The X too often stands for eXposition.
Released at the dawn of the new millennium, X-Men might seem to today’s audiences, gorged on the bombastic, dazzling spectacle we associate with modern superhero films, a little quaint but at the time it marked a significant shift in Hollywood’s approach to the genre. Prior to this, superhero movies were teetering on the brink of campy irrelevance thanks to high profile bombs like Batman & Robin, The Phantom and Spawn. Yet-to-be-disgraced director Bryan Singer’s X-Men, however, clawed the genre back from the brink, infusing the genre with a degree of seriousness and introspection that laid much of the groundwork for the superhero renaissance that would follow. It’s far from perfect, but it would turn out to be a game-changer.
Like its source material, at its core, X-Men is a story of fear, alienation, and identity politics writ large. Set in a world where mutants are ostracised and feared for their powers, we’re introduced to two opposing views on how to bridge – or perhaps widen – the chasm between mutants and regular humans. On one side, there’s Professor Charles Xavier (played with paternal gravitas by Patrick Stewart), the idealistic leader of the X-Men, who believes peaceful coexistence is not only possible but essential. On the other, we have Magneto (Ian McKellen, dripping with elegant menace), who harbours little interest in cohabiting with a species that he believes would rather annihilate his own. Caught in the crossfire between these two opposing ideologues are Logan, low-key known as Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), the gruff loner with claws of adamantium and a past shrouded in mystery and Rogue (Anna Paquin), the young mutant terrified of her own lethal powers and the lynchpin in Magneto’s straight-out-of-a-Saturday-morning-cartoon masterplan.
What X-Men does well is create a compelling dynamic between these characters. Stewart and McKellen empower their performances with a rich sense of history and ideological tension, refusing to patronise the materials’ comic book roots and instead treating it with the respect it deserves, even if it often feels like the X in Professor X stands for eXposition. You can feel the weight of their shared past in every scene they share, two old friends divided by their view of the world and it’s X-Men’s masterstroke to have cast two such august performers to act as the magnetic poles of its story, a duet of opposition that would power the franchise throughout its peaks and troughs.
Of course, the undeniable breakout star is Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine. A controversial casting at the time for comic book fans, he indelibly brough the role to life for the general audience, thanks to a gruffly charismatic performance and sharp writing which gave him a role as an audience proxy, his persona of a cynical outsider who thinks all of this is a bit ridiculous giving the wider audience permission to embrace the comic book silliness without feeling silly themselves. Jackman nails the role, bringing just the right amount of brooding, barely contained rage and unexpected playfulness. It’s little wonder that a quarter of a century later, nobody can really conceive of any other actor playing the role.
But for all its strengths in casting, X-Men stumbles in its execution. Virtually all of the secondary characters are woefully underdeveloped, existing more as placeholders than fully realised individuals. Famke Janssen’s Jean Grey, Halle Berry’s Storm, and James Marsden’s Cyclops all feel like afterthoughts, with Berry in particular obviously struggling with what to make of the material, and while Rogue is central to the plot, her actual characterisation leaves much to be desired. She’s more a plot device than a character in her own right, which is a shame given how pivotal she is in the comics. It’s also apparent, with hindsight, that given the available roster of characters, the number of X-men used in the film feels cheap.
The choice to drape the characters in black leather rather than the colourful costumes of the comics might have seemed bold and edgy at the time, but it also hasn’t aged particularly well. While the film tries to ground its aesthetics in a kind of heightened realism, the result feels more drab than daring. Leather jumpsuits don’t exactly lend themselves to movement, which may account for much of the action feeling a bit stiff and awkwardly staged. The wire work is too obvious and beyond Mystique’s gymnastic fighting style, it’s all a bit clunky.
X-Men works, not because it’s flawless, but because it dared to treat its subjects with dignity at a time when superhero films were little more than punchlines. The oblique focus on the racial subtext gave it thematic heft that set it apart from its contemporaries and while its relatively modest scope feels a little twee now, it was that restraint that created space for the subsequent films – and the genre itself – to recover from its recent nadir.
