Je kent het wel met een goede film, dat de held zich zelf opoffert voor de rest van de wereld. Maar wat als je nu heel realistisch naar sommige van deze films kijkt, dan zal je zien dat sommige opofferingen voor niks zijn geweest. De website Cracked.com maakte deze lijst, en onze favoriet is:

#5.X2 -- Jean Grey

X2 is the shining star among the X-Men movies, full of actual plot and character development and everything. But it unfortunately ends on a low note when Jean Grey sacrifices herself for, really, no reason at all.

At the climax of the movie, we find our heroes stuck in a valley with a dam that's about to break, a ship that won't fly and about a dozen uber-powerful mutants, of which Jean is apparently the only one strong enough to save everyone. So in order to do this, she leaves the ship, fixes it with her mind, lifts it into the air while blocking the water from the breaking dam and then heroically gets swept away when she releases the water after the plane is clear.

But the only reason Jean is able to save them at all is because she senses the water from the burst dam coming a full two minutes before it arrives. She looks back at everyone, teary-eyed, and takes the time to slowly limp off the plane, lock everyone else inside and send some creepy good-bye messages through Professor X then fixes the plane from the outside while she simultaneously blocks the water.

Wait a second ...

Why did she need to leave the plane at all?

Jean's powers are telekinetic -- she thinks about something and it happens. Nothing we know about her powers says the walls of the plane would block them, and even if they did, she could have just stood in the cockpit and knocked out the windows. If she had immediately started fixing the plane and told everyone to shut up while she concentrated, they probably could have been half way to Acapulco before the water even got to them.

We didn't just make up this solution, by the way -- it's the one she actually uses in the Marvel novelization of the movie. The book had a different ending where, lo and behold, Jean fixes the ship from inside and doesn't die needlessly, and they all live happily ever after. But if that had happened, we wouldn't have been able to see Wolverine and Cyclops hug out their differences, and we definitely wouldn't have wanted to miss that.