by Benjamin Haines » Fri Jul 01, 2016 9:35 pm
I think I was lucky to have only been 11 years old when X-Men came out in 2000. As far as I knew at that point in time, the only comic-based superhero films were the four Superman movies and the four Batman flicks. I didn't have much exposure to comics as a kid so I knew the X-Men from the 1990s animated series and their memorable guest appearances in the Spider-Man series. I was blown away when I saw that first movie on glorious VHS. It and Sam Raimi's Spider-Man two years later really got me jazzed for the budding genre of superhero cinema, and then X2: X-Men United came along in 2003 and managed to outdo the first movie. At that point X-Men became one of my favorite film series along with Godzilla and I couldn't wait to see where they took it next…
And god DAMN did they mess it up after that. I hate X-Men: The Last Stand. It took a few disparate elements that worked fine unto themselves and mashed them with a plethora of terrible creative decisions into a whirlwind of stupidity. Then X-Men Origins: Wolverine botched both Wolverine's origin story and the character of Deadpool in the most mind-boggling ways, with a horrendous script and every generic action movie cliche imaginable. After that I just stopped caring about what they did with the franchise. I genuinely believed that the days of good X-Men movies coming from Fox were behind us.
Now I regret skipping X-Men: First Class in the theater and not catching up with it on DVD until over a year later. It's fantastic! I was shocked by its slick editing, talented cast, and thematically rich script with sharp dialogue and tight pacing. I thought it was a complete 180 from the prior two X-flicks and I suddenly found myself excited again about what would come next.
The Wolverine was a delightfully smaller-scale kind of movie that hit all the right notes. It was good in the theater and the extended version is even better. Deadpool was hilariously well done, carving out its own niche and expanding Fox's cinematic X-universe. Both movies together are a welcome course-correction from the Origins disaster. I also appreciated how, even while Days of Future Past made it a point to acknowledge The Last Stand as canon so as to highlight the significance of how the future is altered in the end, both DoFP and First Class before it also made a point to explicitly ignore Origins altogether. I'm glad that the movies we've gotten since that fiasco haven't been bound to it.
I think X-Men: Days of Future Past is one of the best examples of the genre to date. I love the way it adapts that storyline from the comics (and the '90s cartoon) while flipping the premise on itself. In both the comic and the cartoon, we the reader/viewer have known that particular iteration of the X-Men for several stories when they receive a visitor from their dystopian future. Fox's series of X-Men films does just the opposite. We followed the original ensemble cast of Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan, Halle Berry, etc. from X-Men to X2 to The Last Stand and then The Wolverine, and it is that particular iteration of the X-Men whose timeline becomes bleak and who end up sending someone back in time to change the past. I love the fact that the X-Men film series I've been following since I was 11, the one that fudged the whole Dark Phoenix story so badly, was in retrospect a cinematic representation of the X-Men's dystopian future timeline.
Having that as the backbone of a Days of Future Past movie gives those prior four films a special place in the cinematic canon going forward. With X-Men: Apocalypse and whatever comes next, we're now watching a new X-Men timeline unfold on the screen, one which only includes First Class and Days of Future Past as part of its cinematic past. But the very fact that DoFP is a part of this new canon means that X1-X3 and The Wolverine are still just as much a part of the complete cinematic narrative. Bryan Singer and the folks at Fox managed to successfully reboot their X-Men film series with a new cast, but unlike the dead-end route Sony went down with The Amazing Spider-Man, Fox managed to pull it off without actually disregarding the movies that came before (except X-Men Origins: Wolverine, blessedly).
Aside from those two major duds in 2006 and 2009, I really dig the X-Men film series. Between these movies, Del Toro's Hellboy duology, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Nolan's Batman trilogy, Hollywood's long dive into the comic-based superhero genre in this century has been a real treat to experience as it's happening. Our cup runneth over with quality examples of the genre and I think the X-Men films have been among the best of them, particularly X2, First Class, and Days of Future Past.