Alright, I finally had a chance to go through and watch the new X-Men DVD, X-Men: The Last Stand, and I thought I'd talk about a few things... this won't be so much a formal review of the DVD... just some stuff that popped into my head while watching it... especially since you already know how I feel about the film (in a nutshell, not as bad a disaster as everyone expected, but not great).
The DVD has a cute gimmick where Magneto and Storm battle it out for control of your menu choices... you can choose to join Maggie's Brotherhood or you can side with the X-Men. Once you pick, the menu choices are either happy hero graphics or evil villain graphics. I don't think it has any bearing on anything else, at least as far as I could tell.
The picture quality on the DVD is very good... looking better to my eyes than it did in the theater. The colors appeared a bit more vivid as well, which seems a conscious choice especially when you look at the DVD art.
There are about a dozen deleted scenes, and most of them are throw-aways, and almost all of them are short, but there are some interesting moments. We get more of Juggernaut kicking (literally) Wolverine around in the fight at Jean Grey's house. We also get a cool shot of Wolvie's claws going into Juggy's arms and coming out the other side, with Juggernaut not being very happy about it. The fight between them ends in a completely goofy scene where storm zaps Wolverine's claws on his left hand with lightning, and the current travels through his body and out his right-hand claws, which are connected with Juggernaut's metal helmet, which fries his head.
There's also a bit that was chopped out of the scene with Bobby and Kitty skating on the ice, in which they actually do kiss, which Rogue witnesses. It has a lot to do with explaining her actions in the film, and in the director's commentary they explain that one of the reasons they cut it out was because although Ellen Page, who plays Kitty, is 18, she looks VERY young and it was a bit creepy.
They also had an alternate ending with Wolverine, where he goes back to Alberta, specifically to the bar where he was doing the cage matches in during the first film, and meets the same bar owner again. It was a nice denoument to the series as a trilogy and set us up for the Wolverine spin-off, but again, they decided against including it in the final product.
As I listened to the director's commentary, I was struck with the sense that Ratner, while a fan, and certainly happy to be part of the project, did not have the same reverence for the material that Bryan Singer did. It makes me wonder what the 3rd Singer X-Men film would have been like, and after seeing Superman Returns, one is left wondering, "was it all worth it?" Petty, I know... but still... one DOES wonder. But the irreverence comes into play in not only the commentary but in the language (which I talked about in my interview) as well as a deleted scene where Mystique is pretending to be the President in her mobile jail cell, and the guard says "Mr. President... shut the FUCK up!" I think PG-13 allows one "F-bomb," but as a mother, I'm really glad they left this one out. I had a hard enough time with Juggernaut calling Kitty a "bitch" in the finished film. I think the director's sometimes forget that there are children who watch these films and revere their heroes, just like we did with the actual comic books all those years ago.
Along those same lines, they also show some scenes of the X-Men behaving in very unheroic behavior, with Iceman freezing Phat and having Colossus punch him into smithereens, and Beast breaking the neck of some anonymous Brotherhood member in the big battle at the end. Again, wisely cut.
Anyway, I also thought that they missed a golden opportunity for a really great scene with Wolverine that would show off his healing factor. It would have been cool to see him injected with the Mutant Cure, collapse to the ground, and then zoom into his body "CSI-style" to watch the virus try to compromise his healing factor, and then watch his healing factor kick in to combat the vaccine. It would give us a really cool way to see just how powerful his healing factor is, completely destroying the vaccine... then we could zoom back out of his body and watch him get that "you picked the wrong guy, Bub" look on his face. Tell me that wouldn't have had audiences cheering!
So anyway, those are my initial impressions of the disc. I bought the regular widescreen edition. The collector's edition had the same disc but an additional booklet and a comic written by Stan "The Man" Lee himself, with some additional classic X-Men tales. With having to buy the Little Mermaid out as well, I didn't splurge on the more expensive edition, so I got nothin' to tell you there.
