The Storm casting did get some buzz from Storm fans, because she is once again being played by some girl who doesn't fit the Storm mold. I get it, because everyone wants to see their favorites represented properly on screen. It's the reason why I have decided that the Transformers movies are nothing more than a series of night terrors filled with slow-motion action shots and blurry metal shards that I can't wake up from. Storm fans (myself included) want to see their girl shown as the powerful African leader that she is, instead of the sidekick to Jean with a white wig that she's become.
But the really important issue with this recasting hasn't even been addressed: We no longer have to watch Wolverine's love affair with Jean Grey that never made a lick of sense. I assume it won't be there, because it would be really, really creepy.
See, I'm a masochist, evidently, because I've watched all of the X-Men movies. And I watched them closely enough to realize that Wolverine knew Jean Grey for maybe a week, in total movie time. So watching him tearfully kill Jean in the third one, and dream about her years after the fact, always made me sick. I should have been crying, because I was the one who sat through X-Men: The Last Stand.
That plot thread is something that is well known to folks who read the comics. For a couple of decades, the comics teased the idea that Jean and Wolverine had a long smoldering attraction for each other, and in another world, they might have been together. But Scott had that on lock (for reasons that continue to mystify us), so Jean would never act on it, even though Wolverine would sometimes press the issue.
In the flicks, Wolverine met Jean, spent almost no time with her in the couple of days he tooled around the mansion, then left the X-Men for an undetermined amount of time. He showed up back out there just in time for them to get invaded, and never saw Jean again until a few minutes before she died. She was an evil zombie throughout the next movie, so it's not like she was in a position to further explore their relationship. Wolverine worked hard on his chest to impress her, so her rejection forced him to kill her. Some of this might have been made up, because that third movie was so awful, and I really don't want to watch it again.
But saying that Wolverine knew Jean for a week is being generous.
It's kinda like in Man of Steel, where Superman and Lois have no reason throughout the movie to get together, but they still have to kiss at the end, because that's the expectation. Wolverine is a dude who trusts no one and hasn't for decades, but he meets this girl who's already booed up, spends no time with her, but when she dies, he's suddenly so close to her that he's on the brink of tears? And in the next movie, he struggles to kill her, even though he hasn't had a problem killing complete strangers since this trilogy started? Even though these movies were supposed to walk their own path, Wolverine and Jean had to eye-bathe each other, because those were the times. Even if it doesn't make sense.
That's the kind of foolishness that this recasting gets us from up under. Sure, Storm is still underwhelming (and probably wasn't going to be a big part of the movie, so they're just filling a roster spot), but we're just that much closer to a movie that makes sense.
