Another example of too much focus on CGI

Rating: 3/10 (4 May 2009)

There was one reviewer who said that this seems like a Steven Segal movie made in the 1980s. I think that is pretty accurate with $150 mil of CGI thrown on top of it. The CGIs are great but you come out feeling blah about the whole thing. After the studios butchered one of the first Tarzan movies Edgar Rice Burroughs told them they could do anything they wanted with Tarzan as long as it had nothing to do with any of his actual stories. I agree with him. Either stick to the story as written (and why not since it's been popular for 20 years) or just make up something completely new. Trying to twist things around so that they sort of fit just doesn't improve the situation at all.
The actors are all pretty decent. The movie starts with a pretty strange sequence and then flips into the war montage that I had been looking forward to. I thought they would use this to explain the characters a little more fully but basically what you see in the trailers is all there is.
So where is the blood thirsty Wolverine we had expected? I thought the back story was going to set that up but other than he seemed to like being in combat they didn't show it. I had hoped his girl friend/common law wife would be Japanese but no, there is no conflict with the Samurai type anti-western father.
Ryan Reynolds seems wasted in a small part. The Blob was one of my favorite villains in the comics but here I don't know what he is. Some really strong guy with an eating disorder rather than a mutant who cannot be moved.
No explanation of why/how Sabertooth turns into the character in X-men part 1.
One of the real let downs was the cameo of Professor X at the end of the movie. He shows up just to give some of the mutants a helicopter ride in the last 5 minutes. So he knew what was going on there the whole time but just shows up then why? I have no idea, it just seems tacked on for no reason.
If you have never read any of the comics and want some mindless CGI filled action movie you might enjoy this. Other than that, don't get your hopes up.