X-Men United brings us back into the world that Fox created with the characters we love like Wolverine, Professor X, and Rouge. X-Men United shows us the continued story of Wolverine where he has a new mission to find where he got his adamantium claws. Nightcrawler is also on the loose and is an assassin teleporter who is trying to kill the president. Finally, Jean Grey sacrifices herself and it confuses me more than anything else in the movie.

Having Wolverine in this movie really is just getting him ready for his own movie which comes true after X-Men United. He did search about his past in the movie but when it came to the General William Stryker telling him about his past, he just froze and did not know how to react to that statement and he did not even know who he was. Sure it was great to introduce his backstory, but really with everything else happening was it really necessary?

Nightcrawler at the beginning of the movie tries to assassinate the President and actually gets really close but is stopped by one of the President’s guards. Nightcrawler then got away and hid in a church to pray and ask for forgiveness from God for his sin. Wolverine and the other X-men then find him later and take him prisoner but eventually learn that he was controlled by General William Stryker. 

Stryker got authorization to invade the mutants’ school and capture a few mutants for interrogation but really he took the entire school besides Wolverine, Jean, Nightcrawler (the newly reformed mutant), and a few more who hid away in the woods near the now nearly destroyed mansion. Stryker knew a mutant and human war was happening and that was because of Eric aka Magneto who said it while in prison. He’s the one who wants to start a war and has been messing with both sides being humans and mutants, Mutants being good and bad at the same time.

I did love the movie but there were a few things that I did not like that much and already having prior knowledge of future movies really made me question it even more. Jean Grey sacrificing herself made absolutely no sense and really just made people question it more than they cried probably. Sure she was saving her team from the huge amounts of water coming, but couldn’t Nightcrawler the new team player just teleport them out? The only thing that I could think of was that Jean Grey dying was for starting the story of the Phoenix Force and how it was the thing that controlled her. I will give this movie a 7/10 because of the set ups for the future movies but because they did not finish storylines I’m taking away a few points out of 10.