In my time as a comic book fan my feelings about the X-Men were largely left in a state of ambiguity. I had only read a few of their books, watched the cartoon, and all three of the early-2000's movies. Over the past year or so my interest in the X-Men has been rekindled thanks to the two newest movies
X-Men: First Class and
X-Men: Days of Future Past. Thanks to those movies I have plunged headfirst into all kinds of X-Men materials to the point where for old times sake I figured I would rewatch the original trilogy.
Let me be perfectly clear, the original X-Men trilogy is good; it all depends on your perspective. If I was a casual comic book fan, the movies are entertaining and for the most part do what they're supposed to.
X1 is a quick and concise action movie which introduces the X-Men and gets a whole lot of things right. Same goes for
X2; it's an improvement on
X1 in terms of effects and plot, however, this is where we see the trilogy begin to lose it's way in character development terms. Then
X3 comes along and is an utter mess. It destroys "Dark Phoenix Saga" one of the most iconic X-Men storylines, moves along at way too quick of a pace, leaves very little time for things to be explained, and has brilliant bits of writing
like this little gem right here. In short, ff you have any sort of decent comic book knowledge you'll find that the original trilogy finds a way to take one of comics most unique and diverse superhero teams and turn them into boring and bland cardboard cutouts of themselves.
However, this problem escapes the character known as Wolverine, which brings me to my first point: they might as well call these movies "The Wolverine Trilogy" seeing as how the first two movies are entirely from his perspective and the third movie harps on his non existent romance with Jean Grey (more on that later). I suppose my frustration with Wolverine is less him as a character, because Hugh Jackman plays the character flawlessly, but the marginalization of every other character on the team. Cyclops is the leader of the X-Men in the comics, one of the franchise's defining characters and he gets about 20 lines of dialogue the entire trilogy. I mean, Cyclops is a dork anyways but in the comics he eventually becomes the leader of the X-Men. In the films he simply the guy who waves his finger at Wolverine as if the director wants us to hate him for reasons other than that he's a dork. Jean Grey, my personal favorite character, has her most famous comic book plotline mucked up because they needed to throw in Wolverine's angst about her being Dark Phoenix because...Wolverine needs more screentime. Whatever happened to Jean Grey, the great hope of all the mutants, the one who eventually gets a mutant school named after her? Even the X-Men's greatest nemesis, Magneto, is reduced to a one-dimensional, "he's the villain in the movie because the source material said so" kind of character. He's not the tortured Holocaust victim afraid of being persecuted again, he's just a textbook villain. How boring for one of comicsYou can make similar claims about Storm, Angel, Kitty Pryde, Iceman, and Beast. All of those characters are prominent X-Men and yet have the character depth of a kiddie pool.
To put this in perspective, Jean's sacrifice at the end of
X2 is supposed to be a major emotional moment, However, since Jean's character receives little to no character development it's hard to feel any emotional punch there. One of the most prominent characters in your franchise just dies heroically and everyone watching sort of shrugs and moves on to the next scene! That is unacceptable and utterly incomprehensible to me. The fact that Wolverine now has his set of movies is even more frustrating to me. Once again, it isn't that I dislike Wolverine entirely as a character. He doesn't need to be the focus of every single X-Men related work. Of course, it's not like I'm preaching anything entirely new here, people already know and poke fun at Wolverine being the focus of every single X-Men movie so I guess I'll just move on.
One plot device that persists through the trilogy is the love triangle between Cyclops, Wolverine, and Jean Grey. It's not like there is no precedent for this, while Jean Grey is most often paired up with Cyclops she has also strayed towards Wolverine on occasion as well. The trilogy's interpretation on this is well, abysmal. None of the three characters have any sort of chemistry with each other. Jean and Cyclops rarely spend any screen time together where they're doing anything resembling romance. That leaves us with clunky moments between Jean and Wolverine in which we're supposed they like each other for reasons other than the fact that Jean looks like Famke Janssen and Wolverine is Hugh Jackman. Then we get the even clunkier moments where they try and replicate the comic's rivalry between Cyclops and Wolverine. This they do a little bit better since the two share more screentime together. Unfortunately, when some of the most memorable lines of their screen time is Cyclops literally saying "stay away from my girl", it's hard to take this "rivalry" seriously. By the end of
X2 when Wolverine tells Cyclops that Jean chose him the audience is left wondering why Jean was even choosing between them in the first place since she spent minimal amounts of time with either. Then
X3 rolls around and we get Wolverine conflicted about having to kill the woman he loves. However, the movie likes to think that Wolverine is the only character who cares about Jean when just about every other member of the X-Men knew her for longer. In addition, since Jean is given such little character development we're often left wondering why exactly anybody would be interested in somebody so boring. Then I remember that she's played by Famke Janssen and it all makes sense.
I only really get into the two major reasons as to why the X-Men trilogy bothers me and there are definitely many more. However, rather than simply continuing to rip into a trilogy that concluded eight years ago at this point, I'll simply go into how it can be made better. Luckily for the X-Men,
Days of Future Past has reset the timeline which means that we can at least pretend that
X3 never happened. In addition, these reboot movies allow for the X-Men to be done the way that they're supposed to be. First, the next movie should introduce the real first class of
X-Men: Jean Grey, Cyclops, Angel, Beast, and Iceman. If the movie places a focus on Professor X training them it will allow them to grow as characters in ways that the original trilogy failed to do. If anyone needs inspiration as to how to do that they should look at the work that Brian Michael Bendis is doing with
All-New X-Men a comic book run in which the original X-Men team has been brought forward in time to the present timeline. Obviously, there is no need for the first class to be brought into the present because they already have their own perfectly good timeline to use. However, Bendis has revitalized the X-books and the level of storytelling and character development in
All-New X-Men is something that future X-Men media, including the movies, should try to recapture. The characters in the new X-Men movie universe are already deeper and more diverse than the original trilogy's so we're already off to a good start there. Second, avoiding the Wolverine effect is a must.
Days of Future Past already made a bit of an oopsie there by having Wolverine go back to the past instead of Kitty Pryde like it was in the comics. However, it is easier to forgive because given the mechanics of time travel within the movie, Wolverine was the only one who could go back. It would seem that the new movies already have a good handle on the source material and given how good the first two have been, the future looks promising.
