It's an odd revelation that one of the greatest moments - or at least the most affecting - of the entire X-Men franchise comes in the film typically deemed one of the first, but there is something primally entertaining about the moment in Last Stand when Phoenix snaps at Magneto's immediately regretted goading and turns her former mentor into a cloud of dust. That moment, which turns protegee against master, friend against friend, is the most damning moment in Jean Grey's meta-morposis into the evil Phoenix. We had already seen in her killing of Scott that she was no longer governed by typical human laws (though it's never quite established why she kills Cyclops, since she has no motivation as she does for Xavier) but it is the manner of her execution of Xavier that is the most affecting. There is something almost messianic about his death - and particularly in his ultimate acceptance of it, with a creepy smile - and though the moment was all but wiped out by the reprehensible attempt to explain it away using an identical twin in a perpetual vegetative state, it is still regrettable that the spectacle of the moment no longer matters in this timeline. Which are your favourite moments in the X-Men movie franchise that have now been wiped out by
