The Millennium in Frames: Marvel's Dying Breath Gives Us X-Men
The Millennium in Frames is our close-to-chronological look at the most important, influential, popular movies since 2000.
Standing atop the massive stack of comic book movies we’ve accumulated in 2016, we can see from our modern vantage point that X-Men was a high-stakes movie. Twentieth Century Fox was counting on it to launch a bankable, reliable franchise that could serve as a continuous summertime tent-pole, and Marvel was counting on it to no-joke save their company. Of course, it did both of those things, but on the way it aimed for a narrative standard that few Marvel movies have shot for since, and it set a benchmark for what the modern superhero movie would be and could be.
The simplest story around X-Men is that it reestablished the legitimacy of comic book movies and launched the modern era of superheroes in pop culture. That’s true, but that doesn’t really tell the whole story. True, the success of X-Men in 2000 made it possible for Marvel to start rolling out other properties (Spider-Man would follow in 2002 before X2 and Hulk came in 2003), but this wasn’t a throwing-darts-at-the-wall situation. Marvel was effectively bankrupt at the turn of the millennium, and if X-Men didn’t work, most of the subsequent projects either would’ve had to change drastically or be scrapped completely. The company was essentially trying to pull themselves back from the brink, and going all-in on the X-Men movie was key to their strategy. Licensing—putting Marvel characters in movies, on television, and in videogames—was the final big bet, and if the cards didn’t reward X-Men, it’s likely that Marvel would have busted.
The movie is undeniably a crowd-pleaser, and that could be good or bad. Rewatching X-Men feels a bit like sampling a cheese platter—there are some delicious snacks to be had, but you also run into a few things that are a bit too funky or a bit too bland. Yet, the snackable parts are really addictive. The first twenty minutes, when our various heroes and villains are discovering their mutations, are as good as anything Marvel’s ever done. The quiet world-building of Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters is charming. Wolverine’s quips and zingers and general eyebrow-raising is essential to lifting the movie above its potential campy quagmire.
X-Men’s greatest success is, of course, its cast. Hugh Jackman is irreplaceable as Wolverine (astounding he was the studio’s third choice—he wasn’t brought on until week three of filming). Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen were born to be nemeses as the respective Professor X and Magneto. Even Anna Paquin is imminently sympathetic as Rogue. If the goal of X-Men was to encourage us to spend more time with its protagonists, it couldn’t have accomplished it with any more authority. These are permanent looks. Marvel paid up and went big and, to its credit, it has numerous cultural icons to show for it.
(Side graf: Marvel’s all-in approach on this movie was evident from Day One. The company’s original vision for X-Men had James Cameron as producer and Kathryn Bigelow as director. The movie’s actual director, Bryan Singer, was in high demand after Usual Suspects, and every actor from Bob Hoskins to Russell Crowe was on tap to play Wolverine. Anna Paquin bailed on another movie to play Rogue. Even the unfortunate Toad character was played by Ray Park, notable for his role as—ready for this?—Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace. Yeah, Marvel really wanted this one to be good.)
Despite all the talent involved, X-Men’s real attempt at greatness lay in its script. Bryan Singer, upon assuming command of the project, approached the movie with a level of intention that we probably take for granted today, what with all the Christopher Nolans and Joss Whedons running around. Singer, rather than take an action-heavy, effects-laden approach to the X-Men story, decided to use the subject as allegory, much like the original comics. The best moments in X-Men deal with the mutants’ quiet struggles against oppression and otherness among normal humans: Rogue can’t touch anybody, Magneto can’t trust anybody, and Cyclops can never look someone in the eye. An early highlight sees a younger mutant ask Wolverine if it hurts when his claws come out. He hesitates and looks away: “Every time.”
The allegorical approach had its detractors—some critics thought the movie didn’t go far enough, and lost too much of its meaning to special effects and explosions (maybe that’s true)—but it nevertheless set a precedent that comic book movies could be more than linear, flat stories. To this day, our greatest superhero movies capitalize on that idea. Under Sam Raimi, Spider-Man was about maturity, growth, and the burden of heroism (giving us an all-time line to prove it). Under Christopher Nolan, the Dark Knight trilogy succeeded primarily as crime movies instead of superhero flicks. Under the Russo brothers, Captain America became an examination of patriotism. Superhero movies were allowed to be more than superhero movies because X-Men wanted to do something other than phone-it-in fan service. Sure, it didn’t quite pull off everything it shot for, but the degree to which Marvel supported the attempt is notable and important.
X-Men didn’t complete its mission, but it opened the door for other movies to explore further areas unknown. It saved Marvel and set a precedent for ambition, complexity, and dedication within the comic book genre. The icons embedded within its cast began a run that’s going to brush against two decades of relevancy, and it ensured that the licensing of popular characters would be a surefire way for studios to print cash. X-Men wasn’t great, but it was good enough to begin one of the millennium’s defining cultural timelines, one that would always be punctuated with an ellipsis instead of a period: To be continued…
Next time, a more unfortunate genre staple of the 2000s is established by Scary Movie.