X2: X-Men United/Headscratchers


 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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 tornados, 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 flightdeck, or some other solid matter and kill himself and everyone onboard
 * 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.
 * 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 miligram of poison per kilogram of victim. That way she could inject enough iron for Magneto to use, without killing the guard instantly.
 * 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 despensers". 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.

"Nightcrawler: Someone so beautiful should not be so angry all the time. Storm: Anger can help you survive. Nightcrawler: So can faith."
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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 presumeably 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.
 * Nightcrawler and Storm have this exchange on the Blackbird:

"Kelly: Do you hate normal people? Storm: Sometimes. Kelly: Why? Storm: I suppose...because I'm afraid of them."
 * 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 Non Sequitur Scene 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.


 * So I think that was going to be her arc, but they just fumbled it.
 * 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.
 * 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 comics version of the Blackbird does have military-grade ECM and countermeasures, precisely because its intended to deliver people into potential combat zones. Which makes its omission in the film is even more glaring.