First Class

Now, this is the kind of movie that M. Grondin would write a 3500 word exposition on, including a 100 word treatise on Michael Fassbender's chemistry with Hugh Jackson, whose character who shows up for a net 10 seconds. Interestingly enough, he will fail to comment on why Erik, who was quite a snappy dresser for the first 2 hours, would show up in the last scene wearing a red suit, cape and purple helmet.

In light of this, I will choose instead to critique some things that literally no other critic would.

Naval tactics.

Firstly, I may have misheard, but I was under the impression that the 7th fleet was ordered to blockade Cuba. I hope they were actually talking about the 2nd fleet because sailing from Fleet Activities Yokosuka to Cuba tends to take a long time.

Big clusters of ships show up a lot in pictures. Those are not real battle formations, they are just posing for the camera. In reality you could have ships from an B/C/ESG picketing 10km away along the likely threat vectors.

Sonar. It's not just the act of sending sound waves out, you need to be able to pick up the echoes and discern them. This ability of Banshee was not alluded to in the film previously. Additionally, the difficulty of littoral sub hunting isn't in illuminating the ocean floor, it's discerning what are the subs and what are just rocks.

There were 2 Iowa class battleships present at the battle. All of them were decommissioned in the 50s.

Assuming they were active and deployed to blockade, they would never use their 16" guns for such a role. I'm thinking the 40mm Bofors or the 5 inchers at most. Also, warning shots, the more civilized nations among us tend to use those.

Or you know what's even better for maritime interdiction? Aircraft, and as it turns out, we even had aircraft specifically built for this role. They are called P-2s and they are the shit.

Speaking of aircraft, you'd think that either side would be concerned that there is a rogue plane circling their airspace the whole time. What are those AA pickets doing?

Is Beast really that smart? He decided to take the SR-71, a plane designed for the sole purpose of flying faster than anything else airborne, and make it VTOL. Seems like what they need is a C-130. I mean, however slower they move in that, surely they'll still beat the blockaders sailing in from Japan.

A Mk12 5/38 has a range of 12km, missiles even longer. I don't know why all the ships were steaming in what looked like a counter-current PASSEX 2000 yards off the coast to engage, it's a nonsensical tactic.

On the other hand, it's kind of difficult for a person to see at that distance. So while Magneto might be good at passing metal through the air, I don't imagine his fire control being very good. It's kind of hard to hit ships because they are small compared to the ocean (and it'd be even harder if the entire combined fleets weren't sailing like every ship was doing CONREP exercises with every other ship). Unless he could detect the electromagnetic anomalies in the Earth's field caused the the metal hulls, but that'd be such bullshit. Well. As if levitating isn't already bullshit.

Yes, I do mix units a lot; deal with it.