I just saw this movie, and my general consensus was simply that it was mediocre. Truthfully I was kind of hoping they were going to re-boot the entire franchise, but honestly after seeing it I'm less than impressed. I think "The X-men" might need to a break from the cinema, with a potential reboot down the road by someone who has a somewhat better grasp of things.
See, I realize movies can't follow the comics exactly, or rather they could, but nobody wants to take that kind of a risk in alienating the mainstream cashbags who don't have any knowlege of the source materials... of course then again I think Hollywood underestimates the amount of knowlege of comics your typical member of the mainstream posseses, most probably don't realize it either unless they really think about it. See "reading comics" is one of those stereotypical things kids do, largely because all kids do it. Being into comics only becomes high geekdom when you see adults that are still into it, but even so adults being into comics is one of the slighly more acceptable forms of geekdom, compared to say role-playing games, or even video games. Your typical comic book can see some pretty heavy travel, I for example did most of my heavy comics reading while hanging out with an enclave of navy nerds who I played paper and pencil RPGs with in my teens, and while not as into it as much as I once was, I still keep up with some stuff. At any rate the point is that your typical schlub knows a lot more about these characters than your typical Hollywood mogul or executive thinks he does, and as a result I think we can expect more than we're seeing. I don't think it's "awesome" just because we're seeing comics made into movies anymore.
I think we can expect more from movies like this not only staying far more loyal to the characters and continuity, but also for them not to insult our intelligence while we're watching them.
See, for every thing this movie did right, it had an immersion breaking "WTF" moment attached: (SPOILERS BELOW)
For example, in this storyline they were giving The White Queen her secondary mutation, which is her diamond form power, which is something she didn't develop for a VERY long time in the comics. That's fine, but almost immediatly the writers proceed to put themselves into a corner, Baby Charles, and Baby Erik find themselves in a direct confrontation with a mutant who should have killed them instantly because the plot demands it. After all The White Queen can turn herself into diamond, which is not metallic, and which renders her immune to psionics. The solution to this? The writer/director has Magneto capture her by strangling her with a Brass bed.... which what's more manages to create fractures in her diamond form. To make things even more insulting they later try and be clever by having her cut through security glass with her finger "oh she's made of diamond!", while expecting us to have forgotten the whole previous scene where she obviously wasn't that hard.
You can say "so what, that's only a couple of scenes", well I'm not going to go over this movie with a fine toothed comb, but it wasn't just a couple of scenes.
See, the thing here is that the scenes not only did no justice to the characters, they also actively insulted the intelligence of the viewers. Not to mention demonstrating a constant Hollywood problem, in that writers can produce drama really well, but when dealing with the extraordinary they oftentimes are incapable of writing their scripts and scenes as if it was normal.
In the above case, the problem is literally that the guys doing the writing and directing had a certain flow of events that they wanted, which for dramatic purposes involved Erik and Charles defeating The White Queen, but they had absolutly no idea as to how to bring this about using the characters that they developed, so they improvised something that was stupid. The script doubtlessly having been written with the idea of the characters actually having and using powers (despite the premise of the movie) being almost irrelevent.
We won't see any really good Super Hero movies, until we start seeing the development of writers and directors who can deal with the material consistantly and according to it's own logic. I gave the first modern, big-budget movies of this sort something of a pass personally because it was new and exciting, and we really hadn't seen it done very often before... but really, there isn't an excuse for it here. The movie manages to be passable, but if I look at it objectively.... well there are a few scenes this movie relies on to move things along that are just terrible. Logically, both of the main characters should have been dead part way through Act 2... of course then again, why they bothered to give The White Queen her secondary mutation other than "it's part of the character as most people know it and gives our FX people something to do" is beyond me. Really that was added to the character in the comics because The White Queen started out as a telepathic rival for Professor X (as in the X-men meet the Hellions and OMG there is another psionic out there who can take on Chuck! Crisis!) but over the years sort of wound up being second rate in that department, being surpassed/trounced by both Professor X and Marvel Girl numerous times, as people liked and wanted to use the character she was given something else to make her a major player again. At this point there was no need for this, as she only needed to match a fledgeling Professor X, and the telepathic battles could have been left unresolved as long as they wanted, it took a while in the comics for that one to ever be settled if I recall, even though she did do some time as a "knockdown villain" for a while once it was. It was just horrible, horrible, planning, and writing, and choosing to ignore it BECAUSE it's a super hero movie is not a good thing. Really I think the suckage of the last two X-men movies made this one look a lot better than it actually is.
As a disclaimer of sorts, I will say that the "Watchmen" movie was pretty good, but that had the advantage of being based on a stand-alone graphic novel, and dealing with a cast that generally didn't have any powers. Doctor Manhattan being more of a plot device than anything and the way he was written making him relatively easy to do in the movie. Even so, I feel the Graphic Novel was far superior, and if someone ever comes up with the idea of doing "The Watchmen" as a mini-series that follows the Graphic Novel more literally... I think the film can be easily surpassed. I felt that the stories within stories, and all the subtexts were what made "Watchmen" such an amazing work, and really the film only captured a part of it. I don't think you can really "get" the messages (there is more than one) inherant in "Watchmen" from that movie.