X-Men (2000)

The year 2000 brought with it not just relief from Y2K freaks, but also relief for X-Men freaks! The months leading up to it were wrought with fanboys having heart attacks over everything they could think of, from the leather costumes that they considered dominatrix-y, to the guy who plays Wolverine being too tall (for those who don’t know, in the comics Wolverine is 5’4”). On opening night none of that mattered as theaters around the country were packed with as many nerds/geeks/dorks as they could support, and there was much rejoicing.

I was one of those. Not one of the nay sayers, I understood that you shouldn’t put effort into finding a really short guy to play Wolverine. And out of it we got Hugh Jackman (sorry, Dr. Cox). I also understood the costume thing, addressed a little obviously by Cyclops at one point in the movie. So I was one of those there on opening night gitty like a kid on Christmas. However I’m not a big fan of Wolverine. Sure I think he’s a fun character, but as a comic fan he’s just been saturated into the comic world, be despite of this I didn’t mind how much the movie focused on him. In fact in the end it made a lot of sense to focus on the new guy coming in from the cold to this already formed family/team. Besides it would be hard to focus on the whole team as much as say the Fantastic Four, since the FF are and have always been a family. So in the end it worked, and again Jackman was awesome. In fact all of the casting was amazing, none beating Patrick Stewart as Professor Xavier, but I think it’s safe to say it’s impossible to ever do a better casting job for any comic character ever after him.

Now years later it has become nearly impossible for me to enjoy this movie if I watch it alone and I honestly feel it has a lot to do with Singer as the problems just become worse in his following movies, but I digress. Up until the end I don’t really have a lot of problems with it, but the end just falls apart into inconsistencies (and of course Storm’s great line about toads) that are just too great to ignore.

First of all note that I am not complaining about Rebecca Romijn being practically naked throughout most of the movie. In fact anyone who thinks I’m complaining is a communist. There, I said it. But for a movie that’s trying to make mutants believable in the real world, it’s just so hard to believe that a shape shifter can be so good as to imitate clothing and accessories on that clothing that no one would ever notice. In honesty this is something I’ve always found a bit absurd about Mystique, even with the explanation of unstable molecules in the comics. But the thing that bothers me most is how she was able to kick Wolverine’s ass. Great martial artist or not, he has two hands with three double sided blades on each, the fact that the only damage he did was cut off her fake claws (which somehow didn’t cut off anything of her mass when she reverted to normal) is ridiculous. Approaching it as a knife fight, rule number one is control the hand that has a knife and cause as much damage with the rest of your body as you can. Rule number two is if the person has a knife in each hand, run. Oh, and let’s not forget that Wolverine is a trained soldier whether he remembers it or not.

Then there’s the big one of the Rogue/Wolverine/Magneto ending. It has already been established that from just a few seconds of contact, Rogue’s powers put Wolverine, a guy with a healing factor, into a coma for a few hours, yet Magneto just get’s a little sleepy and still has full use of his powers. How did no one stop to notice that that didn’t make sense?

So they stop the machine and Rogue is sitting there dead, Wolverine crawls to her in tears (because crying is cool) and tries to get him to absorb his powers again so she’ll revive. It works but this means Wolverine no longer has a healing factor and all his wounds from the recent fights open up. That would be the wounds that are completely healed already. That’d be like lying in bed one day and having a ten year old surgical scar completely revert to its worst state of being from said surgery without any sort of reason for it.

Marvel Movie Scale = 7.5

Why That?: It’s an enjoyable movie up until the end, and even that is mostly enjoyable if you can keep yourself from thinking about things too much. When I first saw it I would’ve given it a 10, but that’s just something that happens with movies that actually aren’t that good, eventually people realize it.