2. The Last Stand Also Botched The Dark Phoenix Saga
As well as the mutant cure story, The Last Stand made an equally bungled attempt to give audience's a version of The Dark Phoenix Saga, probably the single most iconic X-Men story in history. Would it be surprising to anyone that the film's iteration bears little resemblance to the comic? Nope? Thought not. To be fair to the filmmakers, making a slavishly faithful version of The Phoenix Saga would have been at the very least monumentally difficult, if not nigh on impossible. Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum and John Byrne's story is a full-on intergalactic epic, featuring The Hellfire Club plus alien races named the Shi'ar, the Kree and the Skrulls. Ideally the filmmakers would have crafted a tale that respected the Saga in spirit and scale, but that could only have been accomplished by devoting an entire film (possibly two) to it. Disappointingly, Jean Grey's resurrection by the mysterious Phoenix Force and subsequent descent into evil is relegated to a B or C level story in the film. Why would audience's pay too much attention to it whenever they've got the mutant cure to follow and a metric tonne of new mutants with 'cool' powers to get excited over? By the time the story concludes with Wolverine being forced to kill Jean, it's just another moment in a barrage of special effects and has little emotional impact. Oh well.
