The opening seen with Nightcrawler was perfect, the fx when he teleports rocked.
I liked it on another level as well - I felt that Singer did a great job of making the audience understand the origin of this fear of mutants by humans. Nightcrawler was unstoppable - and if that's the only contact I had had with a mutant, I'd probably be a little wary too. Not sure if anyone else saw it that way, but I thought the subtext behind the action (as with the rest of the film) was what truly made that scene and the film as a whole excellent. Tons of movies have shown how easy it is to have great FX - but Singer's use of a good plot and a theme show the potential power for using both hand-in-hand.
I loved the Beast cameo. I hope Beast and Angel are in X3. I wanted Gambit to actually be in the film, but I hope, because of his extremely small cameo in this film, he will play a big part in X3.
Where were these cameos?? I've only ever seen the movies, so I'm only familiar with the characters they've introduced.
I wish we could have seen a little more of Cyclops - he gets the award for underused character of the movie. It seems to me that the majority of his role in this one was as a set-up for the next one - looking back I get the feeling quite a bit of this movie was a set-up for X3 (the "I'd never let anything happen to you" scene is esp. poignant given the ending).
Was kind of disappointed they killed Deathstrike - very sad, given that she was being controlled by Stryker.
Also, thought it was interesting that Iceman and Rouge had their "X-Men outfits" in the scene at the White House, given Wolverine's earlier comment about them being on order.
Finally, I like the fact it seems that Prof. X's knows that Jean is alive - given his looking out the window and subsequent comments, that's my guess anyway.
I could keep talking, but I'll leave it here for now.
