Headscratchers / X2: X-Men United

That must be the most high-functional lobotomee in the world.

• We know that Stryker lobotomizes Jason to render him non-hostile and to better control him. How does that not make Jason totally useless? IIRC, a human's frontal lobe is vital for decision-making, speech, creativity, etc. Jason shouldn't be able to speak in his projected visions as well as in the real world (as his inability to speak have nothing to do with his larynx), let alone creating all those sophisticated hallucinations, after what is done to him.
  • A lobotomy that leaves the patient a vegetable is a failed and overly aggressive lobotomy. The intended goal of such a procedure was to leave the person more docile than they had been before . There was a time when lobotomies were the popular, if extremely unethical way to maintain control over a troublesome person without having to lock them up forever or kill them.

Why this time he didn't catch her scent?

• A scene has Mystique trying to seduce Logan disguised as Jean, and later as other characters before Wolvie fires her. In the first movie, he easily sniffed her two times, and can tell if she is actually her disguised, only by recognizing her scent. Why this time he does not?
  • Maybe his senses are heightened by adrenaline. In the first movie he was ready to fight and his sense of smell was great. In this movie he's feeling calm and getting ready for bed and so his sense of smell isn't that great. And/or Mystique might have spent some time learning how to make her scent more accurate to her chosen form.

Jason's powers

• Jason Stryker's power is to cast an illusion which let the victims keep full control of their actions but manipulates their entire awarness. But the drug that comes from his brain fluid controls every action made by the victims, yet they are able to percept every action they are forced to make. That's two completely different powers, people.
  • Your point is? Will you be shocked to find out that different parts of the same plant can each have their own completely different effects?
  • It's possible that the mind-control drug is a side effect of his power and is only able to be used because his father is removing it himself. Sort of like a chemical produced because of his illusions, but normally it wouldn't be used in any way.
    • It could also be that it was merely the raw product, which was later refined into a mind-control drug.

Wolverine's healing

• How does Wolverine's healing factor not push his adamantium skeleton and claws out of his body, like the bullet in his head is pushed out in the second film?
  • Because the adamantium is bonded with his bones, and his healing factor isn't powerful enough to rip his bones apart in order to expel a foreign object. It's worth noting that in the comics Wolverine's original adamantium skeleton reduced the effectiveness of his healing factor because they were constantly in conflict. After he lost the adamantium, the first attempt at replacing it ended catastrophically when his healing factor literally fired the not-yet-bonded adamantium out of his body as shrapnel, killing several unimportant supervillain mooks.
  • The bullet doesn't penetrate Logan's head at all, beyond the bit of flesh on his forehead. Adamantium is indestructible; when Logan is shot in the head his skull stops the bullet, it is just the concussion that knocks him out. Presumably it is just Logan's flesh which is holding the bullet in his forehead before the skin is healed and pushes the bullet out.
    • How did he manage to completely recover from a concussion so quickly, and, coincidentally, at the exact same time the bullet was pushed out?
    • You're asking how that guy with the super accelerated healing factor that lets him heal grievous physical injuries in seconds recovered from a physical injury in seconds? Yeah, I have no idea either.
  • Alternately what if it was Jean's telekinesis pushing the bullet out? Her powers have certainly been growing, so that's not outside the realm of possibility.
    • Fairly sure Jean wasn't there at the point when he got shot; she arrived later.

Mutant combat gear

• Why were the marines who attacked the mansion early in the movie wearing forest camo make-up but not wearing matching camo clothes and gear?
  • And for that matter, why were they wearing any camo at all? They were carried in by helicopters and gunships, any attempt at subterfuge afterwards is absurd.
    • Psychological reasons, probably. They're capturing a bunch of kids, but they're highly dangerous kids. Anything that scares them enough that they curl up and surrender is a good outcome. Also, for the soldiers' own morale. Putting on your "war paint" to psyche yourself up for a battle is as old as war.
    • You are mis-remembering the scene. A small team did infiltrate the mansion quietly and try to subdue the kids without waking them up. The helicopters landed after their cover was blown, bringing a second team.
    • Actually "urban camouflage" is very real, however the colors were wrong for that. We have to assume that either the infiltration team came in through the woods, or the costume designers just thought "camouflage is black and green" and left it at that.
  • Possibly the camo was intended to help them leave the mansion by sneaking cross-country in the event that the helicopters couldn't come back to retrieve them. Plenty of mutants can take down a helicopter, after all.

Jean's sacrifice

• Why, exactly, was Jean sacrificing herself 'the only way'? She could've done all that she did from the ship. Hell, Iceman could have set up an ice wall around the ship. She could have let Nightcrawler grab her at the last second, before dropping the wall. Storm could have lifted up the ship with her powers. Her death just seems a bit... contrived.
  • While it was fairly contrived, you're ignoring the established limitations of the characters. Jean moves objects; she doesn't move herself, or, logically, anything she's sitting inside. Iceman took a couple of seconds to freeze a cup of tea; how quickly do you think he could have frozen several million gallons of water, moving at high speed? Nightcrawler would have been able to grab her if the water had been the only threat, but she was visibly burning up by the time she got the jet off the ground (which detail would probably have caused complications if she had been able to lift it from the inside). And Storm, like Iceman, had shown no sign of that kind of power level or, indeed, fine control — earlier in the film she could make tornadoes, but she sure as hell couldn't stop the jet from falling out of the sky.
    • Nitpick: Nightcrawler likely wouldn't have been able to grab her as he does horizontal teleportation a lot easier than vertical, and with the jet pitching around and such he would have had to have been preternaturally accurate to not teleport into the flight deck, or some other solid matter and kill himself and everyone onboard
    • If he was able to save Rogue from falling out of a plane he should have been able to save Jean.
    • He tried, but Jean was holding him back. Why? Apparently she felt that with the Phoenix awakening she was too dangerous for her friends (and judging by her...interaction with Scot in X3 I can't blame her).
    • I second the above. For everybody complaining about Nightcrawler, there's a very short blink-and-miss scene where Logan yells at Nightcrawler to rescue Jean. When Nightcrawler tries, there's his characteristic teleportation sound and black smoke, but he doesn't move. He then says "She's not letting me."
  • Early on, Jean's evolving powers cause some kind of interference with the bank of televisions in the museum. Presumably, her expanding abilities were causing a similar problem with the jet, which is why it would not start and also why she had to be some distance away in order to get its systems back online.
  • Isn't the most obvious answer that Jean is aware her powers are transforming, she's growing less and less able to keep them under control and is terrified that she'll somehow be consumed by them and put everyone else in danger? Considering she voices her fear and confusion about what's happening to her in her opening scene, and that she very nearly kills Scott, it seems like the decision to let herself be killed in the lake is an attempt to avert what happens anyway in the third movie.
  • And in this continuity, the Phoenix is Jean's split personality. So she knows full well what her own powers are capable of - the flashback to her and Charles's first meeting. So in the heat of the moment, she makes a split decision to both save her friends and prevent herself causing more problems.

Guard with non-fatal metal implanted

• Shouldn't that guard have died of heavy metal poisoning long before getting to work?
  • Probably.
    • Maybe that is why Mystique looked for an overweight guy when she searched trough the guard files, since poisoning works by milligram of poison per kilogram of victim. That way she could inject enough iron for Magneto to use, without killing the guard instantly.
    • I guess it depends on how much she injected. There's a genetic medical condition called haemochromatosis where your body builds up excess iron, and whilst it's certainly not good for you (it can cause heart and liver failure, diabetes, and arthritis, among other things), it's not instantly fatal - you can live for years without treatment.

Nozzles to deliver gas in Magneto's prison

• There were nozzles in Magneto's prison cell that give out highly effective knock-out gas. That's reasonable, no, brilliant in its simplicity and usefulness. In fact, every time there is a similar premise (a chamber where they need to prevent somebody from entering and/or leaving) but without a knock-out gas dispenser installed, it leaves me screaming: "You idiots, why didn't you install a knock-out gas dispenser?" All the more stupider does it look when while Magneto's escaping they don't use it at all.
  • There weren't even nozzles or "gas dispensers." I think what they were doing was sucking out the oxygen from inside the cell. People faint rather quickly with LITERALLY no oxygen.
  • The reason they didn't use it, if I recall correctly, was incompetence on the part of the guards. They were screwing around instead of paying attention, and when they finally realized that Magneto was escaping, their first (and only) act was to withdraw the bridge. It wouldn't be a proper Cardboard Prison if human resources had hired focused and attentive guards who fully recognized how dangerous the prisoner was.
  • Even aside from that, Magneto's first action (after killing the guard) was to use the metal balls to start blasting holes in the cell's walls and door. Knock-out gas doesn't do a lot of good in a ventilated room.

Mystique's scars

• It hit me as I was trying to get to sleep (after having been reading about TV Tropes, so)—in the scene where Mystique comes to Logan in the tent, and he only knows it's her because of the scars—shouldn't that, like, not have happened? She can turn into anyone, more or less, which means she can alter her features to nearly perfectly mimic anyone. Shouldn't that include smoothing over her scarred skin? I mean, the bumpy-scaly things go away, so...
  • I'd even be fine with the scars being there in her "normal" form. All I can think of is she wanted to be found out, but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense based on how she reacted.
  • He didn't know only because of the scars. He could tell by her scent, remember? Just like in the first movie. I figure she 'left' the scars there on purpose because they don't show up any other time you see her on screen. She was likely trying to taunt him in some way.
    • I'm sure there are forty-twelve ways Logan realized it was her, but the fact that she didn't cover up those scars was a sore point. Recently, however, I had another light bulb moment. She said something to the effect of, "No one's ever left a scar quite like you." Now, I wonder if it wasn't her way to, eh, advertise, perhaps. Since she obviously could smooth over any scar, the fact that she didn't smooth over the ones he left might be—telling.
    • Or her power just doesn't extend far enough to include healing injuries. She still had the injuries from his claws in X1 when she morphed into the security guard; her skin breaks and scars like any other and her shapeshifting only lets her change the color of the skin of the scar but not remove the scar itself.
    • Well that just doesn't make sense, she can change her entire skeletal structure and musculature so that she can look exactly like someone else, but not a break in her skin?
    • Presumably if the wound goes deep enough to penetrate all 3 layers of her epidermis it leaves scar tissue that stays in place from her soft tissue. She can only morph the skin around the injury; what grows back is just scar tissue that is less "malleable" than her normal skin and can change color but not texture.
    • Again: I'm pretty sure she put the scars there in that one scene just to fuck with Logan. She never shows having the scars in any other scene in either the second or third movies.
    • Granted, this might be true from a "makeup-application" perspective but whether or not it was because they really meant it to be Mystique creating the scars or just them not thinking the fans would notice isn't clear.
    • Her shapeshifting abilities is her psionically altering her own cells, she's doesn't scar. She can take injuries, sure, because she doesn't heal instantly, but with her body basically in a constant state of flux, she's not going to scar.
  • Maybe does get scars, and she can smooth them over with her shapeshifting abilities, but it requires more effort to do so. Say her normal form is X, and a desired form is Y, and normally she activates a mental command of "Go from X to Y." But her normal form has a scar now, so the X has become X+1, so the standard mental command results in Y+1, i.e. the desired form with a similar scar. To become Y and not Y+1, she'd have to re-learn the mental process a bit and make it "Go from X+1 to Y."
    • This would be a good one for Word of God to clarify because it could be either they meant to imply she made the scars or the makeup people just decided to hell with continuity on that scene.

Lockdown

• The military base after Mystique has locked herself in the control room. Lady Deathstrike, with her own set of adamantium claws/nails, is RIGHT there! She's clearly got some form of super strength as well (based on how far she throws Wolverine later in the film). It's shown in the series how easily Wolverine can cut through metal bars and other pieces of scenery, so why can Lady Deathstrike not just cut through the door - or, at a pinch, the wall?
  • One note: The door is clearly not adamantium. Not nearly tough enough.
  • The door is at least a foot thick and though Deathstrike's claws might've been long enough, they were more pointy at the end than edged all the way, so they wouldn't have much cutting ability. She might have made a hole big enough for a person to squeeze through. In maybe an hour.

Stryker knowing Logan

• How does Striker tell Logan from Logan!Mystique?
  • Maybe she walks wrong. Maybe she stands wrong. Maybe he just looked in her eyes and knew Wolverine would never look back at him like that. Maybe it was just that he didn't think Wolverine would ever surrender. There's far more to recognising someone than how they look.
  • When you work/live with someone long enough you learn to recognize certain small mannerisms that makes them unique.
  • Wasn't it because he noticed some scars on "Logan's" skin, which should be pretty much impossible, given his healing factor?
  • It was because Logan is an "animal". Mystique was calmly standing there while captured while Logan would be fighting, yelling, or, at the very very least, obnoxious and irritating.
  • He said it himself, he knows Logan because he experimented on him personally.
  • This troper can pick out a friend's speech pattern when they're typing without a visible ID. Same principle with Stryker: intuition based on years of acquaintance.

Nightcrawler teleportation

• When the plane is damaged and Rogue gets sucked out through the hole, Nightcrawler saves her by appearing in the air to catch her and then teleporting BACK INTO THE CRASHING PLANE. What?! On top of that, why does he think to rescue Rogue using his power but doesn't use it to save them all by teleporting them safely to the ground, one by one? It's obvious that his abilities are accurate enough to do this (how else would he have been able to find Rogue when the hole was on the back of the plane and thus his chair was facing the opposite direction, on top of having to anticipate the movement of the vehicle in order to get them both back inside safely?) I just don't get how this part of the story makes any sense. Yes, it's a terrifying situation for all involved, but if he has the presence of mind to catch Rogue and bring her back into the plane, you'd think it would occur to at least one of the team that they could abandon the plane to crash into the wilderness and save their own lives using Nightcrawler's ability.
  • Remember him teleporting himself and Storm into fake Cerebro? He explained he can only make limited jumps and he needs to know what's on the other side or how far he has to go so they don't end up in a wall or whatever. Even in the comics he's limited in how far and how many jumps he can go, presumably in the movie he doesn't have much experience 'porting other people, let alone an entire group either individually or as a bunch. He's in unfamiliar territory and he's already freaked out by being brainwashed into trying to assassinate the President.
    • Also, in the comics, Nightcrawler states that while he can teleport pretty much anywhere in a 2 miles radius, he will reappear with the same speed he had before teleporting. In short, Kurt wouldn't be able to teleport them all to the ground because when they'd reappear, they would still hit the ground with the speed of a falling jet, which, I'm sure, wouldn't be a good thing.
  • How could Nightcrawler touch Rogue without his power being significantly drained?
    • I actually looked out for just that, and his huge coat together with her gloves did prevent any skin-on-skin contact.
  • Nightcrawler takes momentum with him when he teleports. If he'd teleported himself and Rogue to the ground, they'd have gone splat (hell, he even states this outright in the X-Men: Evolution cartoon while in a crashing plane with Kitty). So, he teleported them into a space that was going the same direction as his momentum so that it wouldn't kill them. Notice how he and Rogue are flung from the back of the plane to the front from the force of the momentum of her fall after the teleportation, even with the reverse momentum of the plane lessening it. It was either be squashed with a stranger from a messy fall, or go down with everyone else and at least be with friends for the end (or new friendly acquaintances in Nightcrawler's case).

Drakes had no clue about Bobby

• How could it be that Bobby's parents sent him to Xavier's with no idea that it was either a mutant training school or that Bobby needed the training? Didn't Xavier explain this?
  • Because the X-Men's cover is a conventional boarding school, that presumably offers dirt-cheap rates to anyone with "talent." If they detected Bobby with Cerebro, and came there and found his parents didn't know, they probably would talk to the boy privately about the real score while giving his folks a more standard song and dance regarding chances for higher education, grants, etc.
    • Alternatively (and I don't think the writers intended it but it could be possible) Bobby did reveal his powers and Xavier mind-wiped them, planting fake memories of boarding school as an excuse for why Bobby wasn't around.
  • Or Bobby just wasn't ready to tell his family yet (with good reason considering the stunt Ronny pulled), so he asked Xavier just to say it was a prep school until he was ready.
  • Really, why on earth would Xavier explain it? He's probably had plenty of students who were "in the mutant closet", so to speak. I'd imagine it would be standard practice to initially use coded language to the families ("Your child is very gifted and I run a school which caters to children with particular talents like the one I believe your child has" etc) and if the family acknowledges what the "gift" is, then whoopdedoo everyone's in the know. If not, then as Bobby's family say they think their child is just at a "school for the gifted" and the child is free to choose when and if to "come out" on their own terms.

Storm's past

• Nightcrawler and Storm have this exchange on the Blackbird:
  Nightcrawler: Someone so beautiful should not be so angry all the time.
  Storm: Anger can help you survive.
  Nightcrawler: So can faith.
  • What the hell was that about? Storm never comes across as harboring excessive aggression, repressed or otherwise. Nothing that happens in the movie before or after seems to connect to that piece of dialogue, putting it pretty well into Big-Lipped Alligator Moment territory.
    • They seemed to be setting Storm up to have more of a conflicted belief in Xavier's mission with Sen. Kelly's death scene in 1.
    Kelly: Do you hate normal people?
    Storm: Sometimes.
    Kelly: Why?
    Storm: I suppose...because I'm afraid of them.
    • So I think that was going to be her arc, but they just fumbled it.
  • This is apparently due to Halle Berry wanting more screen time after her massive success. So if the dialogue feels a little out of nowhere, that's because it was added in after the script was finalised.
  • It's probably worth pointing out that people can harbour anger without necessarily showing it. Sometimes even without being consciously aware of it. "Anger" doesn't necessarily equate to "aggression". Maybe she's just fed up that she's in a position to help people (and does so) while they seem to want nothing more than to make life difficult for her and her friends.
  • If Apocalypse is any indication, she had a hard time because her powers ostracized her from her own family and community.

Xavier sensing... what?

• Here's something that's been bugging me. We all know that Jean makes a Heroic Sacrifice in X2 and was thought to be dead. At the end, we get a scene where Professor Xavier is teaching his class when he suddenly stops and looks out his window in awe. A student calls out to him and he turns back, smiling, tells him/her that everything is going to be alright. We then see the Phoenix in the lake indicating that she's still alive. AT the beginning of Last Stand, it appears to be several months after the incident and Cyclops is still mourning over Jean's death. My question is if Professor Xavier knew that Jean is alive, why didn't he send the X-Men back to the lake to search for her?
  • I always assumed that Professor was just thinking about the girl who he's been teaching most of her life who just died, not detecting her presence.

Lack of flares on X-Jet

• Why doesn't the X-Jet have flares? It's not a civilian plane. It may not be armed, but if you're prepared for the eventuality of of being targeted by missiles, you'd think you'd have more of a defense than hoping the weather mutant is on board. This seem like poor planning on Charles' part.
  • The plane it was based upon (at least visually), the SR-71 Blackbird, didn't have flares because it flew so high and fast that it was effectively a manned space vehicle. It could literally outrun missiles. Had Storm been flying it where it was intended, they wouldn't have been a problem.

Questions

• So I recently rewatched X2 and noticed/wondered these things;
  • Observation #1: Hey, Logan, maybe don't approach a bunch of skittish cops with your claws out!
    • He didn't. The cops popped out at him from the bushes, and he was putting his claws away when they shot him.
    • No, he very much had them out when he stepped out onto the Drakes' front porch, likely as a response to presumed danger. The skittish cop in question even asked him to put his 'knives' away. To which Logan replied, "I can't," while lifting a hand with claws exposed towards the officer, who then shot him in the head.
    • He was putting his claws in plain view of the cop and then said "Look." before sheathing them. It was that he did it so quickly the cop flinched and pulled the trigger.
  • Observation #2: Hey, Jean, maybe use your combo of telepathy and telekinesis to not only see every move Drugged!Scott intends to make, but force his hands away from his visor so he can't fire his eyebeams at you!
  • Observation #3: Why does Jean have to make her Heroic Sacrifice to stop the massive wave of water? You've got Storm, who could probably make some water evaporate, Bobby "Iceman" Drake who could freeze some of it, and Nightcrawler who can poof! people in and out of safety. All that along with Jean Grey's telepathy would've been more than enough!
    • Keywords being "probably," and "some of it." And where the hell was Nightcrawler supposed to teleport them that wouldn't be in the way of a goddamned tsunami wave?
    • Storm can't evaporate an entire broken dam's worth of water in time, Bobby's still technically learning and hasn't tapped into his omega-level powers, Logan told Nightcrawler to get Jean, but when Nightcrawler tries, there's a shadowy fizz and he says "She's not letting me." There's another entry regarding #3 up there somewhere.
    • What "omega-level" powers? Where is everyone getting this idea that Bobby is some uberpowerful super mutant? He's never, once, in the entire series, ever implied to be anywhere near that powerful.
    • From the comics (which means it's not necessarily true in the movies, since they did change a lot). See here.
  • And it's not as if they made the decision to have Jean sacrifice herself. She ran off and made that decision on her own. And plenty of times throughout the scene it's stated that Jean is using her powers to prevent any of them from helping her. And if Bobby freezes some of the water, the rest is still going to be coming at them. He can't freeze that much at once now. All Jean could do was hold it back long enough for the jet to take off.

Magneto's idea

• Did Magneto forget that mutants are a proportionally tiny minority compared to humans? Great work protecting your people, Erik, hope they enjoy struggling for survival in a post-apocalyptic world choked with billion of corpses!
  • Yes, the badguy's bad plan was bad. Magneto has a history of not really thinking things through.
  • While the number of active mutants seem to be fairly small we have no idea how many latent mutants were around. Considering how the mutant population seems to have massively increased between the time of First Class and the first X-Men movie there seems to be a rather large population of people who simply haven't been awakened yet. The third one takes it even further, Magneto forms an army of fully adult mutants that we've never even heard of before. It seems there's more mutants around than we think and most are just keeping a low profile.
  • Fitter species don't always win out. Magneto wanted to make sure his mutants won before the humans could zerg rush them or destroy them through more clever means like Cerebro or Sentinels. Plus, if the mutants pool their resources they are far more productive per capita then regular humans so i don't think they would have problems with the basic necessities or goods. They might have a tough couple of years but as more generations of mutants come the stronger richer and more powerful they get with their newfound abilities.
  • In the first scene with Cerebro, it's actually established that mutants and humans have roughly equal populations. You can see it on the scan, and Xavier says "There's more of us than you think". Presumably a lot of these mutants are hiding their powers, perhaps so much so that they're not part of the mutant community, they don't (knowingly) have any mutant friends etc.. Then there are probably a lot of people whose powers simply haven't manifested yet, so they're technically mutants but they don't know it. (We hear about mutants getting their powers at puberty, but who says it works that way every time?)

Magneto ready to kill good humans

• I know Magneto's the bad guy, but let's recap: In First Class, Magneto wants to kill the soldiers who fired on him first, and start a brotherhood of mutants that won't have to hide. In the first film, Magneto wanted to turn the world leaders into mutants to stop mutant persecution. In the second, he happily becomes worse than Hitler by trying to kill all humans because of one evil colonel, despite knowing about humans like Moira. In the third film, he wants to destroy a serum that he correctly fears will be used to exterminate his race. See the problem? I figure him trying this was inevitable, but they could have at least built it up and not have the X-men completely forget about it afterwards.
  • He simply took advantage of the opportunity that was presented. Magneto knows not all ordinary humans are bad or a threat but he's willing to sacrifice the friendly humans in order to ensure that mutants are safe, just like he's willing to sacrifice a few innocent mutants to save the overall population in the first movie. If he's willing to murder Rogue to convert a handful of world leaders who might make things better for mutantkind then murdering friendly humans to get at the guilty is perfectly in character.
  • Forgive me, but...how can you say it's not built up? Magneto (at least in the movies) is pretty much a standard depiction of He Who Fights Monsters / Well-Intentioned Extremist. In the first movie, he was also warned that Kelly had died from being forcibly turned into a mutant. Whether or not he believed Storm was telling him the truth, the fact is he was, at that point, still ready to take the chance that she wasn't lying and therefore kill, not only Rogue, but all the world leaders in one go. And besides, it's not really a huge leap to go from "I want to keep myself and my friends safe" to "the best way to keep myself and my friends safe is to eliminate any potential threat". And if you look at the sort of humanity he's predominately exposed to (literal Nazis, various armies, fear-mongering senators), again, it's not exactly hard to imagine him rapidly losing faith in the good of humanity to the point where he thinks the best solution is to just get rid of them. Even one of his first lines in the first film: "We're the future, Charles, not them. They no longer matter" shows that whatever his feelings before this film, by now he just wants mutants on top. Again, most direct way to accomplish that? Get rid of the humans.
  • Plus, he's just been handed the opportunity to get rid of every potential threat the humans might pose to him at once; he probably wouldn't have set out to do it himself because he knows he couldn't make a duplicate Cerebro or make Xavier use it on his own, but presented with a scenario where he's got the tools to do it, he might as well just take advantage of the chance.

Mutants in a hard place

• I get that the X-Men are a metaphor for various forms of bigotry and that the audience is meant to be sympathetic toward them, but doesn't their position become just a little untenable by the end of the second movie? Xavier's not merely arguing that he should be allowed to exist with his unique abilities, but that he should be allowed to use them at his discretion and without oversight on the presumption that he's too good and pure to abuse them. By the second movie we know that Xavier secretly enlists child and adolescent mutants into his school, apparently without their parents' informed consent. He does this by using advanced technology that allows him to spy on anyone in the world, but also doubles as a super weapon that would allow him to indiscriminately kill entire species without retaliation. Then, after he was almost made to kill the mutant population at the behest of a human and then the human population at the behest of a mutant, he decides rather than rethinking his approach he would break into the oval office and implicitly threaten the leader of a sovereign nation alongside his cadre of human weapons, including the *man who almost assassinated said leader*. Is the audience meant to accept that it's reasonable to demand humanity to coexist with beings that could (and are sometimes willing to) wipe them out at their discretion?
  • Correction: X-Men is the single most misguided, inept and botched metaphor for bigotry, just one step above Zombie Advocate. So, no wonder that it has messages like this.
  • Expanding on the above, the X-Men franchise has always been caught between two narrative goals: (A) Preaching against bigotry, and (B) doing Awesome Superhero Stuff. This is why the X-men are all teachers at a school...and at the same time they're all members of an elite paramilitary group that saves the world on a regular basis. Forming a school for at-risk youth is a pretty realistic (and helpful) response to bigotry, but a school by itself isn't going to have enough narrative room for Awesome Superhero Stuff. (Unless it's Harry Potter I guess, but that wasn't written till much later.) So everyone has to fill both roles; there isn't a single teacher at Xavier's school who isn't also a de facto soldier. Then there's the fact that we almost never see the X-men teaming up with humans, even though Xavier's entire philosophy is that mutants and humans should coexist peacefully. Non-powered humans just aren't cool enough to keep up with the Awesome Superhero Stuff. Getting to your comment more specifically, trusting Xavier with extraordinary powers is part and parcel for the superhero genre. We're expected to trust that Superman will always be the good guy, for instance. And when Batman dangles a guy off the side of a building to interrogate him, it never turns out that he made a mistake and grabbed the wrong guy, and now this poor innocent guy has PTSD or whatever. (Also we never refer to this as "torture", even though logically that's what it is.) Superhero comics almost always sweep these moral questions aside. I actually will defend Xavier taking kids into his school, though. If a kid's parents are bigoted, and if revealing the kid's secret will endanger them, then I see no moral reason to give the parents "informed consent". What matter is that the kid gives informed consent about attending the school, and is treated well while they're there. But on the flip side, yeah, a device that lets you spy on anyone without oversight is just begging to be misused, not to mention that it doubles as the world's most powerful WMD. Realistically, that sort of thing shouldn't be allowed to exist. But then, if it didn't exist, there'd be less room for Awesome Superhero Stuff. In the end, the tropes win out. The idea the movie is going for is "There are evil mutants, but there are also good mutants, and therefore you shouldn't be biased against someone just because they're a mutant".

Stryker bringing in the enemy

• The entire plan of the X-Men relies on Striker bringing in Mystique disguised as Logan. Ok, Striker and Logan have some history, so perhaps, theoretically, there might be something for them to talk about. But. At this particular moment Striker was minutes away from wiping out the entire mutant population, including Logan. Why in the world would he bother to bring him in then? Just to see him die? He could've just as easily watched it on cameras.
  • There are ways to protect against Xavier's mental abilities. He allows Logan in because of the history, because Logan is apparently coming in there to talk. Striker likes having mutant henchpeople, and why have just Lady Deathstrike when you can have her and Logan?
  • Styker probably agreed to talk to him because he's about to kill every mutant in the word. If there's anything he'd like to say to Wolverine, this is (apparently) his last chance to say it.
    • Seing how he had absolutely nothing to say to him before he sicked Lady Deathstrike on him, that wasn't the case. Neither was he interested in recruting him, not that it would've been an option anyway. There really was no reason not to kill him
    • He only sent in Lady Deathstrike after Wolverine and his teammates snuck in and started causing chaos. At that point Stryker was out of patience. But if it had really been Wolverine by himself, properly restrained and not a threat to anyone, then it's perfectly possible Stryker would have had something to say to him. (Don't forget that he showed interest in talking to Wolverine during the raid on Xavier's school. So why wouldn't he still have some interest in talking to Wolverine now?)

Film different from the comic? Why?

• I don’t know what went into the adaptation process, but I think the film missed a great moment with not using the comic climax: Stryker publicly deems mutants as freaks, Kitty calls him out and then when he tries to shoot her a policeman guns him down for attempted child murder, and then later on a shaken Xavier is tempted to join Magneto’s brotherhood after what happened with Stryker, but ultimately declines.. The comic has such a rich tale the film pales in comparison, in my opinion anyway.
  • The film was always going to be different from the comics. That's a given for literally any adaptation of anything. The medium is vastly different, you can do things in a comic book that just won't translate to the screen, and since this film is a direct sequel to another it's already bound to follow the path and characters that one already set up. As it is, the movie is already over 2 hours long (which was unusual in 2003) with many people already complaining that the Ending Fatigue is one of the weakest aspects to an otherwise great film, with the comic book ending as you've written it seeming very superfluous to all the significant story threads. The Stryker conflict was presented as being very personal between him, Logan and Xavier (to a lesser extent); those three sort that story thread out amongst themselves with Logan ultimately getting the upper hand - which is a much more dramatically satisfying ending of the conflict than having him gunned down by a random guy we've never seen before for trying to kill a character who, at this point, has had absolutely no development or relevance. We've already been shown through Pyro in this film and arguably Logan in the first film how seductive Erik's "mutants first" philosophy actually is, so having Xavier want to join him and decline is just retreading old ground.

Wolverine Vs Deathstrike

• What exactly was Stryker's plan here? He knows the base is overrun with dangerous mutants, one of whom he helped personally create... so upon finding said dangerous mutant, he doesn't call for backup or raise any alarm, but instead leaves his only bodyguard to fight him, possibly believing they'll fight to a stalemate and keep each other busy until the Dark Cerebro started working... except Lady Deathstrike was only working for Strkyer while she was mind-controlled, and we even see during the final moments of her battle with Logan that the mind-control wore off pretty fast. So to recap: what was Stryker's plan here? If Logan and Deathstrike were really equal, then neither would actually win. At best they'd fight to a stalemate until Deathstrike's programming wore off, at which point she'd probably want revenge on Stryker and would most likely ally with Logan against him. So once again, what exactly what Stryker's plan? Beyond giving us the best fight-scene in the movie, that is.
  • Best explanation I can think of is a sick form of 'scientific curiosity'; he has a chance to confirm whether Wolverine or Deathstrike is the better, and he assumed he'd have time to see the results before Dark Cerebro kicked in.
  • Who would Striker call, if he wanted to call for backup? All the surviving soldiers were guarding Cerebro, and he'd ordered them to watch out for Mystique. ("Kill anyone who approaches, even if it's me.") He can't just get on the radio and say "Abandon Cerebro and help me out instead", because that would look super suspicious and they would just ignore him. Obviously his plan was to get Lady Deathstrike to kill Wolverine. If that failed, the secondary plan was that she'd keep Wolverine busy long enough for Cerebro to kill him anyway. And in case neither of those plans worked, he planned to escape via helicopter. In fact he heads to the helicopter as soon as the fight begins. You say "If Logan and Deathstrike were really equal, then neither would actually win", but why would Stryker regard them as equals? Perhaps he thinks of Deathstrike as a more advanced version of Wolverine; she's the more recent "creation", after all. And if he does think that they're equal, again, so what? A 50-50 chance of success is better than nothing. And if they stalemate long enough, Cerebro will kill them both. Of course Deathstike would want revenge on Stryker once the programming wore off, but he's betting that Cerebro will kill her before that happens. It wasn't clear to me that her mind control wore off, anyway. She kept fighting till the end, didn't she?

Colossus vs Soldiers

• Why didn't Logan just tell Colossus to go right ahead when he offered to help Logan against the soldiers during the attack on the mansion? Colossus is bullet-proof and has super-strength, the soldiers didn't have any weapons that could so much as scratch him, and he could have taken them all down with ease. Logan could have stayed with the kids to protect them while giving Colossus a free rein.
  • Logan hasn't spent much time around the school or many of its students, so he probably doesn't know how Colossus's powers work - for all he knows the metal form can only be activated for a limited time and the kid would revert back to normal midway through the fight. Even if it's not, there's still plenty of other variables here - what if they find a way to trap him somehow? What if they have other weapons that Logan hasn't seen yet that could do damage to him? There's far too much risk in just letting Colossus run into a fight alone, so there's no way Logan would let him do it.

"Brother of the Year"

• So why exactly did Bobby's brother, Ronny, call the police on him? His own brother? Did he hate him or something?
  • Same with all hate campaigns, it is a toxic mix of jealousy and fear. Jealousy that the sibling is something special and getting attention, and fear because that is all the media and social pressure feeds them. Sadly all too common with LGBT families in the real world.