X2: X-Men United

After the release of the first X-Men movie in the year 2000, despite its mediocre nature, fans were happy with a film version that took itself seriously with the concept it had and allowed for an adaptation that felt like a departure from typical comic book movies at the time. Because of this, development for a sequel began shortly after, with several scripts being introduced and rewritten, several characters and plot lines being brought in and taken out and deciding to take more heavy influence from the comic series, this eventual sequel, which was released in 2003, X-Men 2 (or X2 as its titled) was met with far better reception than the previous. With critics deeming it a worthy and much better successor, and fans even calling it ”the best X-Men movie” even once the franchise got going with more films, this movie seems to have everything a good X-Men movie needs. However, whether it’s from nostalgia goggles or just seeing something in it that satisfies the X-Men fan base to a certain degree, most fans are still able to overlook its glaring flaws that have been retained, and even in some shocking way, furthered from the previous film. While definitely better in many areas, this movie unfortunately still has a lot of things that keep it from the pedestal it’s been given. After a brainwashed mutant named Nightcrawler (played by Alan Cumming) tries to murder the President of the United States (played by Cotter Smith), this puts everyone in the white house on high alert, leading to genocidal anti-mutant general named William Stryker (played by Brian Cox) expressing his plans to eradicate every mutant on the planet by creating his own version of Xavier’s mind-connecting room, Cerebro. This is done by invading the mansion and capturing many of the mutants living there, resulting in the team being segmented and forced to work things out on their own, especially since some of the captives include Cyclops (played again by James Marsden) and Xavier (played again by Patrick Stewart). Being one of the few that got away, Wolverine (played again by Hugh Jackman) along with Iceman (played again by Shawn Ashmore), Rogue (played again by Anna Paquin) and Pyro (played by Aaron Stanford), work out how they are going to retrieve the stolen mutants, and will receive some unexpected help from former enemies Magneto (played again by Ian McKellen) and Mystique (played again by Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) to find where Stryker is holding them before he wipes out all mutant-kind. For what this movie offers on a basic level, it is technically better than the first in terms of how its handles its pacing, energy, and personality, but it is fundamentally worse in its delivery of its story, writing, and characters.

The story itself was taken from the Marvel comic series and mainly inspired by two in particular; Return to Weapon X, by Mark Millar and God Loves, Man Kills, by Chris Claremont, stories that focus on Stryker creating a device to eradicate all Mutants on the planet and the X-Men being forced to stop him. As a concept, it’s a pretty solid one that ties back into the themes of oppression faced against mutants and the reception that they’ve created, while also creating a world-ending situation that the heroes can stop. While the idea is sound, the execution can’t be fully utilized because of how poorly this universe has been set-up. Outside of just saying ‘’prejudice is bad’’, there’s no understanding of the mutant-human battle in this world, so what should be an uncomfortably familiar battle against racism just comes across as every generic good-vs-evil story, and X-Men as a brand is supposed to represent and mean much more than such a straightforward ideal. The overall story of this film written by Zak Penn, David Hayter and Bryan Singer has the pieces of these comic stories and therefore contains more of a personality that feels more akin to traditional X-Men, but the manner in which this story unfolds is not only fairly uninteresting and surprisingly choppy, but the further the film moves along, the less sense it makes.  Director Bryan Singer seems to not be able to create a movie without having in it something that’s insanely boring, and you can definitely feel that with the movie, especially once it reaches the climax. While the first half of the movie is surprisingly well paced, as the film goes on, it starts to grow more tedious and uneventful, mainly because this movie really lacks any sense of change or growth from anybody, nothing seems to be accomplished by the film’s end. The screenplay for this film written by Hayter, Dan Harris and Michael Dougherty has good starts to ideas, features enough of a connection from the first film to have nice continuity and should be credited for still trying to work around the more stable tone of the first film while amping up the cool action and mutant theatrics the brand is known for, but in terms of actually fulfilling established plot threads, it doesn’t even try to complete them in a meaningful way. Despite talking about Wolverine’s past constantly and building it up a lot, nothing new is learned from that sub-plot, so it all feels so pointless, which can be said for a lot of other aspects.  Old characters don’t do anything for a majority of the film so don’t get their own time to shine, newer characters barely have a purpose outside of showcasing flashy new powers, and even when something game-changing happens in the climax that should feel like a big grand sacrifice, it means nothing because of how terribly set-up it was. Add onto that an ending that just feels backwards to the message and downright rotten in the grand scheme of things, we get a terrible ending to a movie that started off with promise. On the whole though, the movie has more energy than the first, handles its plot better despite it arguably being worse than previously, and feels more in tone with what X-Men should be; if the pieces were laid out better, this could have been a great movie.

Another thing that really drags this concept down is its handling of its characters, which has been a problem of all these X-Men films. This concept needs its characters to be fleshed out, engaging and interesting for this threat, conflict, and tragic resolution to work, and that can’t work when a majority of these characters are bland, forgettable, inconsistently written, and are only cool because of who plays them. There’s some exceptions like Brian Cox as the character of Stryker, as he is pretty good and the idea of showing that a human X-Men villain can be just as interesting as someone like Magneto is impressive, but if you remove the fact that most of these characters are played by famous actors or that they are iconic names from the franchise, there’s nothing to them when you look at their involvement in the movie on its own. Everybody loves Wolverine because of how Hugh Jackman plays him and captures his energy perfectly, but you start to notice that these movies love his character too much and it doesn’t leave room for any of the other X-Men to stand out (which is what should be the case in an ensemble film).  Characters like Rogue, Iceman and Storm (played again by Halle Berry) are handled so differently from their original sources that they can’t be comparable and their new portrayal aren’t interesting enough to make up for them, Xavier and Magneto feel right in terms of attitude, but there’s still barely any meat to chew on with them, and Cyclops and Jean (played again by Famke Janssen) are such bland roles that there’s practically nothing to be done with them (which makes sense as they’re barely in the movie). There’s no sense of impactful progression from any character in this movie, so it’s hard to care about anything that’s going on when your cast is so forgettable. The acting overall is still pretty good though which is probably the reason people are more willing to handle these characters.

From a production standpoint, the movie is still pretty colorless and lacking in any sense of brightness which the X-Men were known for, but it does have a better look than the first film did. The first film felt very low-budget and grainy like it was meant to be a ‘sci-fi movie of the week’ kind of flick, whereas this film does feel like it has a better budget (with about $110- 125 million to spend) and uses what it has to the best of their abilities. Everything about the production design by Guy Hendrix Dyas and costume design by Louise Mingenbach still looks over-saturated in blues and greys and none of the sets are that interesting to look at, but it does look more impressive because of the bigger budget, and it does feel a little more cinematic and livelier due to how its filmed. The cinematography by Newton Thomas Siegel shows its age a bit as well with some pointless extreme close-ups and wide-angle lens that were very over exploited when this movie was released, and while it’s not as distracting as other movies and there are at least a few moments where the film gets a few nice shots (mainly during the action), it shows its age because of it. The action in the movie is also better overall despite how little there is in the movie; it’s nice to see Wolverine actually cutting people up and it leads to a really great fight with Stryker’s assistant, Lady Deathstrike (played by Kelly Hu) at the end of the movie. Outside of a stupid plane chase during the middle of the film, the rest of the action is fast paced, features cool stunts and visuals, and feels like an action scene that would fit in X-Men.

For how much people fell in love with this movie, it doesn’t feel that different from its predecessor, at least not majorly different. It feels both like a step backward and step forward in trying to be an actual X-Men movie; it has more life, more energy, and better action than the first, but the first had a more comprehensible story that while very uninteresting and standard, at least had a purpose for existing. This movie seems to throw out some good ideas for a set-up, but with its bland characters and poor world-building, it doesn’t mean anything. It tries to make it mean something by the conclusion, but those risks aren’t impressive when what you gave up was already incredibly poor and not properly set-up (it was done just to set up another famous story arc that will later prove ineffective because of how badly these movies set up their narrative). Without connecting it back to the comics, it’s perfectly passable; there’s some cool action, some fun ideas, and pretty good actors, but as an X-Men movie, it still didn’t capture the spirit and presence that the comics and even the animated show brought up. Not terrible, but not ‘’Best X-Men movie’’ quality either, the only thing that’s certain is that fans were not going to be happy with what came next.