In December, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen walk back onto a screen as Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr, twenty-six years after they first did it. That’s the whole reason I’m doing this. I’ve decided to rewatch my way to Avengers: Doomsday: running from now until December, working through everything the film looks like it’s pulling from. And I’m starting here rather than with an MCU film, because the X-Men were always my team and it would feel dishonest to pretend otherwise.
I should be upfront about the lens before I start using it. I don’t watch these as a comic book movie fan. I watch them as an X-Men fan, which is a worse way to watch a film and a much more interesting way to write about one. It means I’ve never once seen any of these without the version in my head running alongside. The Dark Phoenix Saga. Days of Future Past. The Mutant Massacre. Some of the Savage Land material. Those stories are extraordinarily well built and every film in this run is competing with them whether it wants to or not, so my love for these comes with an asterisk. I spend a lot of the runtime thinking about what could have been, or how the storyline should have gone. That’s not really the films’ fault. It is unavoidably how I watch them.
Taken as films rather than as adaptations, they were quite fun the first time through. I’ve seen them on and off over the years and they hold up as entertainment. If you’ve somehow never watched them, they’re genuinely worth a watch, and that’s the verdict. Everything below is me picking at it, because picking at it is the enjoyable part.
The first one built the whole genre and gets no credit for it
X-Men in 2000 is a small film. Rogue puts her boyfriend in a coma, runs, falls in with an amnesiac cage fighter, and ends up at a school for people like her. Magneto tries to forcibly mutate the world’s leaders on Liberty Island without realising the process kills them. That’s it. Two hours, modest scale, leather costumes everybody made fun of at the time and which look considerably better now than the alternative would have.
What it actually did was establish that you could take this material seriously on screen at all, and every superhero film made since is standing on it while a fraction of the credit goes anywhere near it. It also set the franchise’s argument in the first act and never wavered from it: assimilate or resist. That’s a real question, and it’s why these films have more on their mind than most of what surrounds them. And the reason it works is the two men at the centre. You cannot beat Stewart and McKellen. Not for gravitas, not for sheer ability, not for the sense that both of them have thought their positions through and arrived somewhere they can defend. Magneto isn’t wrong. He’s a Holocaust survivor who has already watched one society decide a category of people shouldn’t exist, and when he says it will happen again he’s speaking from evidence. Xavier’s optimism is much the harder position to hold, and Stewart plays it as a discipline rather than a temperament. Put those two performances in a room and the film improves regardless of what the plot is doing, which turned out to be extremely useful over the following decade.
X2 is where the run is at its most confident. Stryker raids the mansion, takes Xavier, tries to use Cerebro to kill every mutant alive, and the X-Men and the Brotherhood have to work together. The alliance is the good idea, because it puts Xavier and Magneto on the same problem from opposite ends, which is the most interesting configuration these two have, and the film knows it. The Nightcrawler material is the best writing in the whole run about what it actually feels like to be one of these people. And then it hands the next film the biggest storyline in X-Men history.
The compression is the real fault line
Here’s my main complaint about how these were built, and it applies across the run rather than to any one film. Several of these should have been multi-parters. Not because longer is automatically better, but because the stories they were adapting are genuinely too big for a single runtime, and every time these films compressed one they lost the thing that made it work on the page in the first place.
The Phoenix is the clearest case. That’s a story with a slow corruption at the centre of it, where the horror comes from watching somebody you know get gradually replaced by something else. Give it half a film alongside a completely separate premise about a cure for mutation, and you get neither. Two good stories, one runtime, both damaged. The franchise repeated this mistake later and it cost them the same thing every time. If you want to see what these arcs look like with room to breathe, the source material is right there and it’s the reason I keep being slightly disappointed by films I otherwise enjoy.
Which brings me to my two long-standing complaints, neither of which a rewatch softened. Jean Grey is supposed to be operating at a completely different level to everyone around her and what’s on screen never sold me on that. I’m genuinely unsure whether it’s the casting or the writing and I’ve gone back and forth for years. My honest read is she was never given the right story, and possibly never the right actress for the story they were trying to tell, and either way I never believed the ceiling was as high as the character requires. Cyclops is a different problem. He’s a bit of a mistake on screen, though in fairness he’s also a bit of a mistake in the books, so the films were working with awkward material rather than inventing it. Scott is the field leader of the team and the least interesting person in every room he’s in, and putting him next to Wolverine makes that worse rather than better.
Logan doesn’t drift, and the recast worked
The thing that struck me most this time through is that across four films, two casts and eleven years of production, everyone changes except Logan. And it makes complete sense. He regenerates. He doesn’t age, doesn’t accumulate damage, doesn’t get the arc where a character grows into the next phase of their life. Hugh Jackman plays essentially the same man in 2000 and in 2011, and rather than reading as stagnation it lands as the point: everyone around him is on a clock and he isn’t. That’s the loneliest thing about the character and the films manage it without ever stopping to make a speech about it. His best comic material is a different animal to what the films use, but Jackman found something durable in there and held onto it for seventeen years.
I was not sold on First Class going in. Recasting Xavier and Magneto seemed like the kind of decision you make when you’ve stopped caring about the thing you’re making. James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender did quite well. Better than that, honestly. Fassbender gets the strongest version of Erik anybody has written for the screen, a man hunting the Nazi scientist who murdered his mother, entirely justified, becoming something terrible anyway. The friendship breaking in real time on that beach, Charles taking a bullet to the spine, Erik picking up the helmet, is as good as this franchise gets: two positions hardening into permanence while both men are still young enough to have chosen differently. The Cuban Missile Crisis framing is the part that wears, because building real history around your mutants works better in theory than in practice and the film keeps stopping to walk you through the geopolitics. The performances carry it past that easily.
So which pair do I want walking into December? Stewart and McKellen, and when I say you can’t beat those two that’s exactly what I mean by it. No disrespect to the younger pair, who earned their place and then some. But the argument I’ve been watching since 2000 is the one I want resolved, and it belongs to the actors who started it. If Doomsday is putting these characters in a room with the Avengers, let it be them.
That’s the foundation: fun films, real ideas, a couple of performances nobody has improved on, and a habit of squeezing great stories into far too little space. Next in the rewatch is Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which is where the MCU stopped being a run of origin films and became something with an argument of its own.