> I find myself wondering if large portions which might have brought some substance to the movie ended up on the cutting room floor.

You're right, actually. Singer had to cut a fair amount of footage (all of it being character development / plot advancement type stuff). Supposedly he delivered a 120 minute movie (or so) and was told to cut it to 90. He's denied that too much was cut, but nonetheless the movie that was released was not the movie he originally wanted it to be. Hopefully we'll get this stuff on the DVD release.

> magneto seems to waver between being out and out irrationally evil and simply being extremely misguided but still honorable, at least towards other mutants. this inconsistentcy forms the basis for my major gripe about the movie:

When exactly does he act "out and out irrationally evil?" He kills some civillians and what not, but this is consistant with his basic view (and remember he's approaching it from a very "the ends justify the means" perspective). Magneto isn't out and out evil to any great extent. He's certainly a villain, but he's not your standard evil villian bent on world domination for no particular reason.

>
> why wasn't there any interaction between rogue and magneto? she's hardly defenseless, and it's hard to believe that after she was captured she was unable to make any sort of escape attempt.

Well, she was pretty much tied up and whatnot which does make her defenseless (about to go into comic geek mode -- realize that she doesn't have any of her super strength or flying powers in the movie like she does in the cartoon or later on in the comic series... these come from her battle with Ms. Marvel), but I agree that there should have been more interaction.

> also, when magneto forced rogue to take his powers, either rogue should have not gained enough power to power the machine, or magneto should have been weakened to the point where rogue could use his power againt him to escape.

Why? Let's say he gave her enough power to escape -- this doesn't mean that she'd have any idea how to *use* them. A big part of the whole X-Men thing is that these powers are difficult to use and control (note that someone like Cyclops can't really do it at all).

> and it would have been really nice if rogue and magneto had some sort of conversation; perhaps if after rogue had been captured, magneto had attempted to persuade her to help him willingly. with a little bit of psychological manipulation on his part (which worked easily enough earlier) he could have pulled it off- and then rogue wouldn't have even WANTED to be rescued, which would have made for a far more interesting ending.

Agreed. We really didn't get to see enough of the disagreement between the philosophies of Xavier and Magneto, which is one of the central points of the entire X-Men series (using peaceful methods to obtain change versus violence). If Magneto had been given the oppurtunity to make a case for himself, there would've been more weight to the movie as a whole. We never really got to see mutants being oppressed in any way, so it was hard to empathize with the bad guys.

>
> thoughts?

Overall, I really liked it. I'm not a huge X-Men fan in general (I've read some of the comics and understand the basic continuity), and I really expected this movie to suck. What we got though was something which for the most part captured the spirit of the X-Men: it had some good action, some memorable characters and was pretty intelligent (as far as summer action pictures go). It also managed to have a fairly unique style of its own without dramatically altering some of the core themes of the source material (I'm looking at the whole Batman movie franchise here). I really respect Bryan Singer for being able to pull it off, considering that he had to satisfy both fans of the comics as well as a general audience (and seems to have succeeded), while at the same time dealing with a studio that didn't want to put as much money into the movie as they should have (not to mention forcing him to cut it up a bit).

When all is said is done, X-Men is almost certainly the best comic book movie ever made (unless you want to start talking about manga to anime adaptions), and with the huge success of this movie we should hopefully be able to see better such adaptations in the future (not to mention the sequel, which I'm really hoping will use the "Days of Future Past" storyline).

Stephen