undefined

Product Description ------------------- Dream-team creators Joss Whedon (TV's BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER) and John Cassaday (CAPTAIN AMERICA) unleash the astonishing follow up to ASTONISHING X-MEN: GIFTED. The tragic death of a student at the Xavier Institute reveals that a powerful enemy is working from inside the mansion to destroy the X-Men. It's an enemy who knows all their weaknesses and can predict their every move. This new foe doesn't want wealth, power or world domination it only wants them dead. As the X-Men fight for their lives, they learn they've been deceived by one of their own. Even if they survive, the team will never be the same. .com ---- A second set of Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men comic book series comes into view with this slickly tooled story, which fits a couple of metropolis-bashing battles (and various intra-X dramas) into about 70 minutes or so. Dangerous finds a batch of the Xers fending off large threats, notably a Danger Room that traps a bunch of students in its deadly walls and a major smackdown involving Professor Xavier himself. You've also got the Fantastic Four swooping in to collaborate on cleaning up a mess in Manhattan, an alliance that leads to a little territory-marking between the two groups. The "motion comics" approach means that John Cassaday's comic book art is given (pretty darned vivid) life not by full animation but a clever digital style. It's effective enough to make you forget about the limitations of the technique after a while, and the big set pieces--and there are some big set pieces--don't suffer in the slightest. Whedon's tongue-in-cheek one-liners are securely in place, and (like his work on The Avengers) manage to create a humorous undercurrent without subverting the spirit of the mutant heroes. The motion comics enterprise will always be a hybrid, but if you're going to do it at all, this is the way to do it. --Robert Horton