With a few days to kill at the end of the year, I decided to have another look at the X-Men movies, starting with the first one from 2000. I'd been thinking about it for a while, especially now that I'm reading an issue of X-Men per day on the Marvel app, but I'd kept putting it off, in part because a few of them were only available to rent and I wasn't sure I'd be able to finish them in the time before they expired.
When I did decide to do it, I figured on sticking with the main X-Men movies, so the first three from 2000-06, then the four reboot films starting with First Class, and ending with Logan. I briefly considered watching New Mutants, the Deadpool movies and the first two Wolverine movies, but decided that Logan was the only spin-off movie to watch because it acts as a sort of capstone to the entire mini-universe.
That, and I couldn't bring myself to watch X-Men Origins: Wolverine again.
As I was watching, it also struck me that I haven't rewatched most of these films since I first saw them. Indeed, I know for sure I've watched the first one more than once (but I don't recall watching it since about 2001), and I think I watched Days of Future Past twice. I also watched The Wolverine a second time last year, which, while an okay film, didn't feel like something I wanted to revisit so soon.
I'd also never seen First Class in its entirety, apart from a stint on a plane, so there were large sections I didn't recall. I'd also only seen Apocalypse on a plane, but all I remember being censored from that was Psylocke's cleavage.
My main takeaway is that the movies benefited from some excellent casting, but weren't always particularly well-written. Some of it is the problem of introducing and managing too many characters, but it also comes down to an imperfect grasp of some of the source material. The movies that were strongest - First Class, Days of Future Past and Logan - all had strong relationships at their core, while the weakest seemed to be more an attempt to throw as many characters and images at the audience as possible.
X-Men (2000) is a good example. Rogue (Anna Paquin) is meant to be our gateway in as she gets initiated into the mansion, but Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) steals the show. As a result, the other three main X-Men - Cyclops (James Marsden), Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) and Storm (Halle Berry) - get very short shrift. Storm, in particular, disappears apart from delivering one of the worst lines in movie history. Even Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) get a little lost in the whole business, despite being dream casting for those two characters.
The movie also feels very dated. The other bad guys get very little time to establish themselves, apart from Mystique (Rebecca Romijn), about whom more anon. The camera work is very static, apart from one bit at the end that evokes the Matrix, so there isn't much jumping around, and the little that there is looks cheap.
On the other hand, it was a bit of a shot in the arm for the characters, especially in the comics. I'd stopped reading the books by then, but it was all recognizable to someone who knew the basic story and knew to look for Easter eggs like Kitty Pryde and Colossus. Around the time this movie came out, the X-Books were all rebooted to have the characters wearing black leather, so that they'd look like the movies. It also let Marvel streamline the stories a bit, rather than the bloat that had taken over when I started reading them in 1991.
The second movie, X2 (2003) was a little better than I remembered. I was one of those rare people who didn't particularly like it, but rewatching it more than 20 years later, it's hard to remember what I objected to back then. I think part of it was the seeming death of Jean Grey at the end, but what made me appreciate it more this time was reading about its source material, the graphic novel God Loves, Man Kills. On the negative side, many of the characters from the first movie (mostly Storm and Rogue) were sidelined even more, in favor of Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming), who I normally like but didn't quite land here.
X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) is generally held to be the worst of the trilogy, and it is, but I also didn't hate it as much as I remember hating it back in the day. A lot of it looks pretty dodgy, and it sidelines Rogue so much that she takes the mutant vaccine and gives up her powers. Elliott Page does a good turn as Kitty Pryde, and it was nice to see Leech onscreen, even if they didn't keep him green, like in the comics. But my favorite part of the movie comes early on, when a younger Xavier and Magneto go visit Jean's parents.
It's the first time we get to see Stewart and McKellen together onscreen as anything other than adversaries, and their dynamic is delightful. It's not hard to get a sense of them as a couple, in part because Magneto is delightfully catty. But apart from the homoerotic subtext, which is rife in Bryan Singer's X-Men, the idea that they once worked together is core to the conflict between them, so it was nice to see that firsthand.
After that misfire, they decided to reboot the films entirely and explore that relationship between Xavier and Magneto in First Class (2011). They recast them with James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender, respectively, and heavily played up the friendship/boyfriendship as the core of the movie. And it finally works!
It's super fun getting to see Xavier as a groovy scientist who uses his knowledge of genetics to chat up ladies, at the same time that Magneto's rampaging through ex-Nazis in his search for Kevin Bacon. Because the movie's all about getting the X-Men together, it also introduces us to the characters in more organic ways, like discovering that one of the scientists working at the CIA is actually a mutant himself, and the montage where McAvoy and Fassbender go looking together for the other mutants they've identified. The cameo where Wolverine tells them to go fuck themselves is also delightful.
That relationship remains at the heart of the next movie, Days of Future Past (2014), but here I should acknowledge that the third pole of the triangle is Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique. She does a good job of bouncing between their two philosophies in these two films, showing that she herself is looking for her own path in life. She also does a great job of making the character her own, while also paying tribute to Rebecca Romijn's portrayal, which was very far from the comics but worked brilliantly because of it. In fact, I think Mystique in the movies is one of my favorite things about this movie universe, because she's so striking.
The other thing that makes Days of Future Past work, for me, is that instead of building a whole new team in 1973 the filmmakers use it as a bridge to the previous trilogy, bringing Stewart and McKellen and Berry and Jackman, among others, back to reprise their roles. The bit in the future where a dying Magneto tells Xavier that he regrets spending so much time fighting is both touching and a good counterpoint to the relationship between their younger selves.
Apocalypse (2016) and Dark Phoenix (2019) are less successful, in my opinion, because they lose sight of this relationship between Xavier, Magneto and Mystique. Mystique is pretty established as a good guy by now, which takes away much of the tension around her character, and she doesn't have much to do by the time the Phoenix kills her in the final movie. Magneto has a bit of an arc in Apocalypse, as we see his new family in Poland killed by anti-mutant sentiment, but I think it would have been more interesting to see his philosophy contrasted with that of Apocalypse (a kind of mis-used Oscar Isaac).
One thing that I think these two movies do relatively well, though, is the relationship between Cyclops and Jean Grey, now recast with Tye Sheridan and Sophie Turner. Rewatching the original trilogy, it struck me that Marsden and Janssen had no real chemistry together, and there's nothing to show why they're together; Cyclops is just a bit of a dick because he sees that Wolverine has designs on his lady. In Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix, we get to see them bond over being the freaks at their respective schools, and the two actors have better chemistry together. It's just too bad that they ruin that chemistry by killing Jean off again.
And finally, there's Logan. It came out in 2017, so chronologically isn't the final X-Men movie, but it works as such because we finally lay to rest both Wolverine and Xavier (although a version of Xavier turns up again in the second Doctor Strange movie, and Wolverine's apparently coming back for the next Deadpool movie). Like the other good films on this list, it has strong relationships at its core: Xavier is a good father figure for Logan, who in turn works well as a reluctant father figure for Laura (Dafne Keen). It also helps that Keen is a good enough actress, even at 11, to hold her own with Stewart and Jackman.
The movie takes a lot of things about Wolverine and Xavier to their logical extremes, most notably the violence that Logan's claws inflict on just about everybody, and so it's pretty brutal to watch. But it's nice that it has lower stakes, and it's paced well, so that among the violent sequences you get some nice, quiet moments where the characters can experience joy together, after all these years.
Overall the X-Men movies suffered from some variable quality, to put it kindly, so it's not surprising that they aren't as big a deal as the MCU or the Spider-Man movies. However, on balance they do a nice job of showcasing Marvel's flagship team, and when they're at their best, they beat pretty much any MCU film for quality - unfortunately, as I say, not enough of them reach that level of quality.
Apparently Marvel is working out how to bring them into the MCU, which I'm kind of excited about but also makes me nervous. I've said before that I think they sit uncomfortably in the wider Marvel universe - partly because I don't want to know that all my other favorite heroes turn out to be anti-mutant bigots, but also that the X-Men mythos are large enough that you don't really need to have them mingle with the Avengers and such. It's also hard to see how they fit into the wider crossovers, since the X-Men work best when you can do the soap opera and emphasize the differences between Xavier and Magneto.
That said, I'm curious what an MCU version of the X-Men will look like. At the very least, if they get a feature film or two, maybe we can mine some other good stories from the characters. Here's hoping it won't be too long.
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