X-Men Movie Rewatch: X-Men, X2, and X3

I decided to re-watch the 20th Century Fox X-Men movies. Since I’m old, I saw most of them as they came out and remember liking most of them, but it had been a while since I’d seen the first few, so with how much I’ve been enjoying the X-Men comics, it seemed like the time to revisit those movies.

X-Men

Unfortunately, to my surprise, X-Men actually isn’t a very good movie.

It’s also far from a terrible movie. The two I remember hating are X3: The Last Stand (because the story was a complete hash) and X-Men Origins: Wolverine (which was sort of mediocre until the last 15 minutes, when you see their version of Deadpool, which even I knew was horrible despite having never read a Deadpool comic), and nothing I saw rewatching X-Men brought it to the level of those two. But in a world where Guardians of the Galaxy, The Avengers, Captain America: Civil War, Thor: Ragnarok, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Black Panther, Wonder Woman, Logan, and both Deadpools exist, it’s easy to see the cracks in the first X-Men movie.

One of the weird things I wasn’t expecting to notice is how uncool the powers actually are as presented in this movie. Compared to the modern comic book movies, a lot of this movie is done with practical effects—stunts, wire work, physical stage combat—probably because CG was so much more expensive in 2000 than it is now. Normally I really like practical effects, but in this movie the limitations of the practical effects made a lot of the characters seem weaker and lamer than they are in the comics or the animated series, or even in later movies where the effects budget was bigger. Magneto’s big show of power in this movie is stealing everyone’s guns and pointing them back at their owners. Professor Xavier’s is taking over the minds of Magneto’s henchmen and making them talk to him. Storm struggles to defeat Toad, one of the lamest X-Men villains. (Jean also does, but Jean in the comics was weak and lame until she became Phoenix, so at least it’s in character. Storm in the comics would wipe the floor with Toad.) The fact that Toad is in this movie at all is probably a result of effects limitations; you can get the guys in the makeup shop to whip up some gooey spit, and a CG tongue is cheap enough compared to what you’d need to do someone like Pyro or Avalanche. But setting that aside, even the effects-light fights, like Wolverine vs. Mystique, seem boring and low-impact for some reason. There’s something about the way they shoot and stage the combat. No one ever seems to land a solid hit—they’re always grabbing each other and throwing each other across the room on wires. This might also have to do with the effects budget; they can’t really smash up an environment like the fights in newer comic book movies can because it’s mostly practical, so they would have to build and set up destructible environments, and they would have to do it again every time they need a new take for whatever reason.

Another weird thing I noticed: the color scheme is super dark, and everybody’s dialogue sounds ominous and weighty and a little bit emo. There are a few jokes, but they’re not very good; there were things I enjoyed in this movie, but I definitely never laughed while watching it. There really is a big difference between the “grounded” look and tone that it was felt comic book movies needed to have in 2000, and the more fantastical feel they’re allowed to have nowadays. From what I remember, even X-Men: First Class is a lot brighter and more lighthearted compared to these first two movies. Of course, this was only three years after Batman and Robin, and that was both a critical and financial failure, so it makes some sense that everyone involved would think that getting as far away from that as possible was wise.

The story feels rushed. Magneto’s plot is poorly developed and makes very little sense—he’s either risking death in the machine or risking death touching Rogue, so why bother touching Rogue?—and the mid-movie reveal that he’s after Rogue, not Wolverine, is only shocking because it makes no sense. Rogue traveled, probably via hitchhiking, all the way from Louisiana or wherever it was she lived up to northernmost Canada. If Sabretooth was able to find her so easily even though she was riding in a camper with a hobo, he must have known where she was. So why did he wait to grab her until she was with Wolverine? Why not grab her when she was alone in a dive bar in the middle of South Dakota? Or even as she slipped out of the dive bar in northernmost Canada to stow away in Wolverine’s trailer, before they’d met and he was there to defend her? The twist also led to a painful dialogue exchange between Sabretooth and Magneto in which both of them speak in clipped, vague, awkwardly worded sentences solely because wording them more naturally would have given away the twist. This is most obvious when Magneto asks, “Where is the mutant now?”, solely because he can’t say “Where is she now?” because that would reveal that he was after Rogue, not Wolverine.

We get almost no character development for anyone except Wolverine, Rogue, Xavier, and Magneto, plus some tiny bits for Jean and Mystique. Cyclops and Storm are just there; they have no backstory, play next to no part in the plot, and do almost nothing of consequence. During the final battle they and Jean pretty much just get beat up until Wolverine comes in and saves them. The two villainous henchmen, Toad and Sabretooth, have no personality at all and don’t seem threatening, so the X-Men just seem pathetic for not being able to beat them. Now that I’ve watched this movie again, I understand why modern superhero movies are all three hours long: even for a solo movie, you need all that time to fit in the story, character development, and action scenes without compromising any of them.

The casting is a mixed bag. Hugh Jackman is of course brilliant as Wolverine, as are Patrick Stewart as Professor X and Ian McKellen as Magneto. Anna Paquin’s teenage Rogue is pretty good too, and I think she could’ve been great if they’d done more with her character. Rebecca Romijn as Mystique is surprisingly good too. I always thought she looked the part more than Jennifer Lawrence, but she also acts it well, getting across the simple emotions she needs to with facial expressions and sparse dialogue. James Marsden’s Cyclops is disappointing. He doesn’t have the presence to stand up to Hugh Jackman, so Cyclops and Wolverine’s arguments always seem one-sided. He also gets essentially zero character development, which doesn’t help anything. Same deal for Storm, except I feel like Halle Berry is even less invested in her role than James Marsden is in his, based on how she delivers her lines. Also, movie Storm is a lot more jumpy and screamy than comics Storm. There’s a scene where she’s standing in the infirmary by Senator Kelly’s bedside as he’s dying, and he asks to hold her hand. She takes his hand, and then he turns into water and dissolves, and Storm screams and flips out and runs out of the room, which I don’t see comics Storm doing in the same situation. Famke Janssen’s Jean Grey is okay, but we don’t get much backstory on her either, and she and Cyclops don’t really have any chemistry. (Neither do she and Wolverine, though, so both sides of that love triangle are duds.)

Despite all the marks against it, there are still some pretty great things in this movie. The performances of Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, and Ian McKellen, of course. The movie does do a good job introducing their three characters and letting us know what they’re all about. I also liked the dynamic between Rogue and Wolverine a lot, and I would’ve liked to see more of them paired up in the second movie. The score was surprisingly good, too: it’s grand and orchestral in the style of John Williams, but there’s a bit of a modern edge to it, which not only fits the tone of the movie very well but also fits the X-Men themselves, who are a classic superhero team in a lot of ways but also innovated in others.

X2: X-Men United

Unlike the first movie, I found X2 to hold up very well. It has its flaws: Cyclops and Storm still do almost nothing and get no further development; they throw in two-minute cameos of lamer versions of several classic X-Men for no reason; the final battle drags on for too long; the way they introduce Phoenix is clumsy. But on balance I thought X2 had more good stuff and less bad stuff than the first movie did.

X2 makes up for all the good action scenes the first movie didn’t have by being stuffed with good action scenes: Nightcrawler attacking the White House; Wolverine cutting through a squad of commandos to defend the mansion; Magneto breaking out of his prison and later holding up the entire Blackbird; Pyro blowing up police cars with his fire powers. It also has good character development. Wolverine learns more about his past. Iceman admits to his family that he’s a mutant, and while they try to be tolerant, they certainly aren’t happy about it. Stryker, the villain, whose son was a mutant that Xavier tried to help, sinks to depths that shake even the optimistic Professor X. While I wouldn’t trade the sunny, fun-loving comics version of Nightcrawler for this movie’s version, he fits in to the dark, miserable, grave world these movies have established while still feeling like Nightcrawler, and the way he uses his powers is interesting and works well with the practical effects that this movie still mostly uses. Alongside Wolverine and Magneto, he’s one of the more successful translations of an X-Men character to the screen that these two movies have pulled off.

Speaking of the practical effects, while there’s still something off about some of the fight scenes—particularly the Wolverine and Lady Deathstrike battle—most of them work a lot better than they did in the first movie. The Nightcrawler fight at the beginning of the movie, for instance, and another scene during the final battle where Mystique fights off a bunch of guards, both have impact, speed, and a lack of cheesy wire work. The Wolverine fight in the mansion was so visceral and brutal that if you threw some blood in it, it could have been in Logan. This movie also uses more CGI than the first movie did, to good effect: the scene outside Bobby Drake’s parents’ house where Pyro blows up a bunch of police cars uses a great blend of CGI to depict the fireballs and practical effects to show the cars exploding. Some of the action scenes in this movie even start to surpass the MCU, because the practical effects make them feel more grounded and real.

I don’t have a lot to say about this one; it’s a good movie, and even though some of the social commentary is stupidly on the nose (like the famous line “Have you tried not being a mutant?” that Iceman’s mom says to him), it makes its point without being too annoying about it.

X3: The Last Stand

I remember thinking this was the worst thing ever put on film the first time I saw it, but rewatching it, it’s actually not as bad as I remembered. It’s still terrible, but not as bad as I remembered; the plot is full of holes, there are a bunch of unnecessary deaths, several things that I just found dumb, a lot of comics references shoehorned in badly, and the pacing is weird, but at least the characters seem mostly in character with the previous movies, and I could always follow what was going on in the plot, which for me put it above Suicide Squad. I liked some of the new characters and actors it introduced, like Kelsey Grammer’s Beast and Ellen Page’s Kitty Pryde. Some of the action scenes were pretty cool, although there was nothing as visceral as Wolverine trashing those soldiers in the mansion from X2.

Broadly, the major problems with this movie come from trying to do too much in too little running time. They’re trying to do a version of the Dark Phoenix Saga, with Jean coming back to life, killing Scott and the professor, trying to hump Logan, and going over to Magneto’s side. They’re also trying to do a version of the mutant cure storyline. I haven’t read this story in the comics but in the animated series the mutant cure was a plot by Apocalypse to prey on desperate mutants. Weirdly, it being a plot by an evil blue immortal being who was worshiped as a god in ancient Egypt feels more realistic than what this movie does with it: in this movie, it really works and you can just shoot a mutant with a dart and they’ll lose their powers. They’re also trying to introduce a new team of X-Men and a bunch of new villains, while explaining why the old X-Men and old villains aren’t around anymore, and have enough action scenes to keep everyone satisfied. They do all of these things poorly; for the most part, the plot mechanics make sense and fit together, but because it’s all squeezed together so much, none of it really has emotional impact or meaning. They’re just checking boxes.

It reminds me a little of The Dark Knight Rises. That movie was also too ambitious, large scale, and grandiose with its plot. In that movie, this also introduced various plot holes and things that did not seem to be given their proper due as major events. Some of the ones that people complain about in The Dark Knight Rises, I actually don’t care about. (How did Batman get from the middle of the Gobi Desert back to Gotham after he climbed out of the pit? Who cares, he’s the goddamn Batman!) But there are definitely some plot threads in that movie, like every cop in Gotham being locked in the sewer for six months, that feel weird, cursory, and not well enough explored or set up. And a lot of X3 feels similar.

The specific things I disliked about this movie mostly come in two flavors. There are plot holes, continuity breaks with previous movies, and things I just thought were stupid—things that make this movie bad even if you’ve only watched X-Men, X2, and this, and know nothing about the comics. Then there are things that were changed from the comics, in my opinion for the worse.

In column A we have the following offenses:

• Mystique: “I don’t respond to my slave name”. For anyone who thought “Have you tried not being a mutant?” was too subtle.
• I get why Phoenix killed Professor X—he was the one keeping her sealed away. Why did she kill Scott? Given that she killed Scott, why did she try to have sex with Logan instead of kill him too? (Out of universe, the reason is that James Marsden left the movie in the middle to be in Superman Returns as some guy who’s not Superman or Lex Luthor, and is therefore not important. Not that Cyclops was ever that important to these movies.)
• Making the mutant cure a dart gun that you can just shoot someone with and it immediately rewrites their DNA to take away their powers with no ill effect breaks even my suspension of disbelief.
• There was no reason for Angel to be in the movie. He doesn’t do anything. He only talks to the X-Men once. He goes to live at the mansion, but he doesn’t actually join the team; he just shows up at the final battle to save his father.
• Magneto shows up at a community meeting of mutants and just recruits them all to be soldiers. One of these mutants conveniently has the power of detecting mutants and their power levels from a distance, and also super speed.
• They introduce a class system for mutant power levels with no explanation. Its only purpose is telling us how powerful Phoenix is. We don’t need this; we can see how powerful Phoenix is. If the reveal of Phoenix’s power were going to be pushed to the end of the movie, I can see why this foreshadowing would be useful, but we’ve already seen a small demonstration from when she was a child by this point, and we see a bigger one about 15 minutes after this when she kills Professor X and raises her house into the air.
• Personally, I hate it when a character is a “good girl” and then develops a split “bad girl” personality. It’s hard to explain why I hate it in general, I just find it boring. It’s akin to the “all girls want to date bad boys” maxim, which denies the complexity of real people’s tastes and motives, ignores the variety of relationship dynamics that exist in real life, and has been done to death in fiction. In this specific case, I hate that it implies Jean had complete contempt for everything and everyone in her old life except for “bad boy” Wolverine, who spoke to her “bad girl” side, and was just suppressing a gag reflex as she went along with Professor X’s and Cyclops’s dumb square life of science and teaching and trying to help mutants until Professor X’s mental manipulation wore off and she was able to go have sex with Wolverine and join up with Magneto’s evil crusade. It makes her look like a terrible person in retrospect, and it invalidates every emotional scene we had between Jean and Scott, including the ones where Scott was mourning her earlier in this movie.
• There’s a subplot about Iceman cheating on Rogue with Kitty Pryde. It comes straight out of nowhere. Rogue acts like the hysterical woman characters from 1950’s TV who only care about holding on to their man and keeping his eyes off that hussy down the street. Kitty just goes along with it, even though the whole school knows Rogue and Iceman are together. In the end it’s entirely meaningless because Rogue gets the cure and she and Iceman get back together. It does lead to one good scene: Rogue decides to sneak out and get the mutant cure, and runs into Wolverine as she’s leaving. Wolverine gives her a little speech about responsibility and being able to make her own choices, and tells her to make sure that whatever she does, she does for herself, and not for some guy. Unfortunately the conclusion of the subplot undercuts this scene, because it looks like Rogue really did just do it for some guy who was going to cheat on her if she couldn’t have sex with him, and as soon as they could have sex he immediately ran back to her. It also makes Iceman look like an asshole; he was going to ditch her unless they could have sex and go shack up with Kitty, but as soon as she caves to his desires and gets the cure so they can have sex, he’s right back with her.
• Magneto abandoning Mystique after she got shot with the cure dart felt out of character. Mystique betraying Magneto after that felt even more out of character. The president actually says “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” when we find out she betrayed him.
• So the cure is a dart that you can inject into mutants, but it also comes from this kid who’s a mutant that can cancel the powers of other mutants (kind of like Mikan from Gakuen Alice or Touma from A Certain Scientific Railgun). It wasn’t clear what the connection between these two is. In the final battle, Magneto is trying to kill the kid. (At least, I assume he’s trying to kill him, since he sends Juggernaut to plow through the walls to get at him.) I don’t understand why. Would killing the kid magically make the cure darts stop working? Was he just planning to take the kid and do research on him to try and figure out how to reverse the cure? Where did he think he would be able to do that after declaring war on humanity on national television and tearing the Golden Gate Bridge in half so he could transport his army to Alcatraz?
• They have a mostly new X-Men team for the final battle—Wolverine (who is the leader, of course), Storm, Beast, Iceman, Colossus, and Kitty Pryde. They didn’t really set them up at all except for a single sequence in the Danger Room at the beginning. Colossus only has one line in the entire movie and does nothing of consequence in the final battle.
• After Jean goes full evil and joins Magneto, she spends the entire final battle just standing there next to him and doing nothing while the other mutants on their side get shot with cure darts, even though she’s powerful enough to wipe out the entire force defending the island, tear apart their plastic cure dart guns, tear open the prison, and take or kill the kid all by herself. At the very end, she decides for no reason to start fighting, and then Wolverine kills her.
• What happened to Nightcrawler? He’s just not here anymore.

In the much shorter column B:

• Storm sucks. The scene where Professor X tells her that she’s going to be his successor is the only time she does anything that doesn’t suck. It’s undercut when you realize that Jean is dead and Xavier has decided Scott was too broken by her death to take over, making Storm the only choice left. As in the previous two movies, she hardly does anything, has no character building moments, no backstory, and gets beat up in every fight without achieving anything. Unlike the comics, Wolverine has zero respect for her, ignores her orders in the Danger Room at the beginning, and just assumes leadership of the new X-Men team before the final battle, even making the inspirational speech.
• Juggernaut looks ridiculous and we never see him do anything cool or intimidating. The sequence where Kitty runs ahead of him in the Alcatraz lab is pretty cool, but it would have been better if I actually felt like he was dangerous and not just some idiot who says “I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!”
• Kitty has no personality. She cries over Professor X’s death, but that’s about it.
• Colossus isn’t Russian. What’s up with that?

Even though I didn’t like X-Men nearly as much on rewatch as I thought I would, this was by far the worst of the original three movies.

Conclusion

These three movies were important steps for bringing comic books movies to where they are today, but they achieved it by giving up a lot of what makes the comics fun. They made a habit of suppressing or drastically re-envisioning anything from the comics that felt too colorful or not grounded enough. The black leather costumes and the “yellow spandex” joke are the most obvious examples, but there are a lot of other changes in the movies that I attribute to this attitude. This is probably why Colossus isn’t Russian (Deadpool, which had a comedic tone, was allowed to go back on that), and it probably contributed to us losing Storm’s and Cyclops’s backstories, which are very comic booky and weird, but work because of how they help us understand them as characters. It’s definitely why the movies’ main plotlines could never go outside the “mutants as metaphor for oppressed groups” narrative.

Looking back, it seems like the semi-grounded, semi-dark tone this Fox X-Men trilogy established was adopted by other studios as the generic “superhero movie” feel. The Sony Spider-Man movies are a little more colorful, but they have a similar tone and similar mopey plot points. The Ang Lee Hulk movie, aside from its weird habit of splitting the screen into panels, also adopts this kind of ponderous tone. Even Iron Man feels like it’s transitioning between this tone and what the MCU would become; it’s a lot more colorful and fun and less mopey than any of these X-Men movies, but it’s still more grounded than what we would get even a few movies later with Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger. The trailer for Sony’s Venom movie was interesting because the tone looks less like the MCU or the DCEU and more like this generic early 2000’s grounded feel. That could turn out good, like X2, or not so good, like the other two, but it’s definitely different from what Marvel and DC are doing nowadays. (Personally I’m a bit of an optimist on Venom. It’s not something I’m hugely looking forward to, but it doesn’t look terrible so far.)

There is, however, one corner of the MCU that I’ve realized has a tone much closer to these early X-Men movies: the Netflix shows. Luke Cage is a little more stylish and colorful, but Daredevil and Jessica Jones feel like these movies with better dialogue, and Iron Fist could practically have been directed by Bryan Singer. That’s part of its problem, I think: like Captain America and Thor, there’s nothing about the character of Iron Fist that lends itself to being grounded. The show was constantly dancing around essential parts of Iron Fist’s backstory, like how he received his powers in a wrestling match with a dragon, that didn’t seem grounded enough. It was trying so hard to be Daredevil that it ignored the kind of gonzo grindhouse kung fu movie feel that could have made an Iron Fist show fun to watch, the way Luke Cage plays on blaxploitation film tropes.