Although most reviews were claiming the 'final' instalment of the X-Men trilogy was a bit weaker than the other two, I thought it was still fairly kick-arse. It was an extremely successful Marvel film and I enjoyed it loads.
Visually, the film was very pretty from the crisp, clean tones of the Xavier Insitute to the dilapidated New York church everything was lifted almost straight off the pages of the comic book.
Thematically, the X-Men comics have always been a bit more intelligent than the average comic book. The interesting thing is that these super-heroes are always presented as flawed characters (Wolverine is not your typical holier-than-thou hero for example). And the issues dealt with within the comics are never black and white, everything is always shades of grey.
And so is it with this film - the ethical question of the mutant 'cure' finds parallels in the questionable actions of Professor X's interfering with Jean Grey's subconscious. And of course there are no easy answers.
As the final part in the trilogy anything could happen: the bold decision was made to kill off certain major characters. This felt a little strange - it was quite near to the beginning and perhaps not enough time or importance was given to the deaths. Now, Jean Grey dies on average once every 6 months but it is not usually the same for the rest of the X-Men.
One of the problems I had with this was it did feel rushed. Not enough time was given to explore new characters - for example Callisto (who I don't even think was given a name) and in particular Angel. So much more could have been made of his relationship with his father, seeing as it was the catalyst for this whole 'cure' business. Also - Angel was one of the five original X-Men; it was nice to see the Beast finally making an appearance but no time at all was given to Angel.
One more thing which made this film fantastic was the superb performance of Ian McKellen. He can bring credibility and gravitas to any role (as his brief soap career shows) and so every scene featuring Magneto was a joy to watch.
The fight scenes were excellent (really violent, but dealt with well), and there was some terribly cheesy dialogue, but this was all in the spirit of the comics and so was allowed. The only other complaints I could have would be the differences between the backstory of the films and the comics but that would make me a big big nerd so I won't list them all here.
Now, I can't really rate this in comparison to other films I've seen here. I thought as a Blockbuster summer action movie it was fab, but maybe shouldn't be compared to other, more worthy, films I've seen this year. So I'll give it Four stars out of Five ****
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