X-Men: Maybe the penultimate stand?

I have a few movies on which I've been meaning to blog, so I'll get these out of the way today. (I'm doing this one as I'm finishing a numerical simulation, which may finally put an end to the surgery... Then again, I just saw the results of that and I still need to do a bit more tweaking---damnit! Now I'm going to be stuck here for a while longer.)

Yesterday afternoon, I took a temporary respite from pain (although I was already stressing about a newer project) to watch X-Men: The Last Stand and to play some board games with the gang.

X-Men was very cool, although there is certainly a substantial 'more of the same' aspect to it. I can't really say whether I liked it better or worse than its two prequels, but I enjoyed it a great deal and it was definitely the right type of movie given recent events. Something mindless and fun was definitely what the psychiatrist ordered. Also, Juggernaut was awesome, and his chase scene with Kitty (Shadowcat, but I don't think they actually mentioned this in the movie...IMDB mentions it) in which she goes repeatedly through walls and that he breaks through them was the highlight of the movie for me.

Now, there are some things in the movie that lead one to believe very strongly that this won't actually be the last stand. This naturally, assumes that the movie makes enough money, which doesn't look like it's going to be any sort of problem.

First, this based on a comic book and people come back from apparent death all the time. If you don't want to see spoilers, you should stop read right now.




OK, so here are some spoilers related to things to be dealt with for sequels that retain characters:

1. Professor Xavier's body was apparently obliterated by Jean Gray. However, much earlier in the movie (as (Mike)^2 pointed out), he explicitly discussed possible means to put someone's mind into an inactive body, so he can get "resurrected" that way.

2. Cyclops supposedly dies, but we never actually see him die, so obviously there's a way for him to come back.

3. Jean Gray dies (again), but it's apparently inevitable that she'll find a way to come back. (I remember Lorian mentioned this always happens in the comic books, but this isn't the first time she died in the movies and it may not be the last.)

4. Magneto loses his powers (supposedly permanently), but he's just starting to get them back at the very end of the film. This is easy to reconcile, though. Scientists were just wrong about the "cure" for mutation (or 'mutantism', as it were) being "permanent" and it's just less permanent than they thought it would be. Things like that happen in real life all the time.