A word or two about the movie
The movie? Uh, turned out to be The Sort Of Movie I Expected. I had not read the X-Men comics; for a total and utter newbie, the movie was still fairly informative and I had a grip of the plot ("like, wow, this has a plot!") nevertheless. Not a bad movie. I didn't expect a masterpiece, but it was a surprisingly positive experience nevertheless. =)
It was actually entertaining. I didn't expect to see so much humor, for example, and the acting was pretty good too, if we consider the general bastardizative tendencies of Hollywood.
A Random Thing I Found Interesting™: Screenplay was written by David Hayter, who did voice acting of Solid Snake in Metal Gear Solid.
DVD technical review (Region 2 / Europe)
I have a slightly problematic DVD player; It doesn't like skipping and jumping much. Sometimes, when skipping using menus, the player just halts with "Disc Error" (eject and pop back in and it works just fine).
The menus of X-Men, according to all laws of sadism, jump around a lot. First came the copyright messages. (I just wonder why the heck they put Australia warnings to R2 discs, anyway...) *Jump* Then, Fox logo. *Jump* Camera panning and MovieOS-style things from The Big Round Room Thing. No hurry to get to the main menu, lad, I have all the time in the world. *Jump* Finally, main menu! ... Three jumps and I'm at the main menu. Once, I've ended up to disc error screen before even getting to the menu. Okay, blame me for having a crappy DVD player, but the fact that it takes about a minute to get there, even with a good DVD player, is probably not cool. =)
I mentioned MovieOS before - because the DVD menus reminded me of MovieOSes. The DVD menu designers obviously thought the point of the menu is to give the users pretty camera pans and 3D graphics. Strange, I always thought the point was to select settings and start movie or view extras...
Apart of the menus, the extra features are fairly interesting. The disc has some animated storyboards (cool 3D "sketches" of railroad station scene and Statue of Liberty scene), sketches / drawings of characters, more trailers and TV spots than my head can take, removed scenes (movie can also be played as a branching version) and more.
Anything bad??? Well, it only has English 5.1 soundtrack...