a really huge special-effects scene? OK, just checking.
- All the death. Maybe I'm not remembering things properly, but I'm pretty sure you could count all the deaths in X-men 1 & 2 on two hands. In this one - DEATH! Lots and lots of pointy desintegrate-y falling from high places firey crushing DEATH! And all of it was, for the most part, pointless! (So, just out of curiosity, who's going to be the X-men now? There's, like, two people left.)
- Tiny snarky point: Kitty says she misses the first snow of winter. Is Westchester, N.Y. secretly a tropical paradise, or is Kitty from Alaska?