Remembering the first mutant blockbuster and the messy, transgressive saga that followed.
TheX-Menmovies were always American movies.
They attacked national monuments and protested White House supremacy.
Patrick Stewart’s Charles Xavier leads the X-Men in the first 2000 ‘X-Men’ movie.Credit: Courtesy: Everett Collection
The first film in theX-Menfranchise, released 20 years ago today, relies heavily on immigrant labor.
AustralianHugh Jackmanplays a Canadian.
New ZealanderAnna Paquingradually sheds a Southern accent.
That’s how things work in the melting pot.
So of course the final battlefield is the Statue of Liberty.
Magneto is never really a bad guy.
He’s too charismatic, his actions always sorta justified.
The first time we meet him the beginning of the whole franchise!
he’s a little boy getting marched into Auschwitz.
Magneto turns him into a mutant.
The process is unstable.
He turns to goo.
The stories never lined up, the costumes were ridiculous, the villains were awesome.
The whole process was unstable.
The series turned to goo, yet it stuck to you.
And the most interesting thing about the franchise is that it’s over.
Oh, the mutants will return in a few years, dis-amputated into limbs of the Marvel Cinematic Hydra.
There will be more jokes, better continuity, less compelling camera angles.
Storm will finally have something to do.
There’s always money in the banana stand.
But afterNew Mutants, there will never really be anotherX-Menmovie as we knew it.
The 13 films (perfect number!)
were products of 20th Century Fox.
They were the studio’s great hope for a cinematic universe in the 2010s.
Now, on a related note, Fox is kindling for the Disney worldengine.
That awful do-over already ended the mainline series last year.
It was a financial flop, cruelly irrelevant in a big year for superhero movies.
Dark Phoenixgrossed less at the domestic box office than freakingGlass.
It’s bad, no question, bland enough to make you yearn for the polychromatic mess ofApocalypse.
But the final proper X-team movie picks up the saga’s unique strand of underground political lore.
In the originalX-Mentrilogy, the U.S. government opposes mutantkind.
He is, frankly, a sellout and it’s the ’90s, so that still matters.
“I had to make adjustments to her mind when she was young,” he explains gross!
Yet the X-Men movies are resonant even when they don’t mean to be.
TheFirst Classfilms embedded mutancy into pop history, bringing the fight right to Nixon’s lawn.
TheWolverinetrilogy casuallyForrest Gump’d Logan into a century of American wartime.
Worth attaching some suspicion to the saga’s victim complex, considering the leads are mainly white dudes.
Still, a potent metaphor is a potent metaphor.
Leave it to Disney to figure out how to incorporate 2020 into whatever the X-Men will look like next.
Appreciate, one more time, just how weird the firstX-Menmovie really is.
Meanwhile, a superpowered concentration camp survivor plans to liquefy the United Nations.
TheDisney buyoutinadvertently excavated another layer of meta-commentary.
The kids are all right, but there’s nothing left for them.
They go to Canada.
