X-Men (film)/Headscratchers

X-Men

 * As shown in the x-ray of Logans arm, his Adamantium claws reside safely between the bones of his knuckels when not "in use". This means that they actually extend from his forearm and PAST his wrist. So... wouldn't they tear through his skin any time he bent his wrist without popping the claws?
 * Why do they have to come throught the flesh and skin instead of natural tunnels like animals usually have?
 * Maybe they retract all the way past the wrist.
 * They do indeed retract past his wrists. He has to keep his arms and hands in straight alignment or the claws won't release. Same thing with his bone claws, he's already got natural sheathes/channels that house the claws when not in use. I seem to recall Jean demonstrating based on the X-rays that the claws end up displacing some of the bones in his wrists before they fully emerge.
 * Comicvine.com had a debate on it; they decided the X-ray was wrong.
 * Magneto stopping the bullet millimeters from the cop's forehead when leaving the train station. Assuming that he could stop the bullet fast enough, that strong of a magnetic field would have stopped the bullet's rotation as well, as imperfections in the bullet would have lined up with the magnetic field he was projecting. Sure, after stopping it he could rotate the field for effect, but why waste the energy?
 * Didn't he grind it into the guy's forehead a little? Spinning helps it grind better than simply pushing it against the skin.
 * The magnetic fields Magneto uses rarely make sense. It's more like he simply has telekinesis that only works on metal, rather than generating magnetic fields.
 * Magneto's power is ridiculously fine-tuned magnetic fields. He can generate tiny little fields all around an object, holding it in place or manipulating it as he sees fit.
 * Also, when he stops the bullet it's no longer accelerating, so how is it a threat to the cop? If Magneto quit stopping the bullet, it would just fall to the ground.
 * It wasn't a threat, the cop was just freaking out. The threat was that he could shoot all the guns off at once but couldn't stop all those bullets from killing everyone at once.
 * I figured he was torturing the man. Notice how the skin on his forehead was reddening around the bullet? Magneto was pushing and grinding the bullet ever so slowly into the man's head, knowing that Xavier would sense the man's pain and terror, and possibly hear his groaning. Magneto wanted to hammer home to Xavier what was at stake.
 * Guys, wasn't it Xavier that stopped the bullet? Magneto was the one that fired it, and Xavier was stopping it from killing the cop. Magneto then goes on to say that he could not stop all of them.
 * No. Xavier is telepathic, not telekinetic. He can read and influence minds--that's all. He has absolutely no ability to manipulate matter with his mind. Listen to what Magneto says more carefully.
 * Magneto let Rogue touch him for several seconds, yet he had enough magnetic power to stop Wolverine from disabling that machine. Later Rogue touched Wolverine for just a couple of seconds but she absorbed his powers and his manners for days while sending him into a coma. It just bugs me that her powers are more dependent on the plot rather than logic...
 * Magneto is both much more powerful than Wolverine and has a much stronger mind. Wolverine's powers are passive; Magneto manipulates energy on a grand scale. Wolverine is an amnesiac drifter with no purpose; Magneto is a visionary and a death camp survivor. There's also the fact that Wolverine was actively trying to give her his powers, while Magneto was trying to control her.
 * Don't forget that Wolverine's power is to heal himself (which is exactly what he was giving to Rogue, and she needed a lot of it), meaning that her absorbing his power would cause his rather brutal injuries to start catching up with him, as well as her own damaging effect. Magneto was simply giving her enough of his own power (which has nothing to do with maintaining his health) to her so that she could work the machine, without needing to worry if she would survive.
 * Uh, there's also this thing that his healing factor is the only thing keeping him alive as he has lots of foreign substance between his bones and rest of his body. That's a lot to compensate.
 * It happens in the comics all the time. According to the Marvel Universe handbook (volume 6!), her power is supposed to work on a 1:60 ratio. I.E., one second of contact means sixty seconds of abilities. One minute would be an hour. However, Plot!Power seems to go into effect whenever anyone writes her nowadays, so the film isn't any different.
 * How did Cyclops get into the Cerebro room, since the door opens through a retinal scan?
 * I don't recall anybody saying that only Xavier has access. Jean has to have access so she can fix the thing, and as heir apparent Scott would have to have it as well.
 * The point isn't who has access. The point is retinal scan on a man whose retinas would instantly destroy the scanner. Presumably he's got some kind of bypass, but still.
 * Cerebro's door lock looks to be covered in a red filter, I'd imagine it wouldn't be hard to have covered the scanner in the same ruby quartz that Cyclop's glasses/visor are made from, to protect the scanner from him. Alternately, why couldn't it scan him directly through his glasses?
 * Maybe the door is set to open whenever Scott lightly shoots it.
 * That idea is much more hilarious than it probably should be when you read "shoots" as "coughs at" as I did at first...
 * Voice override. Charles would have the foresight to make sure Scott could get in without a retinal scan in an emergency.
 * Or a chip in his visor that triggers the door in combination with a spoken command.
 * I always thought that the doors opened automatically when the user was finished. Since Jean had finished using cerebro, they opened to let her out.
 * Storm's powers seem a little inconsistent in the first film, especially in the final fight sequence. In the first part of the fight with Toad, she basically gets her ass handed to her, which I'm fine with. After all, they're inside, and Toad (in this universe) is a competent martial artist. Then comes the moment where Toad kicks her down an elevator shaft. She suddenly becomes insanely powerful. Sure, this could be her Berserk Button since she's claustrophobic and all, but it's never mentioned that this is the cause of her sudden Phenomenal Cosmic Power. Then she manages to strike the railing Toad is hanging on to with lightning while standing several feet away. I'd think you'd need a pretty good handle on your powers to be able to do something like that. You'd have to be pretty accurate, and such. Yet, a few scenes later, she tells Wolverine that she can't use her wind powers to blow him over the torch because she can't 'control it like that'. I was annoyed with movie-Storm in general, so I may be a bit biased, but did anyone else spot this?
 * There's a bit of difference between making lightning strike a particular (metal) target and controlling wind with enough precision to make someone else fly accurately. They're more or less entirely different skillsets. You'll recall, when she used wind against Toad, it wasn't with any sort of precision beyond "Blow in this direction a lot."
 * So... Where did Mystique put Senator Kelly's cell phone? Watch the scene, and then see if you can answer me.
 * On that note, where exactly did she hide that tube of coma-inducing poison when she infiltrated Xavier's Hogwarts for Mutants?
 * People, it's frigging Mystique. You KNOW where she hid it. She's the type who isn't squemish about things like that.
 * So she kept it in her hair?
 * With the Tube-o-Coma (tm) maybe, but I'll tell you where she put the cell phone: In her jacket... which was made of her skin... so.....?
 * ...so hypothetically, her pockets are bodily orifices?
 * If they are using the same abilities from her comic book appearances, she is just creating pockets inside herself. She's hidden a pistol in her abdomen and even shifted her internal organs to prevent internal damage from gunshots.
 * Why didn't Professor X, upon taking control of Sabretooth and Toad's mind, make them rip off Magneto's helmet instead of making them grab his throat/walk away, that way he could take control of Magneto?
 * Fun fact: The helmet prop couldn't be put on and taken off like a normal hat. It came in two pieces, which had to be fitted together around Sir Ian's head. From this we can infer that Magneto created a helmet that can't be removed by anyone but him (or someone with heavy-duty cutting equipment). It's too bad they didn't give us an on-screen helmet removal to demonstrate this.
 * Alternatively, why not have Sabertooth just slug Magneto and knock him out?
 * Well, since no attack could be instantaneous, there would be the worry of Magneto using the moment before he got taken down to pull all those triggers.
 * Xavier's something of a pacifist, and being Magneto's former friend, he thinks he can talk him down and wasn't going to resort to violence unless he'd exhausted the option of peaceful surrender.
 * So Magneto's entire evil plan revolved around getting Rogue to take on his powers to power the mutant machine, but how does that FORCE her to make the rings spin? I guess theoretically, the Machine might forcibly draw power from the mutant in question, but why wouldn't they tell us that?
 * It looked to me about half Magneto used what power he had left to put her hands on the machine, and half Power Incontinence on Rogue's part; since she'd never used the power before and was generally untrained and panicing, she just couldn't turn it off.
 * Okay, Magneto's helmet prevents telepaths from entering his head. But why can't Xavier do it at the beginning when he isn't wearing it?
 * He does go in. As he himself admits, looking for hope. Presumably he also looks to try to find out what Magneto's plotting, but Magneto's mind is disciplined enough that he can carry on a conversation while thinking really hard about, I don't know, Mel Brooks films. And as to why he doesn't just mind-control him at that point -- Xavier's too ethical to just walk up to someone and control their mind. Foolish, perhaps, but very much in character, and there's nothing in the film to suggest Magneto's done anything spectacularly evil to that point.
 * He did, I assume. That's how he knows where Magneto's sending Sabretooth and why he's able to send Cyclops and Storm to rescue Wolverine and Rogue. And as to why he doesn't just mind-control him at that point -- presumably because Erik's his friend.
 * The entire final act of this movie makes no sense at all. Magneto's goal is to cause mutations in the world leaders which will basically force the most powerful people in the world to take a more sympathetic stance regarding mutants and herald a new age of mutant rights. Before he goes to Liberty Island, Magneto knows that the artificial mutation killed his one and only test subject. He proceeds with his plan anyways with full knowledge that he will not, in fact, be mutating the world leaders thus forcing them to change their views. He will be committing a mass murder of world leaders which would of course result in every important country in the world declaring full-out war on mutants. A mutant genocide would most likely not take very long.
 * He doesn't know that Kelly is dead. All he knows is that the X-Men claim he is dead. From his perspective (that of a visionary megalomaniac on the verge of triumph) that would sound like the desperate lie of a defeated foe. And even if he thought they were telling the truth, he might have told himself that only some of the heads of state would die -- others would take the mutation, and then he'd have half the world as allies and the other half leaderless.
 * In addition to the previous response, it should be noted that Magneto's response to Storm's claim was "Are you sure you saw what you think you saw?" Although it wasn't followed up in the sequels, it is possible that was meant to be a Sequel Hook--consider the nature of Senator Kelly's mutation. He became some kind of squishy, gelatinous fish-thing, probably akin to a humanoid jellyfish (note the first shot on the beach before he emerges from the water, apparently unharmed). The fact that his death was the result of turning in to water, it's possible there were considerations made that he would reappear with a mutation similar to the comic book character Hydro-Man (a Spider-Man villain). How they would have shoehorned him into the sequel, I've no idea.
 * I always understood it to mean "are you sure MY mutation thingy killed him?" because senator Kelly may have used his powers to kill himself. He was disgusted and distraught by what he had become. he even tells Storm she has one less bigot to worry about before dying... meaning he was still a bigot after seeing what he was.
 * No, he told her she had one less normal person to be afraid of. Bigotry wasn't mentioned in that conversation.
 * Something else to consider: although we never see it, it should be assumed that Magneto had tested the machine prior to using it on Senator Kelly; otherwise, how could he know it would work at all? If all it did was kill people, there would be no good reason to assume it could be used as anything more than a weapon of mass destruction. The X-Men's assumption that the machine kills was based on only one example, and possibly a very atypical one at that. Of course, if the movie didn't play out the way it did, Magneto's plan might have actually made sense to the audience and painted Magneto as either a Sympathetic Villain (which wouldn't have been hard, given he's a Holocaust survivor), and/or worse, a Designated Villain.
 * 1. The X-Men established that the unnatural-ness of Kelly's mutation made it unstable; his dying was just the end result of that. 2. If the test subjects took as long to die as Senator Kelly, Magneto might have not waited around long enough to see them die.
 * Another option is that Magneto has done multiple tests, and has observed that the effect is fatal (or, in other words, the mutation is rejected and unstable) some of the time, but not all of the time. Since his plan is to use it against so many people, he would have enough survivors for his aims, and considers the losses acceptable. He doesn't bother sharing this information with the X-Men, because he knows they wouldn't agree with the 'acceptable' bit anyway.
 * Another possibility is that his test subjects were latent mutants who had 1 allele for mutancy that enabled them to survive. This happens sometimes in the comics because the gene is recessive. Kelly had no alleles for mutancy, making the mutation fatal.
 * While giving the tour of the school to Rogue Xavier makes an off hand comment that one of the things he teaches his students is to maintain a low profile, or as he puts it "Anonymity is the best defense" or something to that effect. However the entire school is filled with mutants that look perfectly normal. They have that option. The most outlandish any of the X-men have to look is wearing a pair of goofy sunglasses, and hell even then only when he's in combat, since it's established that Scott routinely wears normal sunglasses most of the time. Xavier, Orono, Scott, Logan, all the students we see... none of them are physically obvious mutants. All the "evil" mutants save Magneto himself don't have the option of simply "blending in." Sabertooth is giant and hairy, Toad is green and scaly, Mystique is flippin' blue. Yeah she's a shapeshifter, but I'm assuming there is some limit to how long she can hold a shape and even if there isn't as she said in the second movie, she shouldn't have to. How exactly are those three just supposed to blend into a normal crowd Charles? You can spot their mutation from across the street. At night. Through heavy clothing. Now to be fair maybe this was an intentional subtext the film makers were going for, and in the later movies in the series abnormal looking protagonist and normal looking antagonist characters were introduced, but still in that moment in the first movie it made Professor X seem really naive.
 * It might not be fair to those three but for what appears to be most mutants anonymity is really the best option.
 * I expect that the more conspicuous mutants being part of the Brotherhood was intentional; they would realistically be less likely to favour an accommodationist perspective because normal society's rejection of mutants is more apparent to them.
 * The writers brought Nightcrawler out in the 2nd film presumably because they realized this dichotomy. Also, it may be a minor case of Adaptation Explanation Extrication because in the comics, Charles has given some of his freakish students image inducers and other tech to enable them to blend in.
 * Why did Magneto decide to use the machine on Senator Kelly? Even if he did want to inflict an ironic fate on the man wouldn't it have made much more sense to test the machine on someone completely unknown and then transfer his powers to Rogue for the main event? It's not like he couldn't have gotten Sen. Kelly after the events of the movie.
 * Kelly's a good target to get rid of even if Magneto didn't want to use the machine on him: He's the leading activist for the Mutant Registration Act, so if he's missing, then the Act is that much less likely to pass. Also, turning Kelly into a mutant is a poetic microcosm of his larger plan: Bring leaders around by making them the "mutant problem." He was basically not just telling Kelly to walk a mile in his shoes, but nailing the shoes to his feet permanently.
 * When Rogue absorbed Wolverine's healing factor, she touched him long enough to render him unconscious. That seems to imply she absorbed quite a lot of his power what with adamantium adding well enough stress on that healing. Exactly how did he survive that?
 * You Fail Biology Forever: Wolverine has healed his injuries but they magically open up when Rogue takes his powers. Why are healed wounds reopening fresh?
 * You're assuming all of his healing is actually instantaneous. The most advantageous part of a wound to heal first is the entry point to prevent infection or foreign bodies from infiltrating the body. It's entirely possible that his healing factor was still working on internal injuries and when she deprived him of it, the wounds reopened.
 * So how does Magneto learn about Rogue? during the opening she is nothing but a drifter traveling from place to place - and yet somehow the Brotherhood learn of not only her location in some random truck stop but also of her powers?
 * They learned about her through the 'putting her boyfriend in a coma by kissing him' event (especially with all the anti-mutant feeling, it's not unreasonable to assume it was in the news), and then they tracked her.
 * But the boyfriend wasn't a mutant. Until the Wolverine incident, how would they have known her power included sapping mutant powers?
 * Professor Xavier claims that he can't find Magneto using Cerebro; but he wouldn't need to - surely all he would need to do would be to scan for Toad, Sabretooth and Mystique given how they very clearly have no way to block his powers.
 * Presumably they have a larger hiding spot, as Magneto is seen without his helmet and he isn't always actively searching for them because he has a school to run.
 * When I first watched the film, the opening scene was Jean describing junk DNA and how that was where the mutant gene came from. The home versions start off with the end of the speech and Kelly asking about mutants and there's no deleted scene for it. Was there any reason given for why it was cut?
 * How did Logan manage to sheathe his claws during the final battle after Magneto bent them the wrong way? This was the scene at the climax when Logan was about to cut Rogue out of the machine before Magneto caught him.
 * Magneto didn't bend them. He pushed them back, and the lightshow the machine was giving off just made them look warped.
 * Assuming Magneto didn't kill Senator Kelly and Mystique impersonated him to revoke the bill at the end, what was Xavier's plan for a) stopping the Mutant Registration or b) ensuring that it wasn't abused against harmless mutants? Magneto said "Let them pass that law and they'll have us all in chains". Xavier says it won't come to that; did he have a plan for stopping that? Assuming that he wasn't going to use his telepathy to Mind Rape Senator Kelly into changing his position of course because that would be wrong.

X2: X-Men United

 * 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 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.


 * 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.

X-Men: The Last Stand

 * Why couldn't Magneto just stop the darts? The needle part should be made of metal, and yet they act like only Jean can control it. If the needles were plastic, then that implies they were designed with Magneto in mind, which makes it all very stupid as they're loaded into metal guns.
 * I'm pretty sure sure that the guns were plastic, too.
 * There are plenty of non-ferrous metals available... Most drinks cans are made of aluminium!
 * Magneto explicitly says the guns were plastic. The officer ordering the men to arm up with plastic weapons said they were plastic and the troops were to turn in all metallic objects and replace them with plastic weaponry. I'm at a loss for how you missed a very obvious scene explicitly laying this out.
 * Obviously I was referring to before that scene during the rescue of Mystique.
 * In that case, remember that Magneto can only stop metal he knows about. The guard who was shooting him was shooting him from behind and surprised him.
 * Also, the chances of actually encountering Magneto are minimal, and Magneto's observed combat tactics prior to that scene always involved him stopping the bullets before they reached him, and then taking control of his opponents' weaponry. In such a case, in the time between Magneto going "haha, I stop your metal bullet!" and "oh, shit, that's made of plastic!" he'd already have been hit with the needle.
 * Alternately, logistics. They were manufacturing plastic weaponry, but they simply hadn't had time to fully arm the guards with all-plastic weapons before the attack.
 * In the scene when Magneto rescues Mystique, Magneto and his Brotherhood are unaware that the mutant "cure" has been weaponized in this manner. They don't discover this until a guard (assumed incapacitated) shot at Magneto while his back was turned, leading to Mystique's act of Taking the Bullet and being depowered. Hence, as another troper pointed out, he couldn't have stopped metal that he was not aware of. Incidentally, why would the original poster say he or she was "obviously" referring to this scene, when the original question specifically says "and yet they act like only Jean can control it"? Jean was not present during Mystique's jailbreak. Magneto hadn't recruited her yet; heck, they weren't even aware she was still alive at that point.
 * Except that in X2 Magneto sensed the metal inside the guard right as he entered his cell, even though Mystique could hardly warn him when exactly she'd be able to infuse the guard. So nope, the fact the guard in X3 shot from behind shouldn't have mattered, because the gun itself was definitely metal (Magneto drew it to him after Pyro killed the guard).
 * In the case of X2 it can be argued that he sensed the metal inside the guard because he had gone so long without having any around. In everyday life there's metal everywhere so he was desensitized to it, then Magneto is placed in an enclosed area where there no metal at all for a long amount of time. When the guard comes in with the excess of metal in his blood Magneto is hyper-sensitive to it. When he's breaking Mystique out he's desensitized as he was before the incarceration.


 * Magneto catches Wolverine sneaking around his camp for mutant uprising. He easily catches him, via controlling the metal bones Wolverine has. Fine. Then he just sends Wolverine flying out of the woods, despite the fact that Wolverine knows where Magneto is, knows where Jean is, and knows that Magneto's got some sort of an uprising going on. With all of that, you'd think that Magneto would take more care not to let his secret plan get out. Instead, he just lets Wolverine run off to warn the X-men and the military. Was Magneto really that cocky that he believed he could win even with everyone forewarned?
 * You do remember what happened when the military did show up, right? How Magneto had moved everyone and everything out of the area, and set up a decoy? He explicitly had a plan for the inevitable attack. How did you miss that?
 * So that takes care of the military but what about the X-men? Wolverine goes to them, tells them "Magneto's attacking Alcatraz Island" so they suit up, get in a jet, and go straight to Alcatraz. And get between him and Leech. Wouldn't it have been smarter for Magneto to have knocked out or tied up Wolverine until they were well on their way to attack? Considering that he was the master of metal and had a huge army of worked up mutants, surely he could have arranged something.
 * Magneto is arrogant though. The only one of the X-Men he respected was Charles, the rest as far as he was concerned, couldn't find their own arse with both hands and an atlas. It isn't an entirely unjustified POV either, but really, it was Magneto's own arrogance and ego at work in that he has his army of gods and they have a handful of dimwitted, demoralised, handicapped by morals he doesn't have, disorganised malcontents. It is his villain fatal flaw.
 * Did anyone else wonder how on Earth Wolverine was somehow able to ride a motorcycle from New York to San Francisco and back with enough time to warn people and stop Magneto's uprising?
 * He phoned home?
 * But he clearly was shown in the mansion after being in San Francisco. Anyway, wouldn't that really hurt his nuts?
 * That's exactly the sort of thing a healing factor is good for.
 * Not even, they actually encased his testicles in adamantine too.
 * He was given a lift by Chuck Norris.
 * Hey, forget Magneto and the darts - they had, what, four darts all together? So why use ALL of them on Magneto? Even if you're going on the assumption of greater mutant powers require a greater dose, why is it they don't save even one to use on the psychotic mutant destroying the place and killing everyone?
 * Because said psychotic mutant would've disintegrated the needles long before Logan could've brought them close enough, duh. Besides, as mentioned elsewhere Magneto was a very powerful mutant. Beast wanted to be sure.
 * The dart cartridge itself is the size of a pack of gum; the darts are even smaller. I assumed that the effort required to disassemble the thing and handle the darts individually would require time, tools, etc. that they just didn't have. Magneto was the immediate threat, he had to be neutralized A.S.A.P.
 * Magneto wanted to kill Leech. So what does he do? Pick up the Golden Gate Bridge and use it to fly his army over to Alcatraz and then assault it in the conventional manner. Why didn't he just drop the bridge on the building? Problem solved.
 * Presumably they wanted to destroy the research and cure as well (they mention wanting to be able to develop the cure without Leech). Dropping a bridge on Leech would still keep some of the serum intact. The bridge was a way to bring his army to Alcatraz.
 * As I recall, he wanted to kidnap Leech so that he could force the cure upon mutants who didn't join him.
 * Nope. He explicitly tells Juggernaut to kill the boy when he sends him after him.
 * Yeah. but this was after the X-Men had shown up to intervene. In that situation, Magneto could have decided "Plan B. If I can't have him, no one can."
 * Not really an IJBM, but I've been wondering for years: who is that mutant who has Immolation Breath? Near the beginning of the Alcatraz battle, with the leathery skin? Was he created for the movie, or is he a comic book character?
 * Why is Magneto not in prison at the end? Especially when (apparently) depowered he could go in a normal prison? Instead the guy who planned the whole thing is in a park, playing chess by himself apparently free as a bird. Aren't the police, military and X-Men looking for him?
 * He's still a pretty sharp guy, so there's no guarantee that they'd be able to catch him right away even if he was depowered. The most obvious answer is that he wasn't as weak as he looked and either ran off or kept a mutant in reserve exclusively for this contingency (Magneto has always shown himself to be both cunning and Crazy Prepared). Besides finding him would be a far larger challenge than it seems; as Magneto he's a larger than life character wearing a stupid cape and a novelty helmet - but as Eric he's just another old man in a park.
 * With Xavier and Jean "dead" they wouldn't be able to use Cerebro. The X-Men probably wouldn't be too inclined to help recapture him at any rate, as they saw in the second movie that it can be fairly dangerous to put someone who knows a great deal about the school - thanks to his prior work with Charles - in government custody.
 * I just figured it was a "prisoners' retirement home" sort of thing. Magneto was an Auschwitz survivor, putting him somewhere in his seventies, after all.
 * Juggernaut's power is said to be super-inertia or some such thing (Once he starts moving, he can't be stopped). This is the reason he is completely restricted when imprisoned. Then how is it that, when Kitty phased him into the floor, Juggernaut was able to break out, even though he couldn't get any momentum?
 * This one bugged me from the film point of view, I always thought that Juggernaut's powers were magic based, rather than mutation.
 * Juggernaut in the comics also has a few other powers, including superhuman strength. One presumes he used that to break out of the floor. (One also presumes that the restraint rig he was held in also included a sedative IV drip or something. Just enough to keep him too groggy to escape.)
 * Better yet, why didn't that kill the Juggernaut? Super powerful or not, the entire lower half of his body was rematerialized into solid matter. His muscles, bones, circulatory system, and some of his vital organs (stomach, liver, spleen) should have been bonded with the cement or whatever material that floor was composed of. Even if he was too tough to die of the system shock or heart failure and somehow managed to break out, he'd have been severely debilitated and would have probably died shortly thereafter unless there was another mutant available that could fix him. I mean, I assume this is what should have happened, since there doesn't seem to be any indication that his body displaced the floor when he rematerialized. Maybe Kitty's power is also capable of sending the displaced material into Hammerspace?
 * Kitty's power does cause that sort of thing in the comic books. Upon first viewing, I assumed it was the Juggernaut's invulnerability but it's more likely that, as a film that has to be family-friendly to be accessible to a wide audience, Kitty's film powers just have the Required Secondary Powers of leaving people intact to avoid the Fridge Horror that comes with her phasing powers.
 * I might just be forgetting how it happened, but when Magneto dramatically drops the bridge, how come none of the Brotherhood die? I mean, that was at least a 200 metre drop.
 * Sometime after the events in X2, Mystique has been captured and placed in a mobile prison that consists of an armored truck and several escort vehicles, in which she and several other criminal mutants are kept in (somewhat) custom-designed cages. Now granted, the idea of a mobile prison with a top secret location was, perhaps, the best option for keeping Magneto from attempting a rescue, and they had no way to know that he'd eventually meet a mutant who could track down Mystique, but still--it had to occur to them, at some point, that they should be prepared for the possibility that Magneto would find her. Given Magneto's presence in the previous movies, they had to know the metal vehicles and weapons would be no match for a mutant of his abilities.
 * Although come to think of it, I have no idea how someone might create an armored truck with no metal at all. I'm sure you'd be talking about a lot of carbon fiber, fiberglass, hard plastic, maybe even stone--but no metal at all? I have no idea. Where are the mutant engineers?
 * Confirmed by the novelization.
 * Realistically, keeping three dangerous and powerful mutants on the same prison truck probably wasn't the best of ideas, either. I'm sure the taxpayers would have been more than happy to pony up the dough to get another couple of those trucks built and hire the people to guard and maintain them.
 * And another matter to speculate on: that bit when Mystique morphed into a little girl seemed a little inconsistent with her previously-established abilities. The kid was a foot or two shorter than Mystique's normal form, meaning that she would have either had to lose some of her physical mass or compress it. The visual of that little girl with her arms stretched up to stay in those shackles was strange, too--she looked like she could have easily slid her hands out of them and was only keeping them in place to...I don't know, maybe for the sake of politeness? If Mystique is capable of shrinking down in such a way, it seems like a self-adjusting harness or even a ventilated metal coffin would have been a better choice for keeping her imprisoned than a pair of shackles and a cage with widely-spaced bars.
 * It's possible that Mystique was only pretending that the cage and shackles were keeping her there. Given that she was expecting Magneto to pick her up ("What took you so long?") and given the planned ending that, it's entirely possible that she let herself be captured by the government so she could gather information about imprisoned mutants and the cure.
 * If the government has weaponized the cure, why don't they use it against Multiple Man, Mystique and any other mutant criminal in their custody who has proven their willingness to use their powers to commit crimes?
 * My only guess is that there are legal implications of using the cure on prisoners that don't exist while using it as a weapon. Just as the police are allowed to shoot at suspects, but prisons aren't allowed to inflict pain as punishment, the government probably figures it's safer to just use the weaponized cure the same way it'd use any other gun, at least until the justice system's decided whether depowering captured mutants as a matter of policy is constitutional.
 * That's the most likely reason, and it makes sense given that the cure was weaponized so soon after it was created that they haven't yet fleshed out the legal precedents. Still, with the CIA doing waterboarding of terror suspects, one would imagine at least somebody in the chain of command would bring up the idea or casually 'suggest' it to Mystique's guards, given that she was responsible for nearly killing off the UN in movie 1 and the whole human race in movie 2.
 * There's a big difference between torturing prisoners and giving them a simple injection that completely removes their ability to pose a threat to you without any negative side-effects.
 * Any negative side effects?!? As far as anyone in the movie knows, it permanently removes the natural abilities mutants were born with. By that logic, chopping off people's hands or gouging out their eyes "completely removes their ability to pose a threat to you without any negative side effects". A mutant's power is a part of their body. They were born with it, it's who they are. The Constitution doesn't lay down some kind of baseline for human abilities and then allow the government to permanently cripple people as punishment so long as it doesn't go any lower than average. The legal system would take years to sort through the issue of whether depowering mutants is cruel and unusual punishment. It'd inevitably end up going to the Supreme Court. The only reason using it as a weapon isn't as thorny a legal issue is because police are allowed to use lethal force if necessary, and depowering isn't lethal.
 * Mutant abilities are all caused by the same gene. Objectively speaking, it would be no challenge to isolate exactly what part of a mutant constitutes a "genetic threat" to the rest of the population and take steps to minimize the threat. Granted, permanently curing dangerous mutants is analogous to the death penalty, which takes a lot of legal machinations to finalize but a temporary cure injection could keep the prisoner at a manageable enough level to be controlled while allowing for the possibility of their powers returning if in the foreseeable future they can be rehabilitated and become productive members of society.
 * I should probably add that, if the cure turns out to be temporary like the last scene implied, then they probably would start treating mutant convicts with it just as a security precaution. But for the length of the movie, everyone's assuming that once you're injected, you're no longer a mutant.
 * While you're right from an ethical point of view, think of it in practical terms. Let's say you're an unwillingly "cured" mutant criminal. What're you gonna do about it? Traces of torture, a missing arm or an eye are easy to present, but missing superpowers? How are you even going to prove you've ever had them? Now, if there was an all-national registry of mutants...oops, the good guys made sure there isn't one. Nice job breaking it heroes! But let's say you do prove that you had superpowers. It only gets funnier; how are you going to prove that you actually lost them? Unless you're one of those relatively few deformed mutants, you are at a loss, and any lawyer worth his salt will dismiss you as a scam. So, yeah, I agree with the OP, "curing" the captured mutant delinquents was perfectly reasonable, and failing to do that is Plot Induced Stupidity.
 * The Other Wiki says they're using a retrovirus with Leech's cells to create the cure. Viruses trigger antibodies and antibodies show up in blood tests. You could easily modify any blood test for viruses, like an HIV test, to find out if a mutant's ever been injected with the cure. Alternately, if it's not a retrovirus that changes the genome then the X-gene's still there and it can be confirmed with a DNA test. And besides, the movie is assuming that the government is not evil, and actually does concern itself with legality, rule of law and constitutional rights. If they don't care about any of that, then screw halfway measures like a weaponized cure - they could just kill them all and be done with it. I already said that once they found out the cure is temporary there'd be no reason not to use it. This is all only concerning the movie timeline, when they assumed the cure was permanent.
 * Then how did the cure work so quickly? Retroviruses spread even slower than real viruses because they spread via DNA, rather than RNA; in other words, each new copy of the cell it infects produces a new copy so the virus spreads only as fast as the cell can reproduce.
 * Ask The Other Wiki (though it's gone now, so maybe it got flagged as unsourced). I accounted for both possibilities, so it's really beside the point.
 * Multiple Man is just as big a waste of power as Dark Phoenix. If you've got a guy who can make himself into a one man army, wouldn't it make more sense to have sent him and his clones out first during the siege at the island to be used as pawns? Having him as a decoy was a complete waste; its not like the government would be any closer to catching the Brotherhood just because they didn't find them at the hideout he and his clones were in.
 * The only thing I can guess is that, in this continuity, maybe Madrox feels pain across all his duplicates, which makes them useless as cannon fodder (if a bullet hits any one of them, they all go down). The army used satellite imagery to "confirm" the Brotherhood's presence in the forest, so his being there bought Magneto at least a little bit of time while they were busy planning a siege of the camp.
 * How exactly did several dozen mutants of Magneto's army manage to walk all the way to the bridge without anybody noticing them? They leave their camp in the middle of some forest, and next thing, POOF, they're on a lively highway.
 * Moments before Phoenix kills Cyclops, she disables his mutant powers; wouldn't that ability have come in pretty handy just prior to Wolverine stabbing her?
 * She didn't really disable his power, she just held back his beams with telekinesis.
 * Which is what she could have done to Logan; used her telekinesis to keep his claws inside his arms. But she wouldn't have done that because she wanted to die; Jean Grey reasserts control over herself in that scene and she asks Logan to stop her so really, she allows Logan to kill her.
 * What bugged me the most about this film was Magneto's reaction to Mystique being depowered. If nothing else, she was a symbol of what the weaponised cure really meant.
 * Same here. But maybe that's what they were going for; showing that Magneto was just as much of a cold-blooded Fantastic Racist as any anti-mutant human.
 * It makes a bit more sense if you consider the planned ending:
 * Probably not explicitly a head-scratcher, but what kind of bugged me about this installment was the sudden shift in Magneto's portrayal. In the first two films, he's this subtle, extremely sympathetic extremist who's doing what he does for the good of his own kind, and more - you know, very much a Malcolm X with magnet powers. In this one, he's suddenly become a cartoon super-villain who mugs at the camera and it becomes very obvious that his only reason for his entire plan is his own megalomania, barring for a few scenes that are mostly out of context and don't impact his character in the rest of the film all that much. It's jarring and a little silly, but I guess this could be due to the shift in directorial duties - Bryan Singer > Brett Ratner.
 * This sounds like Scapegoat Creator: Ratner is the director, not the screenwriter. To some degree, Magneto is still the Malcolm X guy, what with his speeches at the beginning, but they might have been taking direction from the comics. Most non-Chris Claremont writers like to portray Magneto as a cardboard cutout villain who uses the rhetoric of his Well-Intentioned Extremist self to justify pretty much whatever self-aggrandizing evil he sees fit. It's a part of his loaded portrayal that he can be both an Anti-Villain and a standard Evil Overlord who milks the Anti-Villain reputation for sympathy.
 * Yeah, this bugs me too. I think part of it is that the movie was just generally lower quality and they largely ditched character development for anyone who wasn't Wolverine. Another part of it may have been that they were worried about making his point of view too sympathetic. I mean, even some of the X-Men (like Storm) are completely disturbed by the idea of a "cure", and given events in the previous movies it's very far from inconceivable that the government could start using it against mutants without their consent. Even with their consent, it's fairly creepy - given how society treats mutants, the choice for anyone with a visible mutation boils down to "take it and get the same opportunities as a regular human, or don't take it and we'll keep persecuting you". (The best comparison I can think of is with states that have a state religion and don't outright ban other religions, but make life a lot harder for you if you follow something other than the state church. Heck, most of Europe was like that until the mid-1800s.) Even if people aren't being forced, there's an element of coercion in the cure even being offered. The filmmakers don't want to be bothered making a strong argument against Magneto's point of view, so they just give him a bunch of Kick the Dog moments.
 * Rogue's decision to take the cure: while I totally agree with it as a matter of personal choice (and I'm glad they decided to disregard Status Quo Is God like in most versions where the cure is either bad or gets reversed without explanation), it goes against a running thread in the films (and the novelization) where Rogue was getting Character Development to gain control over her powers. In the first film, she was the archetype of Blessed with Suck since her powers kept her from touching people and she had to contend with some of their memories and personality traits (well, she said she did; we never saw much of it). Then in the 2nd film, she starts to use her powers more actively and doesn't experience any obvious negative effects, and the people she touches lose their powers but don't get knocked out anymore. Then in the 3rd film, she manages to touch Colossus in the Danger Room scenario and copies his powers without stealing them from him. So Rogue was on the way to better control and focus with her powers and perhaps could have learned one day to touch people without taking their powers at all, which would give her a much-deserved ticket for the Superpower Lottery. In addition, Leech is now going to the X-Mansion; she and Bobby could just get the room adjacent to him and they'd be able to touch each other anytime they wanted without her having to lose her powers.
 * The last idea is wrong on so many levels...
 * Not to mention that it's never really made explicit that the kid's powers work within a defined radius regardless of intervening objects. They might, but then again they might not.
 * Rogue never really gets better at using her power, just more comfortable at using it. She takes abilities immediately, and it requires extended contact to shut down those she absorbs. They only remain conscious because she doesn't drain them for too long. Colossus is visibly winded by Rogue's brief copying of his power. Clearly, she hadn't progressed to the point where she had any means of controlling the death touch.
 * How was Juggernaut captured in the first place?
 * He's only unstoppable once he starts moving. Even he has to stop and rest some time, presumably.
 * No, he doesn't. In the comics he's described as not needing rest, food, water or even air. Then again, movie continuity might be different, since he said he needed to pee, or maybe he just stopped voluntarily for a beer or something.
 * Even if he doesn't strictly speaking need to stop and rest, he's still not going to keep running constantly. There's got to be some time when he's standing still.
 * The "not needing food or rest" thing is Hand Wave-able by the fact that in the comics his powers come from the Cyttorak Gem. While there are plenty of mystical and magical type of creatures in the comics that don't need sustenance, most mutants that aren't energy beings of some kind still need food/water/air no matter how powerful they are.


 * Why wasn't Nightcrawler in this movie? I mean, they introduce him in X2, and I'm sure a lot of people were expecting him to become an X-man, so why would they introduce him and not use him ever again? It makes very little sense.
 * At the end of the tie-in game, set between X2 and X3, Nightcrawler leaves the X-Men because he doesn't like the violent lifestyle.
 * And the behind-the-scenes explanation that made the info from X-Men: The Official Game necessary in the first place was that his actor Alan Cumming did not like having to undergo several uncomfortable hours of makeup to portray Nightcrawler, and his role in the 3rd film was going to be much smaller than in X2, making it not worth it to either him or the producers.