^ That was X-24 listening to him.
...
B+ for me. As much as it tries to break all the comic-book rules... it really isn't all that radical in the end, IMO.
We get a new generation of mutants to replace the ones lost (and how the hell did those kids make it out to that valley?! Teleportation?!), we still get a male leading them, we still get a final battle in which multiple powers are wielded, we still get a fake-out demise from not-dead-yet X-24, and we still get two scene-fulls of completely gratuitous violence (the guys trashing his car at the beginning, and then the "Okie dickheads" hassling the family). Heck, the whole family scene itself wasn't all that far from the "nice farm family" in
Origins: Wolverine, apart from the brutality of their deaths. Laura's "X" in the final shot teases her taking up the
X-Men mantle as much as the ending of
X-Men: Apocalypse teases more
First Class cast movies did, even if this particular character iteration and cast don't get a film series of their own. And did I mention a polite, smooth-talking English villain? Not exactly breaking ground
there. (+5 points for a completely unnecessary "you killed my father" backstory.) We even get some lines in which he says that his dirty work is necessary to maintain peace in a dirty world, which is pretty much the same thing Vincent D'Onofrio says in
Jurassic World, only that character was
meant to be poking fun at the cliche.
"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." The third-act action climax works, dramatically, but I can't help wondering if keeping the rest of the kids out of the picture wouldn't have been better in the long run. I wish that, instead of the farm family (#BlackGuyDiesFirst), they trio had somehow met up with Shreiber's Sabretooth (I too totally thought X-24 was him for a moment). What if
Victor, of all people, had managed to settle down and have a quiet, peaceful family out in the woods somewhere?!
The ending was fine and moving and all, but I would have liked some third-act weirdness, as the one we got was ultimately pretty conventional. The ending of
Atonement, for instance, took me completely by surprise and really knocked me on my ass - it's unique and daring and jarring, but when you get to the very end, you see how it all works. I know we just had time-travel shenanigans with
DoFP, but I wonder if some similar hint of like weirdness/time-fixing could have been planted without derailing the tone.
Finally, I can't help but thinking it would have been better if society had shown to be generally crumbling. Not all at once,
Judgment Day/
DoFP style, but gradually. No new/shiny cars even for the bad guys, flat screen TVs breaking down without replacements, gas shortages, that sort of thing. Much like
Mad Max (the first one). Oh, and government-sponsored human mutant-targeting Blade Runners, if you will, would have been a better explanation for the complete demise of mutantkind beyond "Charles had a bad day, and killed them all, thus pretty much entirely validating peoples' anti-mutant paranoia."
IIRC the version in the comics is technically neither. The initial intent was to create a straight clone of Logan but something about his Y-chromosome prevented a viable specimen being created. So they doubled up his single X-chromosome to make a female version instead.
In a way she's half a clone, or maybe a daughter for which he was both parents. I'm not sure there's even a specific word for that.
43/44ths of a clone.
