Movie Ratings
Last updated 24 June 2020
X-Men (2000)
Genre: Action / Sci-Fi
Tagline: Join the Evolution.
Plot Outline: Two mutants come to a private academy for mutants whose resident superhero team must oppose a powerful mutant terrorist organization.
I finally got around to seeing the first X-Men movie.
I enjoyed the sequel, so I was looking forward to seeing the backstory (and hoping they didn't sacrifice a plot just so they could spend *all* their time explaining the origin). I was not disappointed.
One of the first things I noticed was that in the first few scenes, Wolverine was really roided out, much moreso than the rest of the movie. When I rewatched the movie with the commentary on, this was one of the first things they explained--that the Wolverine cage fight scene was one of the last things they filmed, and Hugh Jackman had done a lot of "training" since the start of filming.
They brought up that they had to recast the part of Wolverine 45 days into shooting, but never mentioned who was originally in the part. They also mentioned that someone quite different from Patrick Stewart had asked to play the part of Xavier, but they refused to mention who it was.
I was expecting some sort of explanation of how Xavier got all his money, and maybe why he was in a wheelchair, but they never talked about that.
One comment about the strength of the character writing (both in this movie and the sequel) is that they seemed to put a lot more into the Wolverine character than any of the others. I don't know if that was on purpose, or if it's just that Jackman just put so much more into the part than the other actors. Is Wolverine that much more interesting of a character compared to the other mutants?
Some of the deleted scenes were interesting, and it would have been nice if they had found a way to put them back into the theatrical version of the movie without slowing down the pacing of the plot. They said the main reason most were cut were because they were under huge time constraints to release the movie, so they didn't have time to see if they could edit them back into the film in a way that made sense.
Some of the DVD extras were interesting (stunt coordination, etc). There's something inherently comical about Patrick Stewart screwing up his lines and then saying "shit!".
When hearing how much bigger the budget was for X2 (especially having triple the special effects budget) I wasn't expecting quite as much from X-Men, but if I han't known--I would have guessed they had been made for almost the same budget.
All of the characters seemed to be very well-cast for their parts (but this comes from someone who never really read the X-Men comic books).
X-Men Collection (X-Men/X2 - Widescreen Edition)
X-Men Evolution Collection
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