X-Men 3: The Last Stand

For the first time in over 20 years I went out to the cinema in London.

X-Men 3 opened yesterday in France and it opened today in the UK. I know perfectly well that Desney and Alex went to see it together last night and Jessica went to see it with her friends as well. I therefore had to see it myself or I would be completely out of communication with the rest of my family.

It was quite interesting to go to the cinema in London. I ordered my tickets online from the Odeon theatre. After work I dropped everything off at the hotel and I walked to Marble Arch to the cinema. It was actually the first time I've gone left of Park Street on Oxford Street and the neighbourhood is amazingly different from that point forward: junk food shop after junk food shop. The cinema itself was absolutely enormous. The place where one gets popcorn and soda and such is actually an enormous store not too unlike a supermarket. The theatre itself was huge with lots of leg room and a place to put your soda on one side of the seat and your popcorn on the other. I remembered from when Alex and I went to the cinema that I can no longer eat popcorn so I thought I'd try M&Ms. Better... but not there yet.

The one thing I didn't know was that the cinema seats were numbered and your assigned seat was on one's ticket. I showed up a good half hour early and found a great seat in the center of the third row. I sat there throughout the previews and about 5 minutes before the film started a couple showed up, very upset, and announced that I was sitting in their seats. I didn't understand but I got up anyway as the film was about to start. I looked at my ticket and found that I "should" be in seat K1. That's the far right corner of the 11th row. I sadly moped to my seat and in the process the entire row K had to get up to let me through.

The film was as to be expected. It was basically like the first two... but it wasn't. A new director, Brett Ratner, had replaced Bryan Singer and it showed. The film was fun but not as fun as the others and the plot was just an excuse for the effects and the action. There was much too little of the story of the mutants and the difficulty of being "different" from others and such. The man who brought us the Rush Hour films was basically bringing us more of the same.

A shame in that one felt it could have been so much more... But a lot of fun just the same.