In the second corner is "Magneto" (Ian McKellen), a Holocaust survivor who as a child suffered unknown horrors for the crime of being different from those in power. No, I don’t see a difference, all I see is weapons in our classrooms." "Well, some of these kids possess far more power than any handgun. "You’re in favor of registering handguns, aren’t you?" Kelly challenges another senator in a vote-canvassing cell-phone call. In one corner, Senator Robert Kelly (Bruce Davison), a McCarthy-like demagogue who spearheads a political movement for mandatory registration of "mutants." In the world of the X-Men, mutants are a class of people who represent unpredictable leaps forward in evolution, having been born with a genetic kink that equips them with unique super-powers. The story’s conflict involves not two sides but three, each of which is led by one of three older men. This is a world in which characters are not larger-than-life cardboard cutouts, but human beings with affecting problems, motives, conflicts, and interests in which opposing ideas are at least as important as clashing super-powers or martial-arts moves in which super-powers and special abilities are more than mere arbitrary plot shortcuts or empty pretexts for colorful special effects, but are treated thoughtfully as serious story elements with logical consequences in immediate events and also wider social implications. (If you did like the Batman movies, or saw more than any two of them, chances are you have already seen X-Men, perhaps multiple times, and are not my presumed audience here.)īut should you venture to see X-Men (perhaps in the company of some adolescent boy or ponytailed man), you will find a world of surprising subtlety, complexity, and human interest one that deserves to be taken seriously. Perhaps you have dim memories of Christopher Reeve in red and blue spandex acquitting himself well enough in two entertaining Superman movies (followed by a pair of less entertaining ones) and perhaps you saw enough of Michael Keaton’s rubber muscles and laytex jaw to satisfy yourself that this was not the franchise for you.
Perhaps you think of costumed heroes and super-powers as the proper study of adolescent boys and ponytailed men with goatees who work in video stores. Perhaps, dear reader, this prospect does not fill your heart with joy.
(A few highly-anticipated sequels - The Phantom Menace, The Lost World, and Mission: Impossible 2 - have done better.) Not by Superman or Batman, but by a less mainstream but still wildly popular superhero team known as the X-Men, whose film opened to the strongest opening-day and opening-weekend box-office results of all time for a new cinematic property. In 2000, however, the threat has been averted.
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