X-Men: The Last Stand/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • 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!
        • You can magnetically affect aluminum if you use a varying magnetic field (it sets up eddy currents in the aluminum which makes it electromagnetically reactive). However, the point is moot, as plastic dart guns are entirely possible. They're fairly low-velocity darts, after all, so you wouldn't need anything more substantial than an Airsoft weapon.
    • 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?
    • 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 Mystique and Magneto's betrayal of one another was yet another plan between the two, 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: the entire thing was planned between Magneto and Mystique, to justify her giving the government info on how to find Magneto and, by extension, leading the army on a wild goose chase looking for his camp, while he was busy invading Alcatraz.
  • 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.


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