I watched it on opening day during my extended lunch hour. 🙂 A coworker and I just slipped out, picked up Robin, and went to the movies and lunch for 3 hours…

The movie was good. In terms of action it was grittier than the first, scarier in showing the raw power of some of these mutants. In terms of story, well it was okay. When I saw that William Stryker was in the movie, I was really looking forward to the Sentinels, but that didn’t happen.

They’ve introduced a few new mutants (Nightcrawler, Deathstrike, Iceman, Pyro), but that sort of makes up for the fact that some of them from the last movie are gone (Sabertooth, Toad). The biggest problem about the first movie I thought was that it didn’t go into all of the characters enough and spent too much time on Wolverine. Well, this movie is a slight improvement in balancing out who is featured, but it also short-changes some of the roles, and I mean really, really short-changes them. Cyclops is in the movie for maybe 15 minutes, Nightcrawler has a great intro and then just sort of gets dropped, Deathstrike has like one line in the whole movie which is a shame since Kelly Hu is at least as good an actress as Rebecca Romijn-Stamos. The kids Iceman and Pyro make a pretty good introduction but don’t get the same screen time as the adults which is fine and makes sense, but Rogue is given as much a role as them, which when compared to the first movie is slightly disappointing. Storm plays about the same as the first movie, she is just there. Colossus even makes a brief appearance and according to Robin, he was hunky.

Jean is featured pretty well in this movie, which I think doesn’t jive well with Scott’s afore-mentioned 15 minutes. In the comics they are a pair and really have a sort of synergy when teamed together making for a more team-based feel to the X-men. Scott has been given a lesser role in the movies which really sucks since he is supposed to be the in-the-field commander second to Xavier only when out of battle. Xavier depends on him to lead the team in the field. The movie portrayal also gives an unfortunate disbelief in the Jean-Scott-Logan love triangle; who in their right mind would stick with Scott as he is portrayed in the movies?

The X jet plays a pretty big role in the movie, too, which is fine, but it’d be cool if they featured more of the ground vehicles like the motorcycle from the first movie.

So, I thought the first movie should have been about 30 minutes longer and after viewing the deleted scenes on the DVD, I became satisfied. Maybe the same will be true for this movie.

All in all, a good movie, continuing the trend of good adaptations of comics to the big screen, but not as good as say Spider-man. And The Hulk has the potential to be better. I think X-men will really shine as a series if they do make more and continue to focus on different characters each time. The last scene pretty much hints at a sequel with potentially amazing special effects.