OH MAN, I'M SUCH A GEEK: And so I will have to watch the new X-Men movie again in a non-geekish fashion, because the whole last scene there--I'm giving away the ending now, so watch out--the Professor Frink voice in my head was saying, "Oh jeez, they're just killing Jean because they need to do the whole Phoenix thing later. Where's the Shi'ar? Where's the Starjammers? Why doesn't Bobby get out and just freeze the water?" And my Professor Frink voice didn't even have its history right as I was comparing this Jean Gray death with her sacrificing herself on the Blue Area of the Moon which is all tragic and amazing and everything and not her first, original death, done purely for plot purposes, which this particular death of Jean Gray surely was inspired by. So I was simulatenously too geeky and not geeky enough in my first viewing--smugly lording my incomplete knowledge over the movie I was watching--and so I will have to watch it again, this time as a normal movie-watching human being.

One image that stuck with me was the death of Yuriko, who has the same healing factor, adamantium skeleton and--one assumes, given that Stryker has her doped up to do his bidding--tragic history as Wolverine. They gave Kelly Hu this amazingly pale, perfect face in this movie, which made for an interesting visual contrast during her fight with Wolvie as the cuts on her whitened face--looking nothing like wounds; they were, obviously, computer-generated blood-red lines drawn upon her face (unlike Wolvie, whose wounds always looked visceral, I guess) faded into nothingness. So when Wolvie pumps her full of liquid adamantium and she can't even scream as the slightest adamantium dribbles from the corners of her mouth and her nose and she cries two adamantium tears it was visually impressive--David Mack probably crapped his pants. And impressive that Singer was reserved in this moment when he could've had her head explode or something and gave a character whose history you mostly have to theorize out of thin air and a little knowledge of X-Men mythology some kind of tragic meaning. More than they gave the other megafox sadly dispatched in this movie, Famke Janssen, but as I said above her death is a plot-death. It's the little things that make these two X-Men movies great--little touches where they could've done nothing--and I hope they make a ton of them.