8 / 10
Official trailer
A Gate at Auschwitz
I’ve watched X-Men once. It’s a good movie, and once was enough. I respect this movie more than I cherish it. It’s smart and serious, it treats its outsiders like people, and two or three of its scenes are as strong as anything the genre produced for years. The rest is solid, quick and a little thin, and it never grabbed me hard enough to make me miss it.
X-Men opens in Poland in 1944. At a concentration camp, a young Jewish boy is dragged away from his parents, and as the gates close between them, he reaches out and the metal gates twist and buckle toward him. Soldiers club him to the ground. The boy is Erik Lehnsherr, and he’ll grow up to be Magneto.
It’s an astonishing way to open a comic-book movie, and it tells you exactly what kind of film this will be. Magneto’s hatred of humanity comes from the worst thing human beings ever did, far from any cartoon villainy, and he’s determined that mutants will never be herded into camps.
The opening sets the stakes and the theme in two minutes, and it makes Magneto the most sympathetic villain the genre had yet produced.
For Writers
The opening scene at a concentration camp gives Magneto a backstory that makes his hatred understandable. The villain’s motive is rooted in real historical horror.
A villain becomes far more compelling when their motives come from real suffering. The reader may reject their methods, but they understand the wound, and that understanding creates tension in every scene.
Singer puts the wound first, before the reader knows who Erik will become.
By the time Magneto appears as an old man with a plan, the audience already knows exactly why he fears humanity, and that knowledge makes every one of his arguments harder to dismiss. A villain whose wound the reader has seen can never be simply wrong. My article on character backstory goes further.
Two Old Friends
Patrick Stewart plays Professor Charles Xavier, a telepath who runs a school for young mutants and believes humans and mutants can live together. Ian McKellen plays Magneto, who believes they can’t, and who’s planning to force the issue. They’re old friends, and they still play chess together, even as they fight a war.
The casting is inspired. Stewart and McKellen, two great Shakespearean actors, bring gravity, wit and history to every line, and their scenes together lift the whole film. You believe they’ve known each other for decades, and you believe they still love each other, and you believe neither will ever give an inch.
Those two are the reason the film gets its 8 from me. Every time Stewart and McKellen share a frame the movie gets smarter, and I’d happily have traded ten minutes of the Statue of Liberty for one more chess game. The film’s argument, between integration and resistance, echoes real debates in the civil rights movement, and the characters are often compared to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. That depth, rare in superhero films at the time, is why X-Men still holds up.
For Writers
Xavier and Magneto are old friends who still play chess together while fighting a war. Their affection makes their conflict tragic.
Antagonists who respect or love each other make every confrontation richer. The reader knows what they’ve lost, and each clash has the weight of a friendship that can’t be repaired.
The chess games are a smart device, too. They let the two men talk about their war while playing a game about war, and the board becomes a quiet shorthand for their whole relationship. A shared ritual between enemies says more about what they’ve lost than any flashback could, and it costs the story almost nothing in screen time.
Wolverine
Hugh Jackman was a virtually unknown Australian stage actor when he was cast as Wolverine, a last-minute replacement after Dougray Scott was held up filming Mission: Impossible 2. He became a star overnight, and he played the character for seventeen years.
Jackman is terrific: gruff, sardonic, feral and wounded, with sideburns, a cigar and claws. Wolverine has no memory of his past and a skeleton laced with metal, and he’s the audience’s entry point into the X-Men’s world, a loner who doesn’t want to join anything and slowly finds himself caring about the people around him. His relationship with Rogue, a frightened teenage runaway whose touch drains the life from anybody she touches, is the film’s emotional center. He becomes her protector, a gruff older brother, and it’s the most touching thing in the movie.
Jackman walks off with the picture. I think he found the character on the first try: the snarl, the humor, the soft spot he’d die before admitting to. The scenes with Paquin are my favorite stretch of the movie, because for a few minutes it stops being about a franchise and becomes about two lonely people.
Rogue
Anna Paquin plays Rogue, and she’s the film’s heart. Her mutation, discovered the first time she kisses a boy and puts him in a coma, means she can never touch another person. She runs away from home, ends up in a bar in the Canadian wilderness, and meets Wolverine.
The film uses Rogue to make its central metaphor personal. Being a mutant, here, is like being any kind of outsider: gay, disabled, different in some way the world fears. Her isolation, and her longing to be normal, are the most human things in the story.
For Writers
Rogue’s mutation means she can never touch another person. Her power makes the film’s metaphor about being an outsider painfully personal.
A fantasy element works best when it expresses something real about the character’s emotional life. Rogue’s power is a metaphor for isolation that any teenager can recognize, and plenty of adults too.
When you invent a power, a curse or a magical condition, ask what human experience it stands for, and make sure it costs the character something they want badly. That cost is where the reader connects. Rogue can save lives and still can’t hold a hand, and that one painful detail makes her the most sympathetic character in the film.
The Rest of the Team
Halle Berry plays Storm, who can control the weather, Famke Janssen plays Jean Grey, a telepath with growing powers, and James Marsden plays Cyclops, who fires beams from his eyes and doesn’t get along with Wolverine. They’re all fine, though some of them, especially Storm, get too little to do. Storm is where the film falls short. Halle Berry gets a handful of lines and a weather effect, and Cyclops mostly exists to lose arguments to Wolverine. I’d have cut a chunk of the setup to give either of them one scene that mattered.
On Magneto’s side, Rebecca Romijn is terrific as Mystique, a shape-shifter covered in blue scales who fights like a gymnast, and Ray Park plays Toad and Tyler Mane plays Sabretooth. The fights between the two teams are well staged, and they have a grounded, physical feel that later superhero films lost.
Mutants as Metaphor
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the X-Men in 1963, in the middle of the civil rights movement, and the comics were always about prejudice: people hated and feared for being born different. The film keeps that idea front and center. Mutants are hunted, registered, bullied and hated, and the question the film asks is how a persecuted minority should respond.
Singer lets the metaphor stay open. Readers of different generations have seen mutants as stand-ins for Black Americans, Jewish refugees, gay teenagers, immigrants and anybody else made to feel like a threat for existing. That openness is one reason the series lasted so long. Almost everybody who has ever felt like an outsider finds themselves somewhere in it. None of it turns into a lecture. It builds the theme into Rogue’s loneliness, Magneto’s rage and Kelly’s fearmongering, and trusts the audience to connect the dots.
Senator Kelly
Bruce Davison plays Senator Robert Kelly, a politician pushing a bill to force mutants to register with the government. He’s a fearmonger, whipping up the public against a minority for political gain, and the film makes the parallels with real history plain.
Magneto kidnaps Kelly and uses a machine to turn him into a mutant, and his fate takes the film somewhere dark and affecting. Davison makes him more than a cardboard bigot. By the end, you feel sorry for him. Kelly’s arc is the film’s quiet argument. The man who wanted mutants registered and feared becomes one, and he’s terrified, confused and alone, exactly as the people he persecuted were. Singer doesn’t turn it into a lesson. He just lets Kelly understand, too late, what he was doing to people.
Black Leather
The film’s costumes, black leather in place of the comics’ bright spandex, were controversial with some fans, and the film makes a joke of it. When Wolverine complains about the uniforms, Cyclops asks whether he’d prefer yellow spandex, a nod to Wolverine’s comic-book costume.
Director Bryan Singer, who’d made The Usual Suspects, wanted the film to feel grounded and realistic, and the dark costumes, cool color palette and serious tone were all part of that. It worked. The film treated its characters and its themes seriously, and audiences responded.
The Statue of Liberty
The climax takes place on the Statue of Liberty, where Magneto plans to use his machine to turn the world leaders gathered at a summit on nearby Ellis Island into mutants. The machine will kill Rogue, who he’s kidnapped to power it.
It’s a fitting setting for a film about immigrants, outsiders and the promise of equality, and the fight inside and around the statue is exciting. It’s also a little small by today’s standards, and the effects show their age. But the emotional stakes, Wolverine fighting to save Rogue, hold it together.
The climax is where I checked out a little. I believe in Wolverine fighting for Rogue, but the set piece itself feels cramped and cheap next to everything the film built in its first hour, and I kept waiting for it to get bigger.
How It Changed Everything
In the summer of 2000, X-Men was a big hit, and it changed the direction of Hollywood. Along with Spider-Man two years later, it proved superhero films could be serious, profitable and respected. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, launched with Iron Man in 2008, owes it a great deal.
It spawned a long franchise, with sequels, prequels and spin-offs, some excellent, like X2 and Logan, and some terrible. The first film remains one of the leanest and most focused of them all, at just over an hour and forty minutes.
Where It Shows Its Age
It’s short and sometimes feels rushed, as if it’s setting up a franchise more than telling a complete story. Several characters are thin, the effects are dated, and the climax is smaller than the story deserves.
It still holds up very well, and its best scenes, the opening at Auschwitz, the chess games between Xavier and Magneto, the bond between Wolverine and Rogue, have real power.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Its superhero premise works as a metaphor for prejudice and belonging, and the film grounds that metaphor in real history, from the Holocaust to the civil rights movement. The action is exciting, and the ideas give it weight.
Genre stories gain depth when their fantastic elements reflect real human struggles. The best ones use the fantasy to say something that would be harder to say directly. Ask what real-world conflict your fantastical premise mirrors, and let that parallel shape your characters’ choices.
Where the Modern Superhero Film Began
My rating for X-Men is an 8. I like it a lot and I don’t need to see it twice, and both of those things come from the same place: it’s lean, serious and smart, and it’s also a franchise setup more than a complete story.
Stewart and McKellen, Jackman’s Wolverine and that opening at the camp give it more weight than most superhero films ever carry. The dated effects and the small climax cost it the rest. It’s also the film that made the modern superhero era possible, and that counts for a lot with me.
