Thread by @sapphixy

tonight #sapphixywatches X2 (2003), the direct sequel to X-Men (2000), and the last time the franchise even bothered to try to make any timelines make sense

(the next movie made such a mess that they made a soft reboot and then built off that timeline in ways that made it even more of a mess)

The sequence introducing Kurt is one of my favorites in the franchise

Something I just noticed: at first, Kurt is wearing makeup to conceal his dark blue skin, but at some point in his bamfing around the White House it disappears

Alkaki Lake: It's Fucking Metal

Cringing at Ororo describing Cro-Magnon as "much more advanced" than Neanderthals

The debut of Charles's "freeze everyone telepathically" trick

A small retcon: in the first movie, Charles tells Logan he's in Westchester County in New York, which is consistent with the location of the school in the comics, but in this movie, Stryker says that it's in the Salem area, which is roughly 3 hours north of Westchester

Wait, Stryker has metal frames on his glasses

Logan putting his cigar out by rubbing it against his palm, because he respects and fears Charles that much

"Can't sleep?"
"How could you tell?"
"'Cause you're awake."
"…Right."

And now we come to the plot event that happens because James Marsden *and* Patrick Stewart had scheduling conflicts, and thus had to spend most of the runtime out of commission

Kelly Hu 🥵🥵🥵😍😍

The CGI claws look like ass in this movie under the most favorable possible conditions for janky CGI, why did they try to use them in much less favorable conditions in X-Men Origins: Wolverine? Did they think the script didn't suck enough on its own?

This adolescent Colossus could totally grow up into the Colossus of the Deadpool movies save that he doesn't have a Hollywood Russian accent

I'm guessing the screenwriters didn't know how resilient that much ice is, especially when there's much softer things around it, even when it's a shaped charge

God I would have loved to own an RX8

Hank has a brief cameo on a TV screen and he's very much not Kelsey Grammer, although he does bear a passing resemblance to Nicholas Hoult

Rebecca Romijn on-screen without her Mystique gear!

She's very pretty here.

Highlander: the Series fans, like I was, had a bit of fan glee at Peter Wingfield's appearance in this movie

John (Pyro) is such a dick but this movie makes a good case for his general attitude

And now a TV screen states that the Xavier School is in Westchester

"Have you tried not being a mutant?"

I cringe so much at this line

"Everybody okay back there?"
"No."

Are we ready supposed to feel empathy for Logan acting like a massive creep?

Mystique letting Logan feel those scars was very much a deliberate choice; there's no way she could conceivably been unable to shapeshift them away

The X-Men's Blackbird is plainly based on the Lockheed SR-71, but it's much bigger and somehow even less visible on radar

I hope that the MCU version, if one exists, is based on the proposed Lockheed SR-72

"You are a god among insects. Never let anyone tell you different."

Yeah, I would have been vulnerable to that as a teenager.

This is not too far off from how dams actually fail, as a rule: a little bit at a time at first, and then all at once

In the first movie Logan's costume is said to be one of Cyclops's but there's no way something fitted to James Marsden that closely would come even close to fitting Huge Ackman

Yukiko deserved so much better than this

I completely forgot about what Magneto did with the grenades 😘👌

Yes, Erik, Logan did in fact scratch at the spillway controls with his claws, and it was super effective

Why the fuck did she have to be outside the jet to do that?

I've been asking that for 17 years

And "so the third movie can happen" is clearly inadequate

And that's two of the movies down.

Fun fact: Alan Cumming, noted bisexual, who played Kurt in this movie? One of his exes, Saffron Burrows, is also openly bisexual, and now married to a woman; they have two children together.