X-Men (2000) Review
We’re just around the corner from entertaining the summer movie season. One of the biggest movies of Summer 2024 is Deadpool and Wolverine. In preparation and excitement for that movie I’m going to be reviewing all of the previous X-Men movies. It’s week number 1, so today we’re talking about X-Men. Let’s get started!
The Good:
Right off the bat one of the things to talk about is that it’s a movie from a different point in the time in the genre. This movie was released 8 years before the start of the MCU and before the genre was as big as it was today. It was between this and Spider-Man (2002) that really made the genre what it is today. So it’s a more traditional X-Men movie, coming after the popularity of the 1990s animated tv show. The scope and size of everything is much smaller in scale. Magneto is obviously posing a threat here, but it’s not as dire or world ending as the stakes in later X-Men and comic book movies were. And it’s interesting watching a comic book movie before it turned into the genre it’s none as today. Even the run time of the movie is significantly shorter than most other comic book movies are. It’s only about 1 hour and 45 minutes, which seems about an hour shorter than the average length for a lot of modern day blockbusters. So there’s a lot of importance to be had in this movie, it really did help shape the modern comic book movie genre.
From there, the best part about the movie would be the world building. The movie has a lot of exposition explaining this world of mutants and how the government and normal everyday people will respond to mutants. It builds out this lore and mythology with all of it. It’s a world that you want to go back and visit and we have. We’re 24 years into this franchise and it’s still exciting to go back. What they wisely did with this movie is made Wolverine and Rogue our point of view characters. Professor X and the school are already established. We follow Wolverine and Rogue as they’re learning about everything, we’re also learning about everything. It makes us understand the rules of it. Even using this movie to explore the idea of how would the government, how would normal people react to mutants. Some of them are good and some of them are bad, and it adds to this world. We understand that mutants have been around for a long time. We even get little touches of the dynamic between Professor X and Magneto, which obviously gets fleshed out in later movies.
Another aspect you have to talk about here is the casting. Everybody here is fantastic, and you have great casting for all of the characters. Whether it’s casting that seems obvious, or not it’s great. When you hear Patrick Stewart is playing Professor X that makes sense. It’s like a match made in heaven, it’s great casting and it’s hard to imagine somebody else embodying Professor X other than the legend that is Patrick Stewart. He’s great at playing wise older mentors towards our younger heroes, he did it on Star Trek decades prior. He just commands the screen and it’s believable that lead this team of X-Men and this school of mutants. Even getting cast Ian McKellen as Magneto makes perfect sense, he’s the ultimate Magneto. I really like what Michael Fassbender did with the character. But McKellen’s verison is who I think of when I think of Magneto. The one you really have to talk about is Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. Which is one of the greatest comic book movie castings of all time and once again it’s so hard to imagine anybody else playing Wolverine. We know that Mutants are coming to the MCU and one of the big questions is who could replace Wolverine, and that’s a very good question. He can play the hard and tough side of Wolverine so well, but when you need to see the human side of him. He can play it all so well and it’s one of the reasons why everybody is so excited for Deadpool 3. Hugh Jackman prior to being cast wasn’t an A-lister, this was the star making role for him. He was a theater actor and this launched him to the A-list. But even getting actors like Halle Berry, James Marsden, Fameka Jensen, and Anna Paquin to play the remaining X-Men is great casting.
One aspect that surprised me about the film was just how fast it moves. I think it helps that the movie is under 2 hours long, but I was never bored while watching it. And we went from the opening to introducing Wolverine to exploring The X-Mansion to learning about Magneto’s plan. We went through all of this plot so quickly and I was never bored while watching the film. It’s kind of refreshing to see a movie in a genre that we're so familiar with, but in a different era. We’re getting to a point where every movie is so long. So The Batman is almost 3 hours long, Avengers Endgame is over 3 hours. Eternals and No Way Home are over 2 ½ hours long. And it’s very interesting and refreshing watching a movie that isn’t super long. They had the right length for this movie and the story they wanted to tell.
Finally, the film can have a really nice sense of humor about it. It’s not like an MCU movie where it’s rapid jokes per minute. Even compared to other films in the franchise like the Deadpool franchise it’s not as funny. But there’s just this steady stream of jokes every few minutes that put a smile on my face. If you didn’t know this, Joss Whedon actually did a pass on the script and wrote a lot of the jokes. So a lot of the banter between Wolverine and Cyclops in the finale was because of Joss Whedon.
The Bad:
When it comes to this movie the best aspect of it would be the world building, that’s the most interesting thing about the movie, plus you love the cast and characters. So it can be easy to forget that the actual plot of the movie is so thin and forgettable. After I watched the film, I was somewhat struggling to remember what Magneto’s plan was. He wants to use this machine to turn the senators of the world into mutants, I think that’s the plot and what Magneto is trying to do. That’s kind of a problem with a movie when the story isn’t something you remember. Even with the way the movie is structured, it feels very episodic where episode 1 is the introduction ending with the Wolverine sequence. Episode 2 is Wolverine in the mansion and learning from Professor X. You can go through the movie and see the episodic nature of it.
The other aspect of the film that didn’t quite work for me is the film is very light on action. Once again, I think that ties into the problem of the lack of story. Where it’s more focused on the world building and characters, which they get right and it’s really good. But when you have a team of superheroes with different powers, you want sequences of them using their powers. Storm, Cyclops, and Jean Grey don’t really use their powers until the finale of the movie. And I felt like you easily could have added this action sequence somewhere in the film that shows them using their powers. Even with this film exploring ideas of the government not trusting mutants, put this action sequence in the beginning of the film that shows that. It didn’t need to be anything big or over the top, something small that shows the government’s point of view with mutants.
Final Thoughts: X-Men (2000) is a solid kick off to this franchise and laid the foundation for this world so well. It’s so important to the genre with the one two punch of this and Spider-Man (2002) helped create the genre it is today. I love the casting, Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart would be the stand outs for me. The plot and action being on the back burner does hold the movie back, but I still think this is a really good movie. If you love comic book movies and you haven’t seen this movie, you need to see it!
The Score: 8.6/10 (B)
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