Spoilers abound guys...but the movie comes out on home video in like 2 weeks...
I'm trying to decide if I liked this because it was GOOD, or because it was BOLD. I mean, it's a VERY bold choice to make a film with an established actor carrying a cast of foreigners in a foreign land in an established franchise that everyone knows and giving them a small-scale character study as opposed to the big blockbuster action-driven stuff they're used to. I appreciate and applaud the film for its efforts in that respect and I've fallen madly in love with Tao Okamoto who is only a week and a half older than I am.

Seriously, though, she's the perfect thing for this film universe to help pull Wolverine out of his shame spiral. She's smart, brave, strong in her own way, and she's able to withstand the gruff, often off-putting Wolverine at his worst. Her character's journey is almost just as satisfying as Wolverine's.
It's also a VERY bold choice to have one of the franchise's main characters undergo an injury that will affect him for the foreseeable future. No more adamantium claws? I love it as a film choice even though the fanboy in me wants to hate it because I like the metal claws so much...It's one of those things that I love it BECAUSE I hate it, if that makes any sense. It shows that I am emotionally invested in this, and I feel bad for the character that something so significantly life-altering happened to him.
A few things could have been tightened up, and I'm curious as to what's in the extended edition, because from what I've heard, it just sounds like more blood and swearing, but I'm hoping it actually gives us a little more plot information, as some of the characters made kind of confusing choices throughout and I'm not 100% sure the villain's plan actually makes complete sense just yet.
Oh also, was ANYBODY even remotely surprised that the old dude wasn't dead? As soon as the girl said she didn't see it coming, I was like, "Well, you know what I see coming? Him. Not being dead."
So, serious question for everyone:
The ending of this movie seems to pretty strongly imply that the events of X-Men 3 will continue to be important, but will also be fixed...ie, Xavier is alive, leaving the door open for some other major characters who were unceremoniously offed (Cyclops, Jean) to return.
If between this and Days of Future Past, they fix those issues in X-Men 3, will your opinion of the film change at all?
I have to say, mine will a LITTLE bit. I'll still find a lot of their decisions to be really stupid, like the depiction of Juggernaut and the insane amount of mutants who are used, abused, and then tossed to the side without us being told who they are AT ALL, but (and keep in mind, I haven seen X3 since release, so maybe I'm mis-remembering it) I found X3 to be a decently entertaining movie and if they can find a way to satisfactorily fix some of my major gripes, then maybe I'll be able to tolerate it...you know, on the same level I can kinda tolerate Alien 3.
Never Origins though. That thing is liquid feces wrapped in dried vomit.
In reality though, the more I think about it, the more these "fixes" can make X3 totally irrelevant. You can have 1, and 2, and then The Wolverine, with Logan feeling guilty not about actively killing her, but about letting her die. All you have to do with that is disregard a line or two where he tells her he had to kill her because she was hurting people, and all those images we see of him stabbing her could just be metaphors for him feeling like the blood is on his hands.
Oh yeah, that Jean Ghost stuff was a bit too ham-fisted. It didn't totally suck, but it was kinda like the White Horse stuff in Halloween 2. Like, "Okay, this COULD be working, but you're beating me over the head with it. I got it the first time, the second time made sense to show it was happening frequently...but honestly, the third, fourth, fifth, sixth times...just knock it off already."