We are so fortunate to live in the Golden age of superheroes all thanks to none other than Disney's Marvel Studios. Now your high school bullies, the guys who makes your coffee every morning, and your co-workers are all just as passionate as you are about fictional characters nobody knew 10 years ago. No other companies, till this day, are capable of achieving the same thing as Marvel and that is really something to celebrate about. But for this article, I wanted to celebrate one of the first franchise that broke the superhero genre into the mainstream media. And that is 20th Century Fox's X-Men.
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| Image via 20th Century Fox |
Here's the thing (again, no pun intended), back then comic book movies are geared more towards a younger crowd, particularly children. So when you hear there's a new Captain America movie back in 1994, you'd think, "Ow. That's a great movie to shut my 4-year old brother for the next 2 hours". and you would never think twice to watch it on your own because “It’s just a dumb kids movie". That all changed until Bryan Singer and Fox took a risk of a lifetime that will forever change the movie industry and the landscape of the superhero craze we've known today.
X-Men (2000)
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| Image via 20th Century Fox |
X-Men was initially planned to be a one stand-alone movie so Fox can maintain the rights to their X-Men characters. Singer wanted to make a movie about superheroes being discriminated and treated like freaks in a grounded reality that's similar to ours.
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| Image via 20th Century Fox |
To prove his point, he told a story about your everyday innocent high school girl, Marie D'Ancanto (aka. Rogue), who had the ability to suck out the energy from any being by simply physical contact. Marie kissed her boyfriend for the first time and killed him in the process. This made Marie horrified until she had to ran away from home, fearing she would hurt anyone else. Then she met a few other “freaks” like her and there begins the drama/conflict between humans and mutants.
My Verdict - - - 6/10
The film amazingly established the characters' struggle to live among our modern society, mainly Professor Xavier (played by Patrick Stewart) and a holocaust survivor, Erik Lehnsherr (played by Ian Mckellan). Even though these 2 men had their own differences, they never seek to destroy one another. Therefore this creates such an interesting dynamic between the two supes throughout the movie (now franchise)
With all the positives said, the film as a whole is really a cliched three-act story about our hero finding their purpose in the world and ending up fighting the villain on a tall monument. There's a lot of great ideas throughout but Singer and his writing team couldn't find a way to make them interesting or unique compare to other comic book movies at the time. And man some of the scenes are wayyy too dragged out even for this film's slow pace.
X2: X-Men United (2003)
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| Image via 20th Century Fox |
Because of the massive box office success of the first movie (raking in $296.3 million), Fox, Singer and the crew obviously signed up for a sequel as soon as possible. This time, Singer wanted to expand on this lore deeper than ever by introducing a threatening, yet realistic antagonist known as William Stryker (Brian Cox). This particular character wanted nothing more than to eliminate all mutants alive on Earth due to a tragic past he had to cope with. Therefore he saw them as nothing else than a threat to the human race. Because of his actions and twisted morals, Charles and Erik were forced to set aside their differences and work together to stop him from causing more catastrophic damage.
My Verdict - - - 6/10
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| Image via 20th Century Fox |
There are a lot of noticeable improvements such as the visual effects, animations, choreography and the filmmaking process compare to the first. Mainly I wanted to highlight on the amazingly well-choreographed opening with Nightcrawler. It was so well-executed to the point I had to go online to learn how did they manage to do all that so seamlessly, especially when this came out 16 years ago. Well f*cking done Mr. Singer.
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| Image via 20th Century Fox |
This film had one of the greatest comic-book-to-screen villains amongst Thanos, Ledger’s Joker, Zemo and so on. Brian Cox portrayed a villain who is both menacing, yet sympathetic in his own right. And since Singer likes to do a lot of close-ups, you can definitely tell this is a broken man from top to bottom by looking at his eyes of nothing but pain and anger (similar to Erik).
Singer seems to have a terrible habit of dragging scenes unnecessarily longer than they intended. By doing so, it leaves the film less room for us to learn everyone’s personality, motivation, struggles and so on. So they had to downplay Marie and simultaneously gave the bland character, Jean, more lines than she needed to set-up the Dark Phoenix story in the next instalment. So I ended up only caring for the 3 main leads.
X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)
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| Image via 20th Century Fox |
Now this is when everyone agreed the franchise is starting to lose it’s steam. Bryan Singer was offered by none other than Warner Bros. to direct Superman Returns. This significantly affected the franchise since this has been Singer’s franchise from the very beginning. Fox had no choice but to hire a director that was able to follow orders from the corporate head, Brett Ratner. The result? The film earned more money than the first 2 but failed critically for being “another summer blockbuster”.
My Verdict - - - 5/10
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| Image via 20th Century Fox |
To be fair, this isn’t the worst entry as many of us know what Fox is going to do for their next one and I personally enjoyed some parts of it here and there. The casting and make-up done for Hank McCoy was excellent. Kelsey Grammer remained professional as he’s able to make the costume apart of himself similar to how Jim Carrey in The Mask, despite the hot and heavy prosthetic he had to deal with on set.
The movie itself really wanted to show it’s special effects capabilities and you know what, many of which still looks impressive. All of this thanks to the one and only top-tier specials effects company based in New Zealand, Weta Workshop. How they generate the ash particles in the climax, wings animation on Archangel and the amazing levitating bridge that stands the test of time, and not many reviewers that I have known mentioned about it.
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| Image via 20th Century Fox |
"You've got to crack a few eggs to make an omelette” is the phrase that is very relevant to X-Men: The Last Stand. They focused on style over substance, which is fine for a summer blockbuster but not a film that inspires people to become the better men. Enuff said with the quotes, it’s understandable that Fox (yes, because Brett Ratner is the "yes man” in the movie business) would obviously wanted to make the movie more appealing to as many people as possible by teasing so many cool scenes and comic book references in the trailers with very little context. So once people walked out of their local cinema, it’s pretty impossible to get a refund as they had no choice to bear with mindless action after action or leave with their $15 gone.
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