X-Men (2000): Review and Doing it Better

Before I get started, let’s just take a minute and appreciate this movie. It was one of the first Marvel superhero movies ever made. Furthermore, it was the success of X-Men, and also Spider-man, that convinced Marvel to give making movies a shot when they got the rights to Iron Man back. It introduced Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan as Wolverine, Prof. X, and Magneto, respectively. It also helped restart the world’s fascination with comic book superheroes, and also helped fuel my own interest in the subject. It’s an important movie for nerds. Now that I’ve gotten a little gushing out of the way, let’s get to it.

I'd drop the "Trust a Few, Fear the Rest"
line from the top of the poster. Kind of goes
against what the movie is actually about.

The movie begins in Poland in 1944. The young Max Eisenhart, renamed Erik Lehnsherr for the movies, is separated from his parents at the concentration camp they are being forced into. Erik, distraught by the separation and fearing their or his own death, reaches out to them. The emotional trauma of the situation causes his powers to manifest and he savagely bends the gate before being knocked out. Jump forward to the present Day and we see Senator Robert Kelly proposing his Mutant Registration Act. The MRA would require any Mutant to submit their identity and powers to the US government so that they can be monitored. After Kelly is applauded by the assembled politicians, Xavier and the adult Erik, now going by Magneto, discuss the situation. Magneto remains certain that the bill will be passed, and it’ll lead to a Mutant Holocaust. And you know, given his past, can’t exactly fault this thinking.

In Mississippi, a young girl kisses her boyfriend and puts him into a coma. Her Mutant power to drain life force nearly killing him. The girl, now going by Rogue, somehow runs all the way to Alberta, Canada. Love to know how she managed that. But it’s never addressed. There, she meets Logan aka Wolverine, first seeing him fight a cage match, then humiliating his opponent and the bar tender with his metal claws. Don’t point a gun at Wolverine’s head. She stows away in Wolverine’s trailer, but he finds her pretty quickly. They travel for a few miles before meeting Sabretooth, whom demolishes Wolverine’s ride and nearly kills Rogue. They’re saved by the timely arrival of Cyclops and Storm. Wolverine wakes up in the X-mansion, and after Xavier messes with him a little bit, is introduced to the school and the X-Men.

They sure fit a lot of stuff under his house.

Meanwhile, Senator Kelly is kidnapped by Toad and Mystique, the latter of which had been posing as Kelly’s Aide for an unspecific amount of time. Magneto, after making an excellent speech about God Fearing men, uses a machine to forcibly trigger mutations in humans. Kelly uses his new… I’m not exactly sure what sort of power he has… rubber body? Liquid Flesh? No idea. Whatever, Kelly escapes and travels to the X-mansion. At the mansion, Wolverine has a nightmare/PTSD flashback to the experiment that gave him his metal bones, and Rogue attempts to wake him. Enrage, Wolverine awakes and stabs Rogue through the chest. She quickly touches him and borrows his healing factor.

The Mansion is infiltrated by Mystique, who poses as student Bobby Drake to convince Rogue to run off. Xavier locates her using his super computer Cerebro, and Wolverine runs after her. Rogue is kidnapped by Magneto and his goons, Senator Kelly reveals Magneto’s plan and then dies due to the instability of his mutation, and Xavier falls into a coma after trying to use Cerebro. Part 2 of Mystiques mission was to sabotage the machine. So it’s a race to reach Liberty Island, and stop Magneto from using his mutation machine to turn the world leaders gathered for a mutant summit into Mutants. It’s a good movie.

For the ladies. But seriously, compare Jackman then and now
and he's put a noticeable amount of muscle.

Good first, casting is great. Hugh Jackman, while being too tall for some people, did an amazing job as the amnesia suffering Wolverine. He does the anger really well, as well as the more vulnerable moments he has with Rogue. You could not have found a better Magneto and Xavier than McKellan and Stewart. They possess a regal sophistication and certain level of world weariness that is perfect for the two frienemies that have been doing this for several decades. The evil scheme, turning humans into Mutants, is decent. While I would have like someone to explain how Magneto’s magnetic powers plus this machine triggers Mutations in humans, I can give it a pass. And the effects a pretty damn spectacular for a movie made in the late 90s, early 2000s. So bad by today’s standards, but when I was a kid they looked phenomenal.

The Bad leads me into the doing it better segment.

Not as perfect a choice as Jackman, McKellan or
Stewart, but Famke Janssen was a good choice
too.

My main issue with this movie is the focus, it’s centered almost entirely on Wolverine and Rogue. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, these two are important X-Men characters, but they could have expanded a little bit. The runtime on the movie is only about an hour and a half, they could have easily tacked on another ten or twenty minutes to it to flesh out characters like Cyclops, Jean and Storm. A little more from these three would have been nice. In twenty minutes we could flush out the Wolverine Cyclops relationship so it didn’t come out as “Hey Scott, I hate you.” “Why?” “Because I hate you.” “Good, because I hate you too.” It could have explained the Wolverine/Jean relationship a little more too, so it didn’t seem as weird when he kept hitting on her despite knowing she has a boyfriend. And I think that Storm could have just used more development all around. She has a really interesting heart to heart with Senator Kelly, where she admits that she hates humans in much the same way that human’s hate Mutatns (because they scare her) just before Kelly dies. It’s an intense scene, but aside from that we get very little of Storm. Sure she saves the group two or three times, but she really doesn’t say much. Not sure why.

Think any of these Nazis' have any idea who they are making right now?

Also I would have liked someone to explain Magneto’s machine. The device that somehow mutates humans is never explained beyond the need for someone with Magnetic powers to fuel it. Oh and that the pulse it fires off doesn’t affect Mutants, just humans. In the Marvel Universe, radiation led to the development of the “X-gene” which gives Mutant’s there incredible powers. Sure, there were Mutants before the atomic age, but they were few and far between. So are we to assume that somehow Magneto’s machine uses his magnetic powers to somehow trigger a massive radioactive pulse? A RAP if you will? Or does his machine use some other stimulant to somehow trigger the powers? The X-Men: Evolution universe has the Rubies of Cyttorak, the magic stone that give Juggernaut his powers, and uses them to enhance existing Mutations. Does Magneto’s machine work with something similar? It’s never really explained and it kind of bugs me.

And finally, I would have made some reference to Wolverine and Sabretooth’s past together. These guys have known each other for years, hated each other for years, and yet they hardly have any screen time against each other and their hatred of each other in this movie seems to only stem from Sabretooth stealing Wolverine’s dog tags. BS. And if you try and go with the “Wolverine doesn’t remember anything, how could he know he hates Sabretooth,” I make the obvious counter, “Sabretooth still remembers.” And that furry behemoth is a sadist and a sociopath. He’d love to taunt Wolverine with what he knows about our favorite Canadian. It’d be little things, like “You’ve gotten rusty, Logan,” or “Fight like you mean it Wolverine, I’ve waited too long for this,” small things that hint at a past together. Just enough to infuriate Wolverine about what he doesn’t know about himself.

So there you have it. X-Men the review, and a few little tweaks to make it a better movie. In summation, X-Men is a good movie, great casting and effects, but it is held back a little by the over focus on Wolverine and a few small details that only an obsessive nerd like me would point out. I give it a B. Could have been better but could have been a whole hell of a lot worse. But I’ll get to that when I cover X2 and X3 sometime in the future. Next time, the man that started it all, Charles Xavier.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Men_%28film%29

 http://xmenmovies.wikia.com/wiki/File:X-men-2000-15-g.jpg

 https://www.pinterest.com/pin/350506783470779538/

 http://x-men.wikia.com/wiki/Jean_Grey_%28Cinematic_Universe%29

 http://www.superheromoviesnews.com/2013/08/x-men-franchise-x-timeline-finally.html