X-Men (2000)

"We are the future, Charles, not them! They no longer matter!"

Despite being one of the biggest comic publishers in the industry with some of the most iconic heroes, Marvel long struggled to successfully bring those same characters to the big screen. They had a few hits on TV with The Incredible Hulk and some animated series, but its movies were routinely terrible, low budget embarrassments like Captain America, The Punisher, Howard the Duck, and the Fantastic Four movie that Roger Corman made for tuppence just to hold onto the screen rights and never released. But then one movie changed all that, gave Marvel the critical and commercial hit it had long craved and set them on the path towards becoming a giant of the industry.

And that film was... Blade.

Oh, and a few years later X-Men came out and did okay.

I've been an X-Men fan since I was in single digits and I was overjoyed when the movie first came out 25 years ago, but since then my feelings about it have become more mixed. It's well made, tells a typical X-Men story effectively, and introduces their world to a wider audience in a way that is easily accessible. But overall I don't think it's a good adaptation that does many of the characters justice.

One of the most consistent problems with the Fox series was the clear imbalance in terms of which characters got the most priority. To do X-Men well in live action you need a blockbuster budget, but also need the format and runtime of a weekly TV series so all the characters don't get lost in the shuffle. X-Men is effectively a superpowered soap opera with a large cast of characters and storylines that often took months or even years to play out. This is why the most successful adaptations remain the various animated series, not the movies. Movies can only focus on a small handful of characters at a time, but these movies only ever wanted to focus on Wolverine.

It's no surprise that an X-Men movie would make Wolverine the central figure since he's the most popular character, but he's so central that no one else on the team really gets much focus or development. They get a few token moments to establish their names, powers, and basic character traits, but that is more or less it. This isn't a story about how all these different people came together to form an effective team and become good friends. It's the story of how this cool loner got to hang out with some nerds for a week or so before continuing on his own heroic journey. Sure, he's back for the sequel, but it really feels like the film is trying to fit a backdoor pilot for an X-Men show into a regular episode of The Wolverine Adventures.

With the focus firmly on Wolverine (and Magneto and Rogue, to a lesser extent), the actual X-Men of the film end up being a decidedly dull lot. Xavier gets by solely on the power of Patrick Stewart's gravitas. Cyclops (James Marsden with a straightjacket on his natural charm) is mostly useless with his powers and useless as a leader; his main role here is to help establish the tiresome Jean/Logan/Scott love triangle. Which is also the main reason why Jean is here, to have Logan aggressively hit on her despite knowing she's already involved with someone else. I've never liked Jean/Logan and hate it even more when Logan is presented a borderline sexual predator. There's no attempt to build any kind of bond between them, they have like two small chats and by the end of the movie talk as if there's this great unspoken love between them. We're just meant to accept that she has feelings for this complete stranger she met a couple of days ago because, hey, he's a tad sexier than her current boyfriend.

Considering how surprisingly short the film is, I really don't see why they didn't fit in more character beats to better flesh out a lot of the other characters. We needed more downtime at Xavier's, see more scenes of the characters just hanging out so we get a better sense of what the dynamics are. We're told that Scott and Jean are together, but don't see them together. They barely interact throughout the entire movie. The X-Men all get scenes with Logan, but barely any with each other. Same with Rogue. She comes to this school, but only ever talks with Logan or Bobby. Since he also has a dangerous power he can't turn off, it might've been great for Rogue to have a chat with Scott, to meet someone who might have some understanding of what she's going through.

Because the film shuffles around the team line ups and origins, a lot of the relationship dynamics I loved in the comics have been lost. The only ones that remain intact are the annoying love triangle and the messy love affair of Charles and Erik. They only get a few short scenes together, but they are some of the film's strongest thanks to the great chemistry of Stewart and Ian McKellen (that blossomed into a real life bromance). McKellen manages to successfully balance the many different facets of Magneto to get them all just right, showcasing his supervillain theatricality while never letting us forget the pain and tragedy that fuels his actions.

Despite X-Men being the biggest thing in comics at the time, 20th Century Fox wasn't all that confident it would be a success and was only willing to fork out a budget of $75m, half of what Batman & Robin cost to make. The budget restraints are most obvious in the action scenes. The confrontation with the Brotherhood is mainly physical rather than a splashy clash of superpowers. This results in a lot of scenes of X-Men getting their asses kicked so they are down and out and not able to use their expensive powers. There are also some awkward moments like how Cyclops and Storm just seem to vanish at the train station after briefly showing off their powers. We don't even get a shot of Cyclops stumbling around Velma-style looking for his visor.

The bulk of the budget likely went into making this film look as good as it does. Everything looks sleek and polished, all shiny metal surfaces and muted colours, making for a film that looks expensive, yet feels rather drab. This is a film that so desperately wants to be taken seriously that there is an obvious fear of anything that even remotely resembles camp. But in case it looks like it's taking itself too seriously, Wolverine is there to point out how ridiculous everything is. This really does mark the point where superhero movies traded in sincerity for knowing snark.

Notes and Quotes

--Ian McKellen was offered this and Lord of the Rings at the same time, and originally turned down LOTR to do X-Men. The filming schedule was eventually adjusted to enable him to do both.

--It's funny in retrospect that Hugh Jackman was a last minute replacement for Dougray Scott because shooting on Mission: Impossible 2 overran. I wonder if Scott is ever bitter about just missing out on the role that catapulted Jackman into the big leagues.

--Loved Magneto using his powers to create a stringless Newton's cradle.

--Logan has obviously been cage fighting at that bar for a while and yet the punters kept betting against him. If they lost money betting on the other guys then that's their own fault.

--Charles says he first met Erik when he was 17, the first of many continuity issues to come.

--The film score was by Michael Kamen (Highlander, Brazil, Die Hard) and was one of the last scores he completed and released before his untimely death in 2003.

--Besides Bobby, other students glimpsed at Xavier's include Kitty Pryde, Jubilee, and Pyro.

--Stan Lee cameos as a hot dog vendor on the beach when Kelly comes out of the water. The truck driver who drops Rogue off at the bar was played by George Buza, the voice of Beast in X-Men: The Animated Series.

Wolverine: "Hey! It's me."
Cyclops: "Prove it!"
Wolverine: "You're a dick."
Cyclops: "Okay."

Wolverine: "You actually go outside in these things?"
Cyclops: "Well, what would you prefer, yellow spandex?"

Magneto: "Does it ever wake you in the middle of the night? The feeling that one day they will pass that foolish law or one just like it, and come for you? And your children?"
Xavier: "It does, indeed."
Magneto: "What do you do, when you wake up to that?"
Xavier: "I feel a great swell of pity for the poor soul who comes to that school... looking for trouble."

Cyclops: "Storm, fry him!"
Magneto: "Oh yes! A bolt of lightning into a huge copper conductor. I thought you lived at a school?"

Magneto: "You homo sapiens and your guns!"

As an introduction to the X-Men, this film does its job effectively, but as an actual X-Men adventure it is lacking in many key areas. ⭐⭐⭐

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Mark Greig has been writing for Doux Reviews since 2011 More Mark Greig