I saw X-Men 3 this past week and I just have to say it was a very good movie. That is, it was a good Hollywood summer blockbuster movie. Solid action, not to long, beautiful people doing beautiful things all made this movie an enjoyable experience. However as a story about the X-Men this movie is an abomination before God and Chris Claremont.

Note: This review contains many many spoilers.

My Background

First off I would like to say that I collected The Uncanny X-men more than any other comic. My first  issue of the Uncanny X-Men was #170, June 1983. It was the issue where storm fought Callisto for the leadership of the Morlocks. Having a superhero who would stab a person thru the heart to save her friends really appealed to me. I bought the back issues all the way up to the end of the Phoenix Saga. They were too expensive so I had to wait and settle for the trade paperback. I was an avid reader for many a year. I even read Claremont’s novel First Flight. I bought into the new mutants from their very beginning. I bought Classic X-men, even when the duplicated comics I already owned. I bought X Factor and Excalibur. I bought all the limited series: Wolverine, Kitty Pride and Wolverine, X-Men/Fantastic Four, X-Men/Avengers, Nightcrawler, Magik,  heck I even bought the Iceman limited series and the crossover with DC’s Teen Titans. I was a total mutant junkie, so I approached the movies with skepticism.

The First Two

When I saw the first movie I will admit to being entertained despite my disappointment. So many key storylines were gutted and left for dead, but overall the movie was good. I can even watch the re runs on TV and enjoy them. (Something I am still unable to do with Peter Jackson’s The Two Towers.) The second movie was also decent. I took issue with a few parts of it but, again, overall it was a good movie. They mutilated Wolverine’s background and cut most of the good parts from the God Loves, Man Kills graphic novel, but it still came out alright.

The Last Stand

Now the 3^rd movie tackled the greatest story ever told in the pages of the X-men. The Phoenix Saga was such a powerful and compelling story that it is only natural that they would want to use it for the movies. Unfortunately they mangled it so bad it was all but unrecognizable. Right from the start there were little things that detracted from it’s authenticity. Wolverine towering over Storm in the hallway outside the Danger Room was just the first. But accepting all that as inevitable there still was the problem of the changes to the core Phoenix storyline. The Phoenix Force was a cosmic entity that struck a bargain with Jean Grey, not an alternate personality. As Phoenix she continues to serve with the X-men for several issues. It is only after she is subtly manipulated by the villain Mastermind that she turns to the dark side and becomes Dark Phoenix. In the movie it is almost as if she is a zombie. She comes back from the dead but never acts normal so it is like they are fighting a monster, not a friend. In the original story Xavier did confront Dark Phoenix and prevailed. He brings her back  and doesn’t die in the attempt. Speaking of death it is outrageous that they had Phoenix kill Scott. If there was any one character that she wouldn’t kill it would be him. He is the one person who can reach her. Wolverine, being the main character of the movies, has to be the one to kill Phoenix in the end. This also goes against the books. Even when he recognizes the threat she poses he is incapable of killing her. She is forced to commit suicide. In the movie Phoenix kills a couple of hundred people while in the books she consumes a star causing it to go supernova and destroy a world with over 5 billion inhabitants. Of course this is offset by the fact that as an X-Man, before becoming Dark Phoenix, she saved the whole universe. Whenever Phoenix used her power there was a firey bird manifestation around her. In this modern age I expected a glorious CGI effect for this. They completely ignored it.

The whole B story about the mutant cure was unnecessary and poorly handled. One of the key themes in the comic books is that there is nothing wrong with being a mutant.. Between Rogue undergoing the treatment and the governments use of it as a weapon, it is if the movie makers were saying that it is better to be able to “cure” mutants. The  last scene with Magneto is their way of tying it up: “See there is no need to worry about all that, the cure wares off.” But even if it was executed flawlessly it still would have been unnecessary. The Phoenix Saga alone has so much substance to it that they could have left out this subplot entirely.