X3 Thoughts Part I

The disappointing thing to me about X-Men: Last Stand is that it had such great potential--both the concept of the X-Men in the first place and the specific concept of this movie--but dropped the ball in so many ways. The advantage to having serial characters who are interpreted by hundreds of different creators over the course of half a century is that some of those creators are going to do some pretty darn cool stuff with the characters, things the original creators never dreamed of. An example is the first two X-Men movies, in which Bryan Singer updated the concept for the twenty-first century and told some excellent stories. The disadvantage is that some of the creators are going to do really mediocre things, such as in X3 where instead of dialogue we have an endless string of crappy one-liners and instead of character development we have, well, an endless string of crappy one-liners. And Jean Gray, who was one of the most interesting characters of the first two movies, turned into some chick who stands around looking bored while people talk about how powerful and passionate and insane she is. Blaugh.