In Retrospect: The "X-Men" Series

PRIMAL DIFFERENCE: A LOOK BACK AT THE X-MEN ONSCREEN,

AND HOW THE FILMS EXPLORE THE CONCEPT OF THE OUTSIDER

by Bennett Campbell Ferguson

Above: Anna Paquin and Shawn Ashmore in "X2," the second film in the series

“Everyone has some experience or understanding of personal, spiritual, or cultural oppression.  And everyone also has some experience of being on the side of the oppressor.  We share a world—an existence.  If there is a God, that God put us together for a reason.  I cannot believe that reason was simply to kill one another.  If we’re going to learn to stop killing one another, then we must live together—not separately.  Wouldn’t you agree?”

That’s what Professor Charles Xavier tells us in Uncanny X-Men #417 (written by Chuck Austen) which perfectly explains the raison d’être for the X-Men comics and movies.  Set in a “not too distant future” where super-powered mutants (whose inborn abnormalities range from cakey blue fur to literal mind-reading) are hunted and hated by “normal” people, the first film channeled the series’ metaphors for racism, homophobia, and every other known form of prejudice.  It also captured the story’s bizarre and familiar world, a place where only Xavier’s X-Men (a posse of mutants who double as teachers and superheroes) strive to prove that two different species can occupy the same space without eviscerating each other.

            From scenes of mutants coming out of the closet and later being forcibly “cured,” you might gather that the X-Men’s adventures are definitely potent as an allegory.  Yet it’s something else about the series that keeps grabbing me by the collar.  The reason I keep re-watching the movies and combing dusty shelves for new, bright-colored tales is that on a primal level, “X-Men” personifies what it’s like to be different, in any shape or form.  Even without their powers, the mutants would stand out in a crowd—think of Rogue’s ornate gloves, Xavier’s flawlessly smooth skin, Jean Grey’s flaring red hair, or any other detail that betrays the fact that they are not ordinary people. 

This week , we'll see more extraordinary powers and fashions splashed across the big screen in director James Mangold's “The Wolverine," which takes the series farther into the future than ever before.  But whether or not you buy a ticket, you should take some time to learn about what’s come before.  Besides being colossally crowd pleasing, the X-Men movies all explore what it means to be an outsider, keeping their head and heart balanced, or at least on the same stage.

With that, I give you….

X-MEN A man awakens in a silvery smooth room and flees to an expansive, expressionless hallway.  But everywhere he runs, he hears voices—someone is chasing him.  How is it possible that he could be safe here? 

And yet he is.  The man is the clawed mutant called Logan or “Wolverine” (Hugh Jackman) and he’s in Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, the one place where mutants can learn to master their powers, safe from the searching eye of the outer, human world.  In this film, Logan and his fellow runaway Marie (whose power prevents her from touching people), are our guides to this sanctuary, but their friendship is the true root of the film.  When she first sees him caught in a bar brawl, her round eyes pop with fear, yet she stows away in his truck, spurred by an animal recognition of another outsider.  They get separated after a mad tumble in the snow, but in the aftermath of the film’s edge-seater climax, the two friends are reunited high above the white city lights of New York, and it’s there that Logan holds Marie, eyes closed over the tired grooves in his face.

X2 Logan kisses Jean Grey before a neon stairway.  Pyro stares dimly at his face, reflected in someone else’s framed family photos.  Magneto conducts the pieces of his cell through a symphony of shattering.  Marie and Bobby “Iceman” grasp hands while murderous noises scream in their heads.  Do these moments sound beautiful to you?  They are, but not in the more delicate sense of the word.  Director Bryan Singer may have kept everything neat and small in “X-Men,” but here he pushes each frame to a visual and emotional breaking point, drowning you in rage, passion, and unchecked grief. 

So why, in a film series reputed for being intensely cerebral, does “X2” work to engage us via such overwhelming emotions?  To convince you of one key point, I believe. Throughout the first film, the murderous Magneto (Ian McKellen) murmured that a war was brewing between mutants and humans, and the prospect thrilled even better men like Logan—it would, after all, provide them with a reason to strike back at a hateful society with justification.  But the true nature of war is brutally yanked into perspective at the climax of this movie, when a woman sacrifices herself to save the X-Men.  As an onslaught of white, foaming waves surges toward them, she utilizes eons of untapped, orange-hued power to save their lives, losing herself in the process and showing her friends what it would really mean to fight Magneto’s uncompromising, flat-minded battle.  It’s a brutal lesson to learn and yet somehow, everything turns out all right in the end, even if we are left cliff-hanging over green-tinged waters.  

X-MEN: THE LAST STAND It was May 26, 2006.  I was on a field trip to the formally beautiful Portland Chinese garden, but I couldn’t think about anything except the arrival of this climactic new X-Men movie.  I’d spent weeks reviewing the first two films and reading about “The Last Stand” and how its director, Brett Ratner (who had replaced the absent Mr. Singer on short notice), hoped to create a conclusion to the trilogy that gelled with its previous tales.

In some ways, he did.  And yet “The Last Stand” still feels alien to its companions.  It bleaches the series’ shadowy sets with stark brightness, wiping away the vividly raw and dirty sheen of “X2”; slips in anti-humorous crass jokes with embarrassing regularity (a security guard’s declaration of, “I’ll spray you in the face, bitch,” perfectly exemplifies the film’s concept of verbal dexterity); and carelessly condenses stories fraught with regret and confusion in the previous films (like the broken friendship between Iceman and Pyro) into snot-spraying battles of good vs. evil. 

            When the movie came out, I was horrified by these betrayals, and I still am—repeat viewings can’t change the fact that “The Last Stand” is high-polish studio trash.  But I wouldn’t wish the film out of existence, not only because raging and wrestling over it has become an inescapable part of the X-Men experience, but because it does possess moments of genuine cinematic grandeur.  The picture’s theme is the misuse of power, and it’s perfectly personified by the deranged goddess Phoenix (Famke Janssen).  In a scene that Mr. Ratner and the editors (Mark Goldblatt, Mark Helfrich and Julia Wong) execute perfectly, Phoenix rises from the opaque depths of Alkali Lake, but here’s the trick—we never actually see her stepping into view.  There’s just a swirl of liquid, a propulsive burst of light and suddenly, she’s standing there, by the water’s edge. 

X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE I’ve heard “Wolverine” referred to as a dark fable, and so it is: it’s the tale of how the Wolverine got his claws.  In this grimly thrilling prequel (which was directed by Gavin Hood), Logan’s character deepens as we see different sides of him due to the ever-shifting company he keeps.  His brother Victor (Liev Schreiber) always calls him “Jimmy” and provokes his animalistic rage; a series of sidekicks, including John Wraith (the soft-spoken Will.i.am) and Remy LeBeau (Taylor Kitsch, sporting awesomely wild hair and a very cool fedora hat), spark Logan’s more genially macho, beer-catching spirit; and the love of his life, Kayla Silverfox (Lynn Collins, in a touching performance) breaks through his posturing so successfully that they end up living together in the Canadian Rockies.

            Even in those peaceful moments, Logan remains a hero of superfluous masculinity—his righteous rage is often a pretense for gratuitous killings.  But while the movie (which explodes with the energy of its score, by the great Harry Gregson-Williams) relishes Logan’s leather-jacketed, motorcycling manliness, it confronts the pitfalls of his aggressive nature by revealing how susceptible it leaves him to manipulation.  Like Leonard Shelby in “Memento,” Logan learns the hard way that the easy fulfillment of revenge is always too good to be true.

            The most striking thing about the film, however, is how it relates to the previous “X-Men” pictures, in both logical and movingly ironic ways.  When Logan is on the run, an old couple welcomes him into their home and though all his memories of that event are erased by the movie’s end, it is easy to imagine that an echo or shadow of the encounter inspired our hero to help Marie in “X-Men.”  And then there’s Victor.  We all know that in the future Logan will beat him to a pulp on top of the Statue of Liberty, but here there’s just a touch of sad sweetness in their bond.  “We can never be done, Jimmy,” Victor tells Logan.  “We’re brothers, and brothers protect each other.” 

X-MEN: FIRST CLASS The “X-Men” movies are perpetually underestimated—no one fully grasps the apocalyptic implications of Mr. Singer’s artistry and most people blatantly refused to see the depth in “Wolverine,” which is a little astonishing since part of this franchise’s power lies in its bent towards cutting directness, rather than sly implication (“Why not stay in disguise all the time?” the demonic Nightcrawler asks the shapeshifting Mystique in “X2.”  “Because we shouldn’t have to,” she replies).

            And yet, this latest installment may have been overestimated.  Set in the 1960s, when Xavier (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) are first forming their rival factions, the movie is painfully unaffecting—director Matthew Vaughn (who did more richly romantic and humorous work on the 2007 fantasy “Stardust”) and cinematographer John Mathiesen merge the movie’s many plazas into one flatly sunlit square, in which the mutants clash with a playboy tyrant (played with a wonderfully sleazy smile by Kevin Bacon) who just wants to blow up the world just for kicks.  In other words, this is a film stripped of the series’ emotional gravity; for all his talent, Mr. Vaughn seems to recite “X-Men” without really knowing it.

            The frivolousness of this narrative packaging is undeniable, but if the film glides along airily, it does so in a smooth, pleasurable fashion, knitted together by well-considered visual motifs, from a Nazi coin to a paired-up gun and beer tube.  Yet therein lies the problem—the movie’s narrative is so delicately constructed that there’s no room for the mad emotional fire that could have made its components not only weld together but sing with operatic intensity, as the films in this relentlessly durable series so often do.