The X-Men Movie Franchise - An In-Depth Look and Review (Part 1)

After the release of the X-Men: Days of Future Past trailer I had two big thoughts; One, that it looks fantastic and I can't wait to see it, Two, I hadn't seen X-Men:First Class and couldn't remember most of what happened in X-Men 1-3. So I decided to go back and revisit X-Men 1-3 in preparation for watching First Class and reacquaint myself with the universe and talk about what I thought of them.

First up - X-Men


Full disclosure, I've never read an X-Men comic, though I do love the characters and franchise. My main exposure to the X-Men were through the 90's animated series...and this film. I loved the animated series, but I couldn't tell you anything that ever happened, just generalizations about the characters themselves. This movie came out when I was 10, so between the animated series and this movie these are the versions of the characters I grew up with and I know.

I can't speak about how the characters relate to their comic book versions, but boy do I love this first film. It does a pretty good job of setting up the expansive X-Men universe, covering Magneto, Professor X, Wolverine and Rogue. The problem that these large scale team movies run into is that you can't possibly have time to explore each character and give them a great deal of things to do, but this movie seems to find a good balance. While Storm, Cyclops, Jean Grey and Mystique don't get much in the way of character development, they each get to show why they're useful for their own specific skills and how they fit in in their environments.

We essentially have four main characters, who each provide a different view of the world through their mutant eyes. Professor Xavier shows us the positive and encouraging side of the mutant debate, while Magneto shows us the dark destructive side. Wolverine shows us someone who's new to the world of being out in the open and around other mutants, but has dealt with being a mutant for a long time. Rogue shows us the young, inexperienced side that is experiencing everything for the first time. This gives the movie a well-rounded feel, like afterwards you know pretty much how this world works. The other thing I think it does exceptionally well is making the bad guy sympathetic.

In the film, the catalyst for events is a Senator being highly supportive of a Mutant Registration Act, which would strip mutants of a lot of rights and treat them as lesser people. Through Professor Xavier and Magneto trying to sway his opinion on the matter we get to see both sides of the coin and understand where Magneto is coming from. While he is this film's bad guy, you understand how he came to the conclusions he did. After all these years X-Men still holds up for me as a very solid film.

X2: X-Men United


This film has been my second place contender for best comic book movie sequel for a long time, right behind Spider-Man 2, and with good reason. X-Men United feels like a near-perfect expansion of the first film and fits extremely well as a second installment in a series. Instead of finding new directions for the story to go, X2 feels like a direct progression of events, a solid and cohesive venture that takes the ideas, themes and concepts from the first film and expands on them in logical ways. In the first film we open the movie with a flashback to Magneto's childhood of being in the Nazi concentration camps and he brings up throughout the film that he will not be put on a list and targeted as a demographic ever again. In this film he still rallies on this point, but throughout most of the film he is either under mind-control or stuck in a prison. Nevertheless, his predictions about how mutants will be treated are shown to be coming true thanks to the films main antagonist, William Stryker, who is collecting and experimenting with mutants. I loved the portrayal of Nightcrawler, and thought he often steals the show. He brings humor through his repeated stated introduction of himself, but he also brings a much darker storyline about what it's like to truly be an outcast. He's a mutant just like the others, but he looks much too different for normal society to accept him, a point he bonds with Mystique about, who tells him that they shouldn't have to hide who they really are to please society.

While I do have some problems with the story, they are overshadowed by the amount of good things I think about it. My biggest complaint is that the Wolverine/Jean Grey love triangle seems so rushed. It's clear that she feels something for him, but she never acts upon it. Wolverine has a handful of interactions with her in the first film and by the time of this film he's full on in love with her, despite us having not seen any development towards that. Other than that though, I think the love story angles in this film were executed well, especially Rogue's adoration of Wolverine and her inability to be intimate with her boyfriend as well as his inability to understand her situation. There's a nice summary of the situation towards the end of the film where Mystique appears as Jean Grey in Wolverine's tent and tries to seduce him. When he figures it out he throws her off, but she shifts into both Storm and Rogue, asking him if he would prefer either. When she shifts into Rogue Wolverine hesitates for a moment before giving her a final "Get out."

Another story point I thought was handled very well was the comparison between being gay to being a mutant. The highest point of this not-so-subtle but nicely done arc comes when the gang travels to Iceman's parents house and he "comes out" to them about being a mutant and his mother asks if he'd ever tried not being a mutant. Again, not the most subtle, but a nice little analogy, as it helps audiences relate to what being a mutant must be like, being ostracized based on the way you were born and had no control over.

The action and effects in this movie are fantastic, from Iceman's ice and Wolverine's regeneration to Magneto's metal controlling abilities (that prison escape sequence is one of the coolest scenes in the whole series) to Nightcrawler's teleportation. The only thing I get hung up on is some of the wire-work for characters. In a lot of scenes it seems really unnatural, like in Wolverine's battle with Lady Deathstrike, they both use a large amount of wire-work and wire-fu and I swear I can almost see the wires with how clear and unnatural it looks to me.

The film climaxing at Jean Grey's death is still super effective for me. Though like I mentioned earlier it does feel a little odd how effected Wolverine is, you just have to accept in these movies he is head over heels in love with her. The death feels impactful and the movie built it up to make sense. She had been having erratic spurts of power since using Cerebro in the last film so she both knows she has the power to save everyone and that she is the only one who could do it. There is some beautiful symmetry at the end of the film with Jean Grey reciting the same monologue about the arise of mutants in the human gene pool that Xavier opens the first film with while we get a visual of a Phoenix shape rushing beneath the water, setting up what comic book fans already knew was coming, the story of Phoenix in the end of the trilogy. Overall this film is still one of my favorite superhero films of all time, and is an excellent sequel to a first installment, doing pretty much everything right.

X-Men: The Last Stand

This is where things got tough for me. I hadn't seen The Last Stand since it came out on dvd. I remember originally liking the film but after all the negative criticism and some bad feelings over the contents of the deleted scenes, I was left with the impression that I hated the film and it was awful. A friend of mine told me before I had seen the trailer of Days of Future Past that it was going to make The Last Stand a relevant movie, and though I haven't seen it yet, heard the same thing about The Wolverine. So I thought I should try and keep an open mind when re-watching, and you know what, it's not that bad.

With The Last Stand came the switch of directors from Bryan Singer to Brett Ratner, which was my first warning sign. Though I don't think he's a bad director, it doesn't bode well for the continuing look and feel of the film from the last two. For as much shit as this movie gets, I think it handles a lot of continued plot points well, and I think that is owed largely to Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn, the main writers for all three films.

First, for the good. I think the overall Phoenix story is handled very well, with the intro showing how powerful Jean Grey was, following her re-appearance as Phoenix and her ultimate demise at the hands of the one man who can kill her, Wolverine. We had been building up to this storyline since the last movie and the final sequence with Wolverine and Phoenix is a true visual masterpiece that conveys the utter hopelessness and finality of the situation, how she's virtually unstoppable but the one person who can stop her also is madly in love with her. To me, the mutant cure main story arc is just a catalyst to set up this story and the other arc I thought was done well, Magneto's.

In the first film we were shown Magneto loudly stating that he would never be under the rule of a dictator again, and that no one would be able to put him on a list or judge him based on his birth again. In the second film we see him amassing other mutants who think the same way as he does about being controlled. In this film we see Magneto becoming exactly the thing he vowed to never be under rule of, a tyrannical dictator. We do get a taste of this in the first film, as his main plan is to force everyone to be like him, a mutant. In this film Magneto wants to use Phoenix to kill the humans and have him bend to his will. When Mystique gets hit with the cure and becomes normal, he disowns her, saying she's "not one of us anymore." In the final battle sequence when Magneto gets hit with the cure, he drops to the ground and just starts muttering to himself that he's the thing he hates, normal. Throughout the trilogy you get a good understanding and sympathy for Magneto, as you can see the path he had to go and why he would think that way. Why his past at the hands of Nazi's effect his ideas in the present day. You don't agree with him, but you understand him, and I think that was well done over the three films.

Now, for the bad. The intro sequence's cgi de-aging of Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan is unnerving. They look like they're wearing rubber masks of slightly younger selves. They're supposed to be 20 years in the past but they just look like they're really shiny versions of themselves 10 years younger. It makes me feel uncomfortable watching, much like young Jeff Bridges in Tron:Legacy. Most of the other problems have to do with secondary characters, like Angel. Angel shows up in the beginning of the movie as a kid to provide the motivation for the cure storyline. He then proceeds to only show up to progress the plot and has no real character development. He shows up once to escape being given the cure and he flies off to the Mansion. He shows up at the mansion to give Storm a reason to keep the school open, then he shows up in the final battle to save his dad. Finally we see him flying in the air in the end sequence. For a character who is so connected to the plot of the film he barely does a damn thing. Then there is Bobby Frost and Kitty Pryde. I get that the idea of their relationship is that she's a "normal" girl that likes Bobby that allows him to feel needed and important, unlike Rogue who can't be intimate with him for fear of injuring or killing him. However, he's a real dick to Rogue, which makes her decision to get the cure to be with him really frustrating to me. On the subject of Kitty Pryde, I really like Ellen Page and her characterization of Kitty, but it was frustrating that they switched actors for Kitty once she actually had something to do with the plot. I know she was someone different in the first film too, but in X2 she actually was the star of a sequence of events and some continuity there would have been nice. The disappearance of Nightcrawler was also a big deal to me. I think he's one of the stars of the second film and plays an integral part of the plot and to have him not even be name checked in the next installment really gets to me. My last big gripe here is that Magneto recruits an army of mutants, but Toad and Sabretooth are nowhere to be found. It didn't really make sense for them to be in the second one because Mystique was his only henchman who had contact with him. But in a film where Magneto is trying to recruit everyone he can find and the two henchman from the first film are nowhere to be found is annoying.

The Last Stand feels rushed, in a hurry to get to the next action sequence, whereas the first two maintain a nice balance of emotional/plot arcs and action sequences. This one is all about the effects. Not a terrible film, just not great. Unlike it's successor, X-Men Origins. But I'll save that for part two, when I talk about prequels!