Don't let it control you.

I've had lots of discussion about X-Men 3 with my boss. He's a big X-Men fan and has followed all the comics, knows the characters, and is familiar with the world events and storylines. I've read at most half a dozen of the comic books and just have a casual understanding of the characters (for the main characters I know their powers, the basics of their personality archtypes, and if any of them are related to eachother.) He absolutely hated this movie, I thought it was pretty good.

To be clear, it wasn't as good as either of the first two. This movie misses the direction of Bryan Singer and loses it's way a bit. Some of the transitions are a bit harsh and the set pieces a little overdone. But for this is one of those "fun ride" kinds of summer movies, and it succeeds at that goal.

However, according to my boss, it doesn't at all stick to X-Men cannon. A selection of complaints: it botches the phoenix force stuff, it's casual about killing off important characters, it doesn't properly display the motivations for several characters (most notably, Collosus), and it uses more characters than it needs just to use them (I sort of agree with this point.) Essentially what's going on here is the movie just took what it wanted of the X-Men world and didn't really worry about being consistent or true to the rest of it. This means that for very casual X-Men fans like myself they ended up making a pretty good movie. But for more serious fans like my boss they made something he can't enjoy because it's so far from the stories.

This is where Singer is missed the most. He was such a comic book fan that he was able to make a movie that varied a little from the cannon (in order to make a good movie) but not so much as to piss off the hard core fans.

Aside from all that the biggest take away I had from X-Men 3 is that special effects have really turned the corner. Not too long ago (think Jurassic Park) we'd think effects were remarkable when we'd watch fully effect generated creatures or scenes and think they looked believable. Now the mark of excellent effects is when you don't even notice that they're effects. There was only one time in this movie where I was reminded that effects were going on (when Wolverine grabs Cyclop's glasses while they're floating in mid air.) The rest of the time I just watched and enjoyed. Things like Jean transforming into the Phoenix force and dissentigrating people just looked *natural*. Like they had actually managed to make that happen and film it. The whole thing just flowed seamlessly.

Yay for the power of computing and the skill of talented artists...

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