(Reposting this to fix a ghastly formatting error... stupid non-editable comments!)
I guess it's often hard to tell whether a story's deliberately trying to be complex and ambiguous, or if one is simply trying too hard to rationalize a shoddy story. I suspect this often comes down to the degree of trust one has in the creators. In this case, since Brett Ratner has yet to distinguish himself as a director and the scriptwriters are relative newbies, I don't think we need to go out of our way to look for deeper levels of meaning.
Still, I think there's some basis for thinking that the creators are deliberately calling Xavier's actions into question. Wolverine seems to take a pretty dim view of Xavier's judgement - I recall some grumbling from him about how animals don't take kindly to being caged - and I think the audience is expected to take his side over Xavier's. The fact that Jean eventually goes into full psychic meltdown seems to vindicate Xavier's dire warnings, but if Wolverine is to be believed, repressing this side of her personality has only made it that much worse.
The problem, of course, is that this "dark side" comes completely out of nowhere. Hookles and I just sat down and rewatched the first two movies, and while the first one has its share of weird hints and strange behavior on Jean's part, her depiction in the second one is so spirited and confident and unabashedly heroic that the notion of a repressed evil persona seems kind of bonkers.
Be that as it may, I didn't feel that the filmmakers were putting Xavier in a terribly saintly light. Even his post-credits resurrection shows him blithely stepping over something that Xavier himself had earlier identified as a pretty questionable ethical line. And meanwhile, I thought Magneto came off rather well in some respects; his insistence that Jean doesn't need to be "fixed" or controlled echoes the sentiments of all right-thinking mutants regarding the prospect of being "cured," and his agenda here is very much one of mutant self-defense rather than a crackpot scheme to mutant-ize world leaders or explode the heads of the entire Homo Sapien population. Of course, his ruthless methods tend to undercut his noble goals, but that seems consistent with the previous movies.
Once again, I've blathered on and on about Jean and Xavier and Magneto, but when it comes to Rogue and Iceman and Pyro I think I'll just agree with you. I was really hoping that Rogue would end her reunion with Bobby with a firm "goodbye," confirming that she took the cure for her own sake rather than his, but instead I'll just have to settle for my shippy conviction that studly Colossus will catch her on the rebound. :-)
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I guess it's often hard to tell whether a story's deliberately trying to be complex and ambiguous, or if one is simply trying too hard to rationalize a shoddy story. I suspect this often comes down to the degree of trust one has in the creators. In this case, since Brett Ratner has yet to distinguish himself as a director and the scriptwriters are relative newbies, I don't think we need to go out of our way to look for deeper levels of meaning.
Still, I think there's some basis for thinking that the creators are deliberately calling Xavier's actions into question. Wolverine seems to take a pretty dim view of Xavier's judgement - I recall some grumbling from him about how animals don't take kindly to being caged - and I think the audience is expected to take his side over Xavier's. The fact that Jean eventually goes into full psychic meltdown seems to vindicate Xavier's dire warnings, but if Wolverine is to be believed, repressing this side of her personality has only made it that much worse.
The problem, of course, is that this "dark side" comes completely out of nowhere. Hookles and I just sat down and rewatched the first two movies, and while the first one has its share of weird hints and strange behavior on Jean's part, her depiction in the second one is so spirited and confident and unabashedly heroic that the notion of a repressed evil persona seems kind of bonkers.
Be that as it may, I didn't feel that the filmmakers were putting Xavier in a terribly saintly light. Even his post-credits resurrection shows him blithely stepping over something that Xavier himself had earlier identified as a pretty questionable ethical line. And meanwhile, I thought Magneto came off rather well in some respects; his insistence that Jean doesn't need to be "fixed" or controlled echoes the sentiments of all right-thinking mutants regarding the prospect of being "cured," and his agenda here is very much one of mutant self-defense rather than a crackpot scheme to mutant-ize world leaders or explode the heads of the entire Homo Sapien population. Of course, his ruthless methods tend to undercut his noble goals, but that seems consistent with the previous movies.
Once again, I've blathered on and on about Jean and Xavier and Magneto, but when it comes to Rogue and Iceman and Pyro I think I'll just agree with you. I was really hoping that Rogue would end her reunion with Bobby with a firm "goodbye," confirming that she took the cure for her own sake rather than his, but instead I'll just have to settle for my shippy conviction that studly Colossus will catch her on the rebound. :-)