A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

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Title: X-Men

Date Viewed: 7/16/00

Details:

Patrick Stewart

Ian McKellen

Halle Berry

Hugh Jackman

Famke Janssen

James Marsden

Rebecca Romijn-Stamos

Anna Paquin

Director: Bryan Singer

Score: 1/2

The Review: The future: in what might be a post-apocalyptic biological rebound, or the simple subtle meanderings of genomic shuffling, as a new generation of children are reaching maturity they are exhibiting a wide variety of unusual paranormal abilities. Society's reaction to these events forms the backdrop to this first entry in what will likely be an X-Men series. Drawn from the comics, hence larger than life, the core set of characters gradually form two teams under the direction of two quite different leaders. There's an interesting contrast in casting the primary leaders of good versus evil (although the script makes these poles fuzzier than need be): two larger than life and highly experienced actors lent their skills -- Stewart and McKellen -- as old friends now grown into arch-antagonists. Although clearly the team of the X-Men was the raison d'etre of the movie, I'd've liked to have seen more one-on-one encounters between Xavier and Magneto.

As an ensemble movie, with lots of characters, it's perhaps a bit busy, but the characters are clearly distinguished and easily separable one from the other -- "that's advantage of being a mutant, you're unique." (Well, maybe not, but you get the picture.) It's almost as if there were some "equal opportunity" clause invoked in casting and scriptwriting, with the result being a thin story line (with two new mutants being discovered, educated, and added to the fold) with too much distraction on the mutant fringes.

The world-building is decent, if superficial; clearly I'd've preferred if the nuts and bolts of the mutation process itself, or how these special abilities evince themselves and operated, took more of the spotlight, but I understand why these mechanics are of little interest to most folks. As an introduction to the group entire and this particular future vision, the movie is OK but not compelling, entertaining but not deep. There are sure to be follow-ups, and (hopefully) the identification of new and unusual mutant abilities, and the playoffs between them, will play a larger role.

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