In many ways, X-Men: The Last Stand is the most daring and provocative of the three films in the X-verse. The story shakes up the status quo in a dramatic fashion, with some major characters dying, others changing in fundamental ways and a brewing conflict that boils up and over into an all-out war. The thinly masked allegory expands, this time to include terrorism, too; all in the name of the Magneto's (McKellan) quest to build a mutant army that rises up against the more mundane humans.

This time out, Wolverine (Jackman) and Storm (Berry) are at the center of the action. And action there is: The film is packed with it, nonstop, and with an array of special effects, too—to the point where, really, the effects are the distracting fourth leg of this story.

The final battle is a bit overdone. But there's no denying the power of the film's parting shot. Maybe this was, indeed, X-Men's last stand.

As a DVD, X-Men: The Last Stand feels sloppily conceived and executed: The white menu text is hard on the eyes, and the extra features feel paltry.

Some of the extras boil down to being nothing more than extended commercials for other Fox properties. The World of Marvel section in the special features simple offers two-minute trailers to Fox's Daredevil, Elektra and Fantastic Four films. Under the Trailers section, you get to revisit two of the X3 promotional trailers—and an extended trailer for season five of the Fox TV show 24 on DVD. You get two audio commentaries, at least (one by director Brett Ratner and writers Zak Penn and Simon Kinberg, the other by producers Avi Arad, Lauren Shuler Donner and Ralph Winter), but it's unclear from the sparse menus why you would listen to the director/writer commentary vs. the producer commentary.

Alternate endings change little

Considering X3 is an effects-laden film that would have required tons of prep, the lack of "how-did-they-do-that" making-of featurettes and storyboard art evolution is fairly surprising. The lack of such content makes me wonder if Fox is holding out its big guns for a future X-Men release on a high-definition Blu-ray Disc.

Likewise, as I thumbed through the impressive five menu pages detailing the disc's 24 deleted or alternate scenes, I couldn't help but think this is one of those discs that would greatly benefit from Blu-ray Disc's improved menuing and seamless interactivity between movie and content. The plethora of deleted scenes—which run for 20 minutes in all if you use the handy "play all" feature—are this disc's greatest strength. But the numbers sound deceptive, unless you run the basic math: 24 snippets, running time of 20 minutes ... that means you're getting some clips that are just dozens of seconds long (including one of the three alternate ending clips) and others that are just under two minutes (the extended battle sequence at Jean Grey's home).

The alternate endings are mildly disappointing, in part due to their sheer brevity, and in part due to their underwhelming impact. None of the three endings—a new school year begins, Rogue's return to the school, Logan's return to Alberta, Canada—feels substantative, and none gives the real ending much in the line of competition.

The short deleted segments make for an interesting insight into the movie's development, but at other times, they feel somewhat lacking in context. The latter is particularly true when you're listening to the optional commentary enabled (by director Ratner and writers Simon Kinbeg and Zak Penn). The commentaries often sound clipped and truncated, much like the abbreviated segments you're watching. The first time it happens, you might think it's a sound-editing mistake. But it happens on almost all of the deleted segments—making this more an annoyance than anything else.

The final element in the "Stan Lee Collector's Edition" version of this film will appeal only to the most hardcore of X-Men fans: Inside the DVD's slick box packaging you'll find a custom, smaller-than-DVD-size, bound X-Men comic. The comic book includes Lee's three favorite X-Men tales from among those he's penned over the years, plus the original story "Xavier, Magneto, and Stan." Unfortunately, the book is so tightly bound that in order to read it, one will have to break the too-tight binding.