X-Men 3

Spoiler:

This movie reeked of being built around special effects, at the expense of everything else. It's like they made the movie by saying "oh that would look so cool...let's put that in." After they'd had enough scenes to "wow" the audience then they put in everything else built around that. And boy did it show...everything else fell completely by the wayside...character development, plot, dialogue, editing, pacing, even music. Whenever I was paying attention to the music I was thinking, "What the heck is this? This sounds totally banal and is adding absolutely nothing to the experience." There's only one time the music struck me as being good and fitting, I'm not sure exactly where but it was a sad theme, perhaps for Xavier's funeral.

X-Men 1 began centered around Wolverine and Rogue. Rogue virtually disappears in this movie. Wolverine's still around plenty, but clearly the movie is pushing Storm as the lead X-Man now, maybe due to Halle Berry's strongarming. The scene where Mystique loses her powers was horrifyingly idiotic and mishandled, mainly because Magneto is SO abruptly out of character it was laughable, considering their relationship in the previous 2 movies and Mystique's role in those films. In a scene maybe a minute long Brett managed to basically say "die k thx bye!" to her character and everything the first 2 films built for her, and we don't see her again except for a few seconds later helping out the good guys. The sheer audacity with which he just dismisses already well-developed characters left and right while adding new ones which are pathetically underdeveloped is ...well, not good.

Jean Gray/Phoenix -- holy crap, I swear there was more time showing her just STANDING AROUND than anything else. "Oh I'm just going to stand here. Then I'll finally decide I want to start wreaking havoc at the appropriate time when the movie needs a really fancy SFX scene to bring the movie to a climax." Dark Phoenix looked more like an undead creature. Certainly creepy, but not very phoenix-y to me.

Geez, so many things were just so poorly handled and seemed like afterthought. The Iceman/Pyro duel lasted what, a minute or less? Angel has about 3 minutes of screen time. Juggernaut is an absolute joke. Colossus' main role in this movie is to throw Wolverine.

The dialogue was cheesy/poor probably more of the time than it was not, all of the emotional moments seemed to ring false.

How did Magneto manage to appear on TV making a terrorist threat against the nation, do all of what he did, and then he's suddenly in a park with lots of people at the end of the movie and nobody seems to even know who he is? Wouldn't there be like, a massive manhunt going on for him?

What's even more stupid is how by the end of the film, Ratner is basically trying to say "ok maybe I really didn't want to do that" -- he leaves the door open for all of the "deaths" to turn out otherwise. We don't REALLY see Cyclops die. Jean is the "phoenix" who can rise again if she wants to. The scene after the credits shows Xavier's mind in another body. He doesn't even have the guts to really make those deaths a certainty.

The sole good I find here is in Beast, who is a new character who at least gets enough screen time and development to work reasonably well.

Apparently, the scriptwriters removed their names from the script (they're not listed on the movie's imdb page anymore). Maybe Ratner departed from it so much that they were disgusted and didn't feel like it was the movie they wrote.

This doesn't feel like it's even in the same league as the first two movies. Oh well. Unfortunately eye candy is all a lot of people want out of their movies these days if the opening day gross says anything.

Jam it back in, in the dark.