Admit it. You saw that logo and the theme song for the animated series immediately popped into your head.
Picture what we almost had: James Cameron as producer, Kathryn Bigelow as director, Bob Hoskins as Wolverine, and Angela Bassett as Storm with a script by Andrew Kevin Walker. This was the rumored first cinematic crack at the beloved mutants circa 1989. Alas, we would have to wait 11 long years before Marvel’s merry mutants made their way onto cinema screens, but that fateful meeting with Chris Claremont and Stan Lee pitching their idea for an X-Men movie to Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment production company did lead to the long, winding, absolute mess that was the development of the 2002 Spider-Man movie.
That is a whole other essay and series of false starts, stalled productions, complicated rights issues, and Marvel’s own bankruptcy proceedings. But we need to go back to the 1980s.
And we need to look towards television for the first crack at establishing the beloved comic property as a larger pop cultural presence. The likes of Spider-Man and the Hulk had managed to not only appear in multiple television shows, but also become household names. (And this was when the first murmurings of a full-fledged Spider-Man movie started.) Prior to the 1990s, the X-Men were known in comic book circles and hardly anywhere else. The occasional (mostly unsuccessful) video game or guest appearance in Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends notwithstanding.
Pre-2000 Attempts
The premise is pretty simple: Kitty Pryde joins the X-Men and aides in defeating Magneto and company’s dastardly plot to launch a comet into Earth. The animation is better and more consistent than the well-known animated series while the voice acting and overall writing are just as inconsistent. You can see what the overall potential series would have been – hyperbolic, thinly written characters, but immense style.
Much like the animated series, Pryde of the X-Men contains a roster of mutants that represented the comic book lineup as it was around the time of its production (Cyclops, Wolverine, Nightcrawler, Storm, Colossus, and Dazzler). Seemingly setting the template for every adaptation of the property, it also uses a teenage new recruit to introduced us to the larger world of the franchise, here that is obviously Kitty Pryde while it would be Jubilee in the 90s series. Same goes for the hodge-podge characters assembled for Magneto’s Brotherhood of Mutant Terrorists (a name change that goes harder than the comics): White Queen, Pyro, Blob, Toad, Juggernaut, and Lockheed, who is just chilling on Asteroid M for some reason waiting to be adopted by Kitty.
This grab-bag approach to the characters and their roster would carry forward into the film franchise. But the best random tidbit is that Wolverine’s Australian accent was a concession to the popularity of Australian figures in the wider media at the time (namely, Crocodile Dundee and Mel Gibson’s megawatt ascension). Of course, that character would famously get the big screen treatment and provide a star-making turn for an up-and-coming Australian actor. Sometimes the universe has a hilarious sense of humor that plays the long game.
I remember watching this when it aired on Fox. The general vibe of the material was there even if it is in a diminished capacity. The roster is largely that of the comics, with Chamber, Husk, and Penance dropped for budgetary reasons with the newly created Buff and Refrax replacing them and largely functioning in the same manner. A group of teenagers are rescued by Emma Frost and Banshee and whisked away to the Xavier’s Institute of Higher Learning where they will be trained in how to properly control and use their powers.
Naturally, the team needs a villain and here it is Matt Frewer going full Jim Carrey in Batman Forever as a mad scientist who creates machinery to travel into people’s dream dimensions. Of course, he plans to target the minds of mutants for their advanced mental acuity. The stuff involving the daily life and training of the students isn’t so bad, but the sequences involving Frewer feel like a far campier and ridiculous concept. It’s like watching Frank Gorshin’s Riddler wander into Tim Burton’s Batman – the tonal dissonance is nearly too much.
While a majority of the casting decisions are fine, or at least serviceable enough, Heather McComb is very much not Asian and is playing Jubilee while Jeremy Ratchford’s Irish accent is so broad that he sounds like he’s wandered in from a Lucky Charms commercial audition. The constraints of the TV movie budget are most evident in the likes of Finola Hughes’ hateful blonde wig and cheap looking costume that seeks to replicate her comic outfit from the time verbatim on a budget of $15. The ending reveal of the replicated comics costume looks too soft when it should have been leather and thick padding.
Generation X is a complete mess with some painfully 90s tropes and dialogue throughout. What was once considered “edgy” is now just painfully silly. And it crams so much canonical material into the comics that parts of the script feel vaguely formed and shaped with only mere gestures paid towards the Mutant Registration Act, Hellions, and the Dream Plane essentially standing in for the Astral Plane. Overstuffing the material with references and easter eggs for fans to find would become a benchmark of the franchise going forward, but it starts here.
This also continues using a teenage mutant as an introduction to the world, here that is not only Jubilee but Skin (Agustin Rodriguez), whose power of malleable skin could make for interesting visuals if given the proper budget, time, and care. What most intrigues is how Hatley Castle is used as the stand-in for the mansion the characters reside, something that would repeat in the film series. It appears that Fox only had a small handful of ideas about how to adapt and visualize the property, some good and others terrible, that would repeat for roughly the next twenty years.
Original Trilogy (2000 – 2006)
20th Century Fox bought the property rights around 1994 and began the earliest serious attempts at translating the comics to the big screen. Andrew Kevin Walker, probably best-known for writing Se7en, focused on the original five X-Men (Cyclops, Jean, Iceman, Beast, Angel), saw Wolverine as the new recruit, and had the team fighting Magneto and his Brotherhood with cameos from the Sentinels. The bare bones of what we would eventually get – an established group of X-Men bringing in Wolverine as the new member and fighting Magneto and his Brotherhood – was established here, even as the various lineups of heroes and villains changed consistently.
Perhaps the most interesting (and deeply strange) movie pitch came from Michael Chabon. He brought on the idea of a young mutant (Jubilee, in this case) being a central focal point and source of audience identification, but dropped Magneto in favor of the team dealing with a variation of the Friends of Humanity, a human-supremacist hate-group. These building blocks are important to notate that while the studio trashed and restarted various script ideas, certain story beats and character types would survive.
The list of potential directors was just as long – Brett Ratner (we’ll circle back to him later), Robert Rodriguez, Paul W. S. Anderson, until they landed on Bryan Singer, fresh off the success of The Usual Suspects. I will not go into Singer’s myriad of offscreen controversies, but discussing the X-Men film franchise makes him an unavoidable person. It was Singer who decided that the team would consist of the (then) most popular characters and resemble the animated series lineup. At one time, Beast and Nightcrawler were considered for inclusion but were dropped due to budget limitations.
The script continued to undergo numerous rewrites and reductions in scope – goodbye Danger Room, Pyro, Blob, and a narrowing of ornate action sequences that would have required more special effects/money. What we wound up with has (largely) aged remarkably well, all things considered. Nothing ages like special effects work, and some of the visual effects work looks aggressively cartoonish now while some of the makeup work has aged better than several of the films from the 2010s.
X-Men manages the neat trick of largely sticking the landing by introducing so many characters and making their personalities distinguishable and finding a cast that has a pleasing chemistry together. At this time, a majority of these actors were not household names and Hugh Jackman, cast three weeks into production after the original choice, Dougray Scott, had to drop out, was a total unknown to American audiences.
The story is fairly basic, a rudimentary introduction for the unconverted that manages to distill the basics of the franchise into digestible bits. Xavier (Patrick Stewart) believes in peaceful coexistence while Magneto (Ian McKellen), a Holocaust survivor, has taken “never again” as the orientating principle of his ideology. The rest of the characters fall into the various teams while Rogue (Anna Paquin) and Wolverine (Jackman) function as the audience surrogates into this strange new world. Granted, some of the problems with the franchise are beginning to show here, an overreliance on Wolverine at the expense of everyone else, Cyclops and Storm being mere set decoration, character cameos or names tossed about merely for nerdy easter egg points, but the whole thing moves without a wasted minute.
Remember when comic book movies were typically under two hours, didn’t require you having to watch thirteen other pieces of media to understand them, and had largely self-contained stories? It was a nice reminder of what once was in watching this again for the first time in years. But what lingers is how despite the film remaining entertaining and solidly constructed, Singer’s mild disdain for the property, a consistent choice to go with the least interesting artistic direction hovers all his entries, comes through. When his X-Men films work and shine through, it is not because of his work as a director, but because he was smart enough to do interesting and solid casting choices and let them rip.
After all, the first film ends with Stewart and McKellen playing a game of chess, and they treat the material like it is one of the great Shakespearean standoffs. Two towering authority figures in a temporary stalemate who respect and admire each other as often as they find themselves in confrontation with each other. Singer’s demand for realistic plausibility in a franchise that involves time travel, alien races, and people who can shoot lasers has always clipped the metaphoric wings, yet the films still find grace notes throughout.
The big bad this time is a high-ranking government scientist, William Stryker (Brian Cox, in a performance that utilizes dispassion for maximum effect), intent of stomping out the mutant menace once and for all. Two things marginalized groups will recognize immediately: government inaction/indifference to their needs, or a tendency towards over policing and subjugation. X2 argues that an evolutionary threat to the stasis would be met with pronounced violent resistance, if not an end goal of genocidal ideation.
As with any sequel, Hollywood demands MORE! So, we open with one of the finest action sequences to come out of the franchise: a brainwashed Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming) sneaking into the White House to try to assassinate the president. The clever use of his powers causes an intentional visual confusion and a smartly cinematic adaptation of them. Other sequences (and characters) haven’t aged as well, including Deathstrike (Kelly Hu), Stryker’s near-mute henchwoman who exists primarily for one action scene at the end, and visual effects that carbon date the project to the early 2000s.
But the scenes and moments that mark this as the franchise’s highest peak are the small grace notes to be found within the bombast. Storm and Nightcrawler discussing the powers and virtues of faith and anger, Mystique and Nightcrawler’s campfire discussion of assimilation or being proudly out, Xavier and Magneto’s various tête-à-têtes. Just like the comics, the thing that keeps the franchise interesting is its chosen family narrative and the interpersonal dynamics.
For every groaner of Wolverine finding a literal lone wolf in the ruins of Alkali Lake, we have scenes like the uneasy truce being drawn between the X-Men and Magneto against a common enemy. Magneto and Mystique meeting a teenage Pyro (Aaron Stanford) and offering him another way to hone and use his gifts offers McKellen, one of the brightest spots in this franchise, a chance to turn on the charm and provides some much-needed social commentary. It underscores the best parts of the franchise like the comradery in a (good) Star Trek film paying off more than any action sequence ever could or did.
The obvious sequel setup at the end, Jean Grey’s sacrifice and her burgeoning Phoenix force, would not go on to get the treatment it deserved. (Twice, but again, we’ll get to that later.) And X2 centralized Wolverine in a way that the remainder of the films would never quite be able to shake off. But for its various shortcomings and poorly aged aspects, X2: X-Men United remains the most distinguished and artistically rich entry this franchise has ever seen.
Matthew Vaughn was the initial choice to takeover, and it was his idea to cast Vinnie Jones as Juggernaut, before he left. In stepped Ratner to a troubled production that had a studio demanding that a handful of characters and concepts finally make an appearance and his own urge to complete the trilogy. This is how we wind up with both “The Gifted” and Dark Phoenix, with the Danger Room and Sentinels, with Angel (Ben Foster) and Beast (Kelsey Grammer) finally appearing after nearly making the cut for the two previous films, with Callisto (Dania Ramírez) and the Morlocks and Leech (Cameron Bright) all competing for attention and development. Ratner was merely a hired gun, and one who apes Singer aesthetic cleanly enough that the change in helm is barely discernible.
The plot is a basic case of being overstuffed and undercooked. That above paragraph does not even cover the sheer number of cameos from the likes of Moira MacTaggert (Olivia Williams), Psylocke (Meiling Melançon), Multiple Man (Eric Dane), and the wasted talents of Bill Duke (Bolivar Trask) and Shohreh Aghdashloo (Kavita Rao) in barely written throwaway parts. It was like the studio decided they were going to allow the filmmakers a blank check to fill the screen with all the things that they had previously denied, but without a coherent or competently told story to tie them together. It becomes a series of jangling keys and easter egg hunts for the initiated and borderline impenetrable for everyone else.
Yet in fits and starts, there remains an enjoyable story struggling to break free. The Dark Phoenix section is woefully under baked and truly terrible. There is no grand pop majesty or nerdy epic grandeur necessary to pull it off. Just the sight of Famke Janssen in a Kool-Aid red wig and flowing maroon robes causing various characters and objects to explode into dust particles. This is made even worse by the fact that the film kills Cyclops offscreen so that thread has no emotional payoff, and hints at Xavier’s mind blocks and power checks on Jean before having them duel to the death. You can guess who wins.
“The Cure” storyline, adapted from the then-recent Joss Whedon run on Astonishing X-Men, survives the transition much better. Sure, Dr. Rao and Angel are mere ornamentation here to get that ball rolling, but this story also offers up the sad vision of a proudly mutant Mystique losing her powers, and provides Rogue with something substantive to do. (Even if I hate her choice, and always have.) If they had decided to focus the film around this story and dropped the sheer volume of “guess the reference” appearances, The Last Stand’s might have been better received and its reputation not so horrible.
Because, shockingly, I never thought that this was the nadir of the franchise and found other films far worse. It is compromised and adheres to a spectacle over substance, but there are things I can point towards as general positives. But so much of it is a squandered, muddled mess of a movie, not unlike its contemporaneous Spider-Man 3. The whole thing has no breathing room and not enough of the interpersonal dynamics on display. More is more, and often to the detriment of things like narrative coherence, character development, or logical story progression.
Wolverine Trilogy (2009 – 2017)
Even worse, despite the franchise’s moneymaking and a healthy budget, Origins looks routinely rushed, unfinished, and cheap. You can see obvious lines where heavy makeup prosthetics have been added to an actor’s face. Kevin Durand’s Fred Dukes late narrative return as the Blob is some of the worst special effects makeup I can remember seeing in a film of this scope. You can clearly tell when Ryan Reynolds and his stunt double have swapped places in the climatic fight scene.
At times the CGI looks like a first or second pass and not like the completed work for a summer tentpole release. The worst instance of this is a post-injection Logan staring at his metal claws in wonder, and the pervading sense that those claws look about as realistic as Roger Rabbit. (No slight to Roger Rabbit, that was incredibly successful in merging clear cartoons with live-action, but this was most certainly not the intended effect here.) And poor Patrick Stewart looks like the victim of an overly zealous face lift in his CGI-assisted de-aging cameo.
The tactile sense of scale and physics, as if what these characters can do can be awe inspiring or terrifying depending on the context, is entirely missing. It is hard to care or invest in any action sequence when the general impression one gets is that these various parts were so obviously assembled in post. Wolverine clutching to an out-of-control helicopter lacks any sense of danger or spectacle because we never for a second believe him to be interacting with these environments and objects.
Yet what persists is a nagging feeling that this entire film is unnecessary. Wolverine’s origin story was a central through line of the initial trilogy, and a huge plot point in the second film. It does not help that everything is surrounded by the most cliché-ridden storyline imaginable. There is not one, not two, hell, not even three, but at least five shots of Wolverine screaming “NOOOO!” towards the heavens (claws extended being optional). A sense of redundancy clicks in because yes, we have seen this before. But now it is longer, bigger, but not better.
The cast is largely game and tries valiantly, but between the red face of a major supporting character (Lynn Collins’ Kayla Silverfox whose sister is revealed to be…Emma Frost?) and the general narrative indifference towards everyone who is not Liev Schreiber’s Sabretooth, the film struggles to maintain our interest. Oh look, teenage Cyclops (Tim Pocock)! And here fanboys, you’ve been begging for Gambit (Taylor Kitsch), and here he finally is! Do these characters have anything meaningful to do with the plot? Absolutely not, they are pure fan service and name checking.
Even Hugh Jackman admitted this film missed the mark and
wanted to salvage the character with future cracks at solo films. Things would
vastly improve with the next two entries. It is such a shame that Origins
descends into such a prolonged wet fart after the opening credits sequence of
Wolverine and Sabretooth fighting various wars engages and promises something
more interesting than what we wound up receiving.
What is quite nice is how much the movie is concerned with smaller, quieter moments of character development or contemplation of the events they have found themselves encountering. Logan’s wounded rogue-like hero is much more interesting here, especially when the narrative saps away his healing factor and makes him cope with the prospect of mortality. For much of the time, The Wolverine is actually much happier to NOT be a wall-to-wall action extravaganza that forsakes character development or interesting, smaller moments which build our rooting interests in their stakes. The Wolverine bothers to question what it’s like to be a near immortal being who cannot be hurt, but don’t worry there are still plenty of explosions.
Taking place after the events of X-Men: The Last Stand, Wolverine has gone into hiding in the wilderness (once again, a story beat that repeats more often than you remember). After being located and tantalized with a chance to lose his mutant powers by an elderly Japanese businessman that he has past dealings with, we’re off and running into the actual story. Wolverine is seen here in all of his facets: as surrogate parental figure to a younger girl (this is a reoccurring theme in the comics that quickly got sidetracked), as wandering lone samurai, as brooding lover, and existential human. And Jackman continues to play the part for all it is worth, but as roles on Broadway and in straight dramatic works have demonstrated, he is an actor of greater range and depth than the superhero genre tends to provide.
I suppose that’s the general problem with the X-Men film franchise: general fatigue about it all. Too many films overloaded with too many mutants for no real reason other than to throw in another nod to the comic books. Case in point, Viper, leader of the group HYDRA in the comics, here a mutant who has taken the snake motif to its literal extreme complete with a forked tongue, venom she can spit from her mouth, and a scene in which she sheds her skin. She offers up a few cool visuals, but could have been cut out and her role given to a non-mutant member of the yakuza or ninja rebels that actually matter to the plot with little-to-nothing lost. And the less said about the gigantic letdown of a third action battle finale the better – it mistakes bigger for better, and the “twist” was obvious from the moment the film began to unravel its story.
You see, we meet Logan in Japan during the waning days of WWII. He saves a Japanese soldier from the atomic bomb, and the survivor spends the rest of his life amassing wealth and the science to steal Logan’s healing factor for himself. Eventually, he reveals the methodology for this is a gigantic robotic suit dubbed Silver Samurai, which is yet another tossed away reference to something from the comics that gets a disappointing transfer. Silver Samurai is a mutant leader of the yakuza in the comics and one of Logan’s better adversaries. His film adaptation as mech armor is another letdown in a franchise that always seemed a little shy about embracing or acknowledging the more lunatic and weird corners of its source material’s universe.
Yet I still really enjoyed The Wolverine, and quite a bit I might add. Rila Fukushima and Tao Okamato are pleasingly tough, strong, complicated characters and both actresses give solid performances. It also helps that both of them create a nice chemistry with Jackman and make the teacher/student relationship and the romantic one equally believable and worth our time and emotional investment. The film populates itself with a variety of characters that we care about and does not insult our intelligence when things must go predictably chaotic. The Wolverine is sometimes most arresting when its explosions are between the characters and not atop a speeding bullet train (although that scene does manage to take a familiar action trope and make it fresh and exciting).
By this point, we have spent nearly twenty years watching the time-traveling, claw-heavy exploits of the X-Men, and Logan proves a fitting conclusion to many of these characters. In a perfect world, this would have been the last X-Men film for a while, allowing enough time to go by for the audience to warm-up to the eventual reawakening of the franchise with entirely new players. Its eventual integration into the MCU always felt like a formality just waiting to happen.
Logan often plays out like a gritty remake of Shane mixed with Unforgiven but with claws and a dementia-addled telepathic genius. Not a pithy comment as the film openly references Shane, thus underscoring its thematic concerns and artistic heritage. It is unquestionably the best of the three solo films and in the upper echelon of the X-Men franchise in general. Not only for its bloodstained hard truths and emotional complexities, but also for the ways in which is finally engages with the darker impulses and heart of Logan’s character that the prior PG-13 films could only flirtatiously blush at.
It would seem that Mangold learned from his few questionable choices in The Wolverine, an already solid and terrific Wolverine film, to make something grander. There’s still a problem of bloated running time, something that has taken root in our modern blockbusters in general, and the comic book superhero genre in particular. Personally, I could have easily trimmed a few sections here and there, and cut out a couple of the facial stabbings, but Mangold’s generally onto some thrilling sights and sounds here.
Not only for the ways in which the carnage is liberally dished out, but for the ways that he makes sure we pull back and look at the physical and emotional cost it takes out on our characters. The best of these films, like the Nolan Batman trilogy, never lose sight of the people beneath the heroics and the moral, emotional, and physical dilemmas and traumas they encounter in their pursuits for the alleged greater good. This is felt throughout the script, but given visceral life in Jackman’s strongest showing in the role up to this point, and if this had truly stayed the end it would have been one cinema’s great glory notes for any actor in a long-running franchise.
Jackman’s long been a charm bomb in any of his projects, and he makes the odd sight of an elderly Logan wearing reading glasses while wearing blood-stained clothing strangely hilarious and nearly poetic in its world-weary and battered heroism. He gets a rich symphony to play here, acting as both surrogate son to a sundowning Xavier and father figure to Laura (Dafne Keen), a young girl with similar powers, claws, and rage issues. If you stuck this performance in an end-of-year drama without the superhero sheen, he’d be rolling in awards considerations and hosannas.
While reliable players like Patrick Stewart and Stephen Merchant are invaluable to pull your emotional interest, and Richard E. Grant is unfailingly oily as the big bad, it is newcomer Dafne Keen as Laura that offers the most unexpected performance. Of course, X-23 (later dubbed Wolverine) is one hell of a character in the comics, another lab experiment alternating between taking their rage out upon the world and finding a place of peace, be it inner or a physical location. Keen is charismatic and enigmatic in the role, having to convey complex emotional shifts in a primarily mute performance through body language and non-verbal grunting. I still want big things for her in the future.
Logan is the strongest showing since Days of Future Past, and one of the strongest recent films for any Marvel property in who knows how long for its daring to shake up the formula. (Fight me fellow nerds, but much of the MCU is paint-by-numbers fan service that exists solely to get to the next crossover.) The near two-and-half-hours runtime can prove a case of too much (the aggressive clone, the farm scenes, protracted scenes of ultra-violence), but there is just too much that’s good, smart, and emotionally engaging here to be easily dismissed. If only this near-perfect goodbye had been how we sunset this iteration of the franchise.
Prequel films (2011 – 2019)
With the critical bashing of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Fox went back to the drawing board. What does this mean? Well, an allegedly in-development solo Storm film was scrapped as well as an announced solo film featuring a young Magneto hunting down Nazis. If that second proposed film sounds familiar then you know we are about to discuss the eventual franchise reboot.
Continuity has always been a major problem with the film translations of the X-Men. We had three different Kitty Prydes, two different Jubilees, two Pyros, and those are just the casting continuity errors. In X-Men we were clearly told that Cyclops, Jean Grey, and Storm were among the first students under Xavier, and that Magneto helped Xavier build Cerebro. So, when I heard that the aforementioned trio were going to sit this one out, I raised an eyebrow.
Instead, we’re given a team of B and C-list characters. For the most part, this actually works in the film’s favor. Havok, Banshee, and Darwin have scenes that beautifully translate their powersets, even if Havok and Banshee barely resemble their source material’s corresponding personalities. Mystique’s revision to essentially be the movie-verse’s variation on Juggernaut is only mildly successful. Chalk that one up to Jennifer Lawrence’s only so-so performance. Whereas Rebecca Romijn left an inedible impression with a few words and a weighty presence, a combination of ‘strike a pose’ fighter and venomous reptile, Lawrence is more often mopey than anything else.
The choice of Angel, better known as Tempest in the comics, as one of the film’s first recruits is a giant “what the fuck?” And Zoë Kravitz does little but pout and dance around in the role – not her fault, as many of the female characters in a Vaughn film feel sorely lacking and malformed. Angel/Tempest was a dumb character in the comics, and she does not translate well here. Sure, it is great to show a character who proves that not all mutations are as cool as telepathy, weather control, or energy beams from your eyes, but there were better characters to choose from if that was the intention.
To my surprise since he’s so hilariously miscast, Nicolas Hoult’s performance as a young Beast is a true highlight. The character is perfectly written, and Hoult’s great performance only adds to the tragedy when his experiment turns him into a giant blue fuzzy fighting machine. The makeup choice of the more feline-looking Beast has aged about as well as the Kelsey Grammer version. I miss the big blue monkey look, but this version offers up a more monstrous reading of the character. And once he finally becomes blue and furry, Hoult’s pretty-boy looks do not distract from the fact that Beast has always been a brick wall of a person, a linebacker working on his Ph.D., even before he changed into a bright blue gorilla.
But the X-Men cannot ban together and learn to comingle in a vacuum. They need a villain, or a group of villains, to fight against. And we are given a very loose interpretation of the Hellfire Club. Still led by Sebastian Shaw, played by Kevin Bacon as an old school Bond villain who’s a combination of pure malice and high camp, with a second-in-command Emma Frost (a woefully detached and inert January Jones), they plot to make the Cuban Missile Crisis happen and thereby supercharge mutant-kind into the dominate species.
But the true heart of the film, and the thing that elevates it from mediocre sub-Connery-era Bond-wannabe to revisionist comic book entertainment, is the central relationship between Xavier and Magneto as played by James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender. Without these two in the lead roles, X-Men: First Class would not have worked let alone been as enthralling and engaging as it turned out to be. The first half truly belongs to Fassbender and McAvoy as they lay out the decisions and workings of their characters that eventually led to the original trilogy’s events.
In fact, Fassbender’s Magneto-as-Nazi hunter made me wish that that movie had come to fruition. Shaw being rewritten in the part that was obviously Mr. Sinister at some point in development notwithstanding, a reoccurring thing at this stage of the franchise as they kept teasing his arrival and never following through. We open as we did in 2000 with a young Magneto being carried away into a concentration camp and demonstrating his gifts. He eventually gets brought to Shaw, a Nazi scientist looking for others of his kind and goading the young mutant into revealing his powers. Fassbender’s performance oscillates wildly between a wild animal fighting for freedom and a raw exposed nerve.
While McAvoy’s Xavier is in swinging 60s London, going for his doctorate in human mutations, living with his adopted sister Mystique, and hitting on anything in a skirt that crosses his eyeline. But there is also a stillness and grounded presence about him. It is not hard to see how he will eventually become the fatherly Xavier, and these demonstrations of lax character only underscore the complicated figurehead he remains. And when they finally do start to form a friendship, it harkens back to the best moments from the comics. Often, literally, feeling like passages and scenes from the comics have been translated verbatim even if they actually were not.
First Class, flaws and all, set the franchise back on track. The prequel series would very quickly devolve from here. But not before we were treated to one of the best entries in the franchise, a film that combined the legacy series with the new a few years before this became standard IP reviving practice.
When you think about, Days of Future Past is an ingenious way to go about rebooting a property without actually having to do it. Based on one of the greatest X-Men stories yet to be adapted to the big screen, Days of Future Past sees the return of the original trilogy along with the prequel ensemble. It is also a welcome return to form, arguably the best movie made out of this material since X2: X-Men United. It also sees the return of Bryan Singer to the franchise, a problematic occurrence as it expands upon the questionable aspects of the franchise while still making a solid entry. A righting of the ship, if you will, while also calcifying the problems.
Days of Future Past follows the basic template of the original story – apocalyptic future in which a small band of X-Men are the last survivors fighting against the encroaching Sentinels, sending back the consciousness of a team member to the past to stop a series of events deemed responsible for this bleak future. While the comic saw Kitty Pryde sent back, the movie positions Wolverine in the central role, a common problem in the franchise but also one that feels like the path of least resistance given the squirrelly continuity.
We begin in the dystopian future, and the film returns to the Holocaust imagery of the first film. Like the comics, the films have always been at their strongest when siding with the proverbial “other” and positioning these elaborate conflicts as mere allegorical fantasy. This time around, it is not a flashback to WWII, but a flash-forward to a desolate Manhattan in which mutants and their human sympathizers are rounded up and killed in concentration camps. Mass graves and emaciated bodies are some of the first sights we see, and this was the studio’s summer tentpole. (I have long assumed the mutant scavenger we see in this prologue was Nate Grey given the styling.)
We soon reunite with a few familiar faces (Kitty, Iceman, Colossus) and some new ones (mostly fan service glorified cameos, but Blink (Fan Bingbing) and Bishop (Omar Sy) turn out aces). As they hide away in a hidden Chinese temple protecting Kitty Pryde (Page) while she uses her powers to send Wolverine back to the 70s and stop this horrific future before it starts. The film then sends us back to 1973, and we watch as Wolverine tries to get Xavier and Magneto to cooperate long enough to stop the impending future genocide.
It is a rousing comic book adaptation, filled with brainy action scenes and a real sense of weight to the action. The scope of this film is massive, but there is a strong story to tie it all together. The franchise is still annoyingly centered on white males – Halle Berry’s Storm remains pretty much it for major diversity in the core cast, but of the five major new mutants (only one of whom is not in the future scenes), four of them are characters of color and one a female. This is a step in the right direction, as one of the great things about the comics was how wide the scope of characters are. The film series leans too hard on Wolverine, Xavier and Magneto, and positions Mystique as the female lead, then often sacks her with spinning back-and-forth between the two authority figures.
And with a cast of characters this large, the filmmakers were bound to skip out on certain things – it’s a pity that wigs and makeup where those things. After all this time, bringing back Toad (Evan Jonigkeit) for a quick cameo is an odd choice, and his makeup job is particularly poor. While Quicksilver is a scene-stealer, it is only thanks to Evan Peters playing up the part as a cocky wiseass that Quicksilver is bought and sold by the audience. By the time he’s done, Peters has threatened to steal the entire film whole seeing as how he’s got the wittiest display of powers, best action scene, and gives a gleefully madcap performance despite that terrible wig.
Mystique’s new makeup job is a bodysuit, and its solid matte color looks cheap and obviously like a bodysuit rather her scaled skin. Compared to the makeup in X-Men, Days of Future Past’s look is a disappointment. Same with the choice to make Beast into a blue, furry Hulk-lite character, an odd choice to be certain, as he spends far too much time in human-mode and only rarely appears as he should. And more than a few special effects shots look half-done and poorly rendered. The worst offenders are a flying bullet that looks no better than the one in the first film fourteen years prior and a train scene involving Magneto that looks rubbery and unfinished.
While these aspects are highly problematic for various reasons, at least Days of Future Past has a game cast. It was nice to see returning faces like Shawn Ashmore, Halle Berry, Patrick Stewart, and Ian McKellen. Elliot Page, so perfect as Kitty Pryde, is finally given something to do, and makes the most of his limited screen time. The Rogue Cut offers Stewart, McKellen, and Ashmore more to do during a prolonged stretch where we did not revisit the future originally. The trio go out to save Rogue to aid an injured Kitty, and I wish that they had left this rescue sequence in the film proper. McKellen and Stewart are clearly relishing the chance to play these figures once more and their natural chemistry only adds to the emotional undercurrent.
As for the past X-Men, McAvoy and Fassbender continue to be a blast to watch as the men who would be Stewart and McKellen. Jennifer Lawrence finally has something juicy to do as Mystique and demonstrates that ability to be both hard and soft that makes her best performances spring to life. Luckily, in the end, she chooses for herself and sets out on her own. Well, until the inevitable sequel demands that she join the team again. And Nicholas Hoult continues to make for a winning Beast, even if I did long for him to spend more time in blue and furry mode (not that I don’t appreciate staring at Hoult’s pretty face).
But the franchise has always belonged to Jackman, who continues to improve as an actor and dig deeper into Wolverine. Here he gives his most complex performance as the character pre-Logan, it is nearly enough to make you forgive the trespasses of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. And call me crazy, but when he awakens in the new, corrected timeline, the succession of quick cameos made me giddy, and I usually do not fall prey to the key jangling of these sequences. It was nice to spend some time with those characters, and those particular actors, again.
As imperfect as it is, Days of Future Past remains one of the best X-Men films to come out of the pre-MCU run. I would also argue that it is one of the best superhero films of its era, a period of time not exactly lacking in options. Hell, I remember watching the end credits teaser and thinking maybe they would go completely bonkers with Apocalypse. But the tease of him being worshipped in ancient Egypt while erecting one of the great pyramids using his powers to float massive chunks of raw materials through the air was as strange and wondrous as his cinematic treatment would get.
Lord help me, but I never could vibe with Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac, wasted in the role) whenever he would appear in the comics or cartoons. He felt completely ridiculous in execution, but impressive as a concept. The world’s oldest mutant emerges in the present day, both horrified and intrigued by what he has found, goes about the process of exterminating humanity and handing the world over to the mutants, specifically his chosen ones. The problem always arose in the simple fact that Apocalypse is all bluster and rhetoric with no follow-through. For all his proclamations of obscene power levels and evolutionary superiority, the X-Men could always roundly and easily defeat him.
This problem reoccurs throughout the film, which devolves into the worst instincts of superhero cinema in the final confrontation between all of the parties. We already know Apocalypse will be stricken down, and he is in a gigantic orgy of collateral damage, cities in ruins, and generous uses of mutant powers. At least Bryan Singer has consistently kept his action sequences coherent and free from the visual kinetics bordering on incoherence or muddy sludge of a Zach Snyder film.
Perhaps the indifference of this sequence is not a result of any deficiencies in this movie in particular, but the abundance of comic book cinema over the past decade. For all of the might, and much of the narrative plays like we are supposed to be overwhelmed and impressed with Apocalypse as a threat, it still feels limp. Marvel has dominated the look and feel of these films for so long, complete with third-act demonstrations of massive destruction, and they have created a whole ecosystem of these films and some of them have shown stronger development than others.
Yet there is still the overwhelming problem of a franchise dedicated towards the outsider perspective and working as an exaggerated moral parable focusing so hard on the straight, white, male gaze. Characters and voices unique as Psylocke (Olivia Munn) and Storm (Alexandra Shipp) are quickly tossed aside for a sixth go-round of the Magneto/Xavier show. Hell, there is even a completely unnecessary sequence showcasing Wolverine’s origin, again, which at this point is as tiresome as Spider-Man’s and Batman’s. (And yes, Jackman cameos once more.) Although the returning cast members are still uniformly strong, with McAvoy and Fassbender tearing into the parts as if they are great roles from the English canon.
Apocalypse is at its most entertaining when shifting the focus to the younger class of mutants, including a green Cyclops (Tye Sheridan), moody Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), comedic Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee), wiseass Quicksilver (Evan Peters), and tortured Angel (Ben Hardy). Even the various scenes of Apocalypse assembling his new horsemen are fairly interesting, with only one leaving a queasy taste in the mouth. (You’ll know it when you see it.) Caliban (Tomas Lemarquis) and Psylocke’s underground lair is a fascinating side-plot that deserves more time and attention than it gets. There are a flurry of fascinating ideas that deserve more exploration throughout this film, and this franchise as a whole.
One gets the pervading sense that the creative team needs to be handed over to someone else as Singer only cares about a small batch of characters at the expense of everyone else. This means that female characters and those of color, and especially both, are given little to do than be mere ornamentation in various scenes and scenarios. X-Men is an ensemble piece at its best, and in a few bright moments involving the younger students, Apocalypse shines brightest. There is nothing overtly awful about it, but there is nothing truly great about it either. We have seen this kind of thing before, several times over, and much better. It exists, it is fine, and it features a jab at Return of the Jedi that feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Dark Phoenix seemed cursed from the inception point. After Apocalypse underperformed at the box office, the studio slashed the budget for this film. They allowed an untested commodity to direct one of their franchise entries, then it got stuck in a limbo-state as Disney and Fox announced an impending merger. The fact that it escaped a streaming-only release, an idea tossed around according to multiple sources, is a minor feat. But the cosmic-scale saga of Phoenix, both light and dark, requires a hefty price tag to pull off, and the film franchise is 0-2 in visualizing it.
We just met Sophie Turner’s iteration of Jean Grey and now we are already supposed to know and care about her well enough to feel something in watching her break bad and sacrifice herself. Even as someone who has read The Dark Phoenix Saga, several times, I felt nothing from this telling. It would have made more sense as the finale for this cast instead of the second film featuring them. We have no engagement with the Scott-Jean romance, have barely seen Jean and Mystique interact, and have hardly spent enough time with them as a solid unit to notice that Xavier has darkened and/or lost his moral path.
Even worse is the pervading sense of tedium emanating from everyone on the screen. Lawrence, Shipp, Peters, McAvoy, and Holt all seem to be counting down the minutes until they could leave the set. Fassbender and Turner try to do the best with the material they have been given, but the material feels overcooked as if too many reshoots and studio notes have neutered whatever was once there into the most nondescript pablum imaginable.
Occasionally, and only on rare occasions, does the film present a unique or interesting idea. Magneto’s hideaway of Genosha finally gets some screentime, even if it comes and goes far too quickly. Here Genosha is less a lush island paradise, a hidden refuge for mutant-kind to make their homeland, than it is a shanty commune just getting started.
But there was one good thing to come from the various reshoots, and that is the finale on the military transport train. In a controlled space, they manage to make an exciting action sequence as the various mutants fight off the shapeshifting aliens (led by Jessica Chastain in a weirdly subdued and indifferent mode). It is in this sequence that they play out as a functioning team, combining and helping each other through use of their powers and basic maneuvering.
And so, the main team franchise comes to close without a Wolverine cameo, the first film to not feature him in any capacity up to this point, and with a timid whimper of defeat. A victim of studio-interference, once again, a merger, a novice director, and a cast that clearly wanted out of their multi-film deals. Why one of the foundational texts of the comics can never get the proper big screen treatment remains a mystery. Multiple animated series have either adapted the storyline outright or alluded to it with far greater success.
Spinoffs (2016 – present)
Two years later, Reynolds not only stars, but financed a portion of the project, encouraged improvisation while filming, and got a producer credit for his trouble. What emerges is a low-budget film that properly captures the Deadpool aesthetic much better than whatever they tried to pass off as the character previously. Given that the Reynolds-led Green Lantern film, a notorious box office bomb, partially led to Deadpool getting shelved, it is a miracle this film even happened, and that Reynolds was allowed any creative freedom at all.
Deadpool fully understands the character, so mark me down as surprised for enjoying the crudity and off-the-wall violence of the whole thing. Reynolds’ does possess a smugness to him and he funnels that into Wade Wilson, the Merc with a Mouth. It helps that the film bothers with (gasp) character development and rising stakes. It keeps its eyes focused on its narrative needs and removes any fat. At times, the incessant fourth-wall breaking can be insufferable, but it becomes clear that this is a defense mechanism for the character. We are, after all, seeing the entire narrative exclusively from his warped perspective.
What is nice is just how seriously it commits to its vision, as obnoxious and strange as it might be. Wrapped up in the meta-textual jokes is a solid superhero origin story, a believable romance, a quest for revenge, and enough bloody action scenes to make the fanboys happy. The Ferris Bueller referencing teaser at the end, essentially blasting the studio for shortchanging them while teasing Cable, is quintessential Deadpool.
Parts of the film are so firmly paying lip service to the tropes and signposts of the genre that the parodic nature of them feels undermined. Vanessa’s death and perpetual presence as the ghostly lover who motivates the hero feels like something this franchise did once before (because it did) but without enough jokey payoff to make it feel fresh. The puckish nature of the character feels constrained by this heteronormative gesture.
It snaps to life when Reynolds has someone to bounce off of, like a brooding Brolin or a deadpan Zazie Beetz as Domino. These moments where the whole thing becomes a de facto X-Force film crackle with the natural chemistry between the trio. Reynolds and Brolin recall the energy of the Lethal Weapon and 48 Hours franchises where the gruff, weary elder has to deal with the chaotic, loudmouth partner. It is a pleasing dynamic when utilized effectively, and Deadpool 2 does more often than not.
Yet Deadpool’s snarky comebacks feel less clever and spikey than they did in the first film. This time around, they feel tailormade for fanboys to elbow each other with easy setups involving other Marvel properties and rival DC. Even worse, some of his one-liners feel sourced from the lowest hanging fruit. The lowest comes in the brief period of time where Deadpool becomes surrogate older brother to Rusty Collins (Julian Dennison). The jokes come fast and furious about Dennison’s weight, possible sexual abuse while in prison, and the direction has him simply yelling and screaming instead of building a character. It punches a hole in the film that it never repairs.
Bloating the runtime to roughly two hours did not help this sequel keep or harness the anarchic spirit of the character going, instead dimming him into convention far too often. It does snap into stark relief when Deadpool holds auditions for X-Force members, their spectacular failure of a first mission, and the sight of Juggernaut ripping Deadpool in half only for the next scene to show a half-naked Deadpool regenerating his bottom half in a manner similar to a toddler’s legs appended to a full-grown adult’s torso. It is the kind of absurd and deranged imagery that best exemplifies Deadpool as a property, and the film needed more of that energy. It harnesses it in the back half, but it is a comedown from the first entry in the franchise.
But what was promised and what might have been doom the whole enterprise to a frustrating exercise. Who says that a comic book property couldn’t merge genres (teen angst, powers, horror) and make something unique and exciting? The New Mutants comics often, especially the years when Bill Sienkiewicz was the primary artist on the book, accomplished the neat hat trick of combining, blurring, and playing around with these genres.
So, where did it all go wrong?
Blame it on Disney? Well, a bit yes and a bit no. In production and prepping for release around the time that the House of Mouse was announced as buying 20th Century Fox, The New Mutants became stuck in a purgatory. Except one that is far more mundane that the NetherRealm of Limbo that Magik teleports into and out of, and instead the usual corporate one that numerous projects have been devoured in as one megacorporation subsumes another.
The ever-shifting release date was the first clue that was not well in Fox’s mutant franchise. Announced reshoots to play-up the horror aspects never happened – another casualty of Mickey and Co.’s takeover. By the time the film was finally announced for release, the actors had visibly aged beyond credibly reshooting to fix tonal issues and money was given to wrap-up special effects work that was incomplete thanks to the limbo caused by the buyout.
All of these production nightmares make the final film’s results of being merely adequate in numerous ways a lot clearer. Hell, it’s a minor miracle that the final film is even coherent at all. And it makes it even more frustrating for the ways in which things that are so well done (casting in this is uniformly great in the youthful mutants, the Demon Bear as an antagonist) all the more frustrating for the deficiencies (more on those in a minute).
The chief problem with The New Mutants is one of tone. Is this a younger generation of homo superior based off of John Hughes’ Brat Pack beloved films? Or is this a phantasmagoric haunted asylum movie? It is both and neither at the same time. It swings wildly from Breakfast Club aping to then fending off Slenderman knockoffs with diabolical grins. It never feels coherent, but it is flirtatious with being better in bits and pieces.
Then there is whatever the character assassination that they did to Cecilia Reyes (Alice Braga, completely miscast in a poorly written part). The part feels tailored made for another character, like Mr. Sinister, Friends of Humanity, or the Purifiers. Same goes for randomly making Magik antagonistically racist towards Moonstar. What exactly is the wider point of damaging these two complicated female characters in these ways? The revelation is lost upon me. Eventually Magik drops the Karen act, but Reyes is a wasted space.
Chalk it up to further proof that as time went on, Fox and company didn’t view this property with any kind of respect. They just jammed together names, incidents, and powers and released another project to keep Marvel/Disney from taking all their toys and going home. It is a bit of anticlimax for a 20-year franchise to go out on.
Then again, this turned into simply a franchise that was. Not exactly anyone’s favorite comic book franchise, but not one that anyone outright hated. The full scope of the franchise reveals that certain voices were too often elevated at the expense of the heart of the material. Since Disney owns all (all praise to the House of Mouse!), I just hope that the inevitable introduction of the X-Men proper into the MCU spotlights characters other than Magneto, Xavier, Wolverine, and Mystique. That is a largely white, cis, (allegedly) straight, male group (with one notable exception) for a potent allegory about minority liberation and struggle.
Disney’s acquisition of Fox led to the cancelation of the in-development X-Force and Deadpool 3. Then something strange happened in September 2022. It was announced that Deadpool 3 was not only back on but folding into the MCU with a surprise casting announcement. Ryan Reynolds released a video with Hugh Jackman stating that he would be reprising his role in the revamped Deadpool 3, the first full-scale appearance of the X-Men universe in the MCU. (For the record, I view Jackman’s return with a bit of agnostic indifference. Logan was a beautiful eulogy to the character and a nice place to leave him and bringing him back undoes a lot of that work.)
Given the Scarlet Witch’s multiverse shenanigans, Jackman and co. exist in a parallel universe to the main MCU and bits and pieces have already been carried over. All of this is based entirely on two films giving us cameo appearances from the Fox cast, Stewart in Multiverse of Madness and Grammer in The Marvels. None of us know how this will factor into the wider universe, but we will find out on July 26, 2024. Or maybe Deadpool will simply kill off the Fox universe and be folded into the wider MCU through the Time Variance Authority. Who knows.
My ranking of the franchise can be found here.
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