One truism about many superhero films – of which X-Men is the primordial progenitor in the modern movement – is that the sequel is often surprisingly superior. This comes of the subgenre’s unique properties, where Part One must needs be 70% exposition, leaving little room leftover for superheroics. But this was not known upon the release of X2: X-Men United, which predates even Spider-Man 2 (but not Spider-Man). That this sequel wound up being incontestably better than the original was a mighty shock at the time.
The fact is that the mutant world is now well known, effectively established. About the fundamental issue with human mutation, only the briefest introductory scene setting suffices for X2. As for the X-Men, their existence and motives and personalities and powers, all this is mostly assumed as well. When the time comes to reestablish that, say, Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) is telepathic/telekinetic/photogenic, it’s simply shown, and viewers are left to deduce the meaning. Could be partially that director Bryan Singer has become more comfortable in the ways of Marvel storytelling. It helps that matters are grounded come X2, and audiences will accept teleportation or super healing or shapeshifting far more readily than before.
Actually, there is no question Singer has grown accustomed to this setting – as have the moneymen at Fox, X-Men having proved incontrovertibly that money spent on superheroes is money well spent. There is a healthy dosage of action in X2 – I wager at least 5x more X-action. It is quantitatively better as well, now that Spider-Man has shown how much CGI assistance the genre can successfully employ. X-Men mutants now freely exploit their powers, feeling far closer to the actual superheroes of the comics…a good sight removed from X-Men’s occasional “stand around and debate endlessly the viability of using your powers” approach, necessitated by what budget and effects technicians then allowed.
The special effects are noticeably better, much more uniformly integrated. They lack the shiny, plastic sheen of Part One – with the exception of Magneto’s (Ian McKellen) plastic prison, which ought to look plasticky. At some point in the early ‘00s – not reducible to a single set of movies, in my mind – CGI effects became more reliable as movie-wide tools, and not simply occasional grace notes. This distinction is there between the first two X-Men movies, with X2 unquestionably a part of the cinematic superhero revolution, and not merely a glimmer of promise.
The (mostly returning) cast is well served too, with a few lesser X-Men now promoted to semi-lead. There is not a weak member in this bunch (and bear with me): Wolverine (breakout star Hugh Jackman) – power: healing. Cyclops (James Marsden) – power: laser eyes. Jean Gray (Famke Janssen) – power: telekinesis. Mystique (Rebecca Romijn) – power: shapeshifting. Rogue (Anna Paquin) – power: absorption. Iceman (Shawn Ashmore) – power: ice, man. Pyro (Aaron Stanford) – power: FIRE!
And of course there’s always Storm (Halle Berry) (power – the weather, except interesting), who gets the mightiest screen time promotion, for a fairly one-note character, owing to Berry’s interim superstar success with Monster’s Ball. I don’t want to dwell upon this for too long, but it seems Berry got a little full of herself in the light of that and Die Another Day, arguably the worst of the James Bond movies. She wouldn’t even appear in X2 unless Storm was promoted to Berry-level prominence, and made to represent all the light and the goodness in the world. Lucky for Berry she humbled herself enough to reprise Storm, for it left her intended Gigli role open for J. Lo’s self-sabotage instead. …And then Berry later did Catwoman!
Meanwhile, there is but one central new mutant among the cast (I’m ignoring the somewhat tertiary Lady Deathstrike and Mutant 143). That would be Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming, another Bond veteran alongside Berry and Janssen), teleporter. One newbie is enough, as the roster is rather overstuffed as it is – it’s a marvel (heh?) Singer balances things as he does. The “X-Men” premise has always threatened filmmakers with its scope.
So X2 takes the promise of X-Men, and runs with it. For all these masses of characters, they’re mostly preset, so a movie-long story becomes the focus instead – where X2, like most superhero sequels, really succeeds. Running with the notion of strained mutant-human relations, especially as a metaphor for otherness and prejudice, X2 flips the villainy coin around and posits a new threat – not Magneto, but rather human Colonel William Stryker (Brian Cox). Stryker is this series’ metaphorical equivalent of a white supremacist, militarily opposed to an entire group on principle, and without reason. Unintentionally backed by the U.S. President into suspending mutant liberties (and kudos to the film for not making some lazy, undercooked War on Terror parallel out of this), Stryker has one aim, and one aim only: KILL ALL MUTANTS
Achieving this worldwide, omnicidal scheme, Stryker needs a few things – a replica of Professor X’s Cerebro machine…oh, and Professor X himself! Thus begins, elegantly enough, his involvement with our heroes. It then becomes a matter of the X-Men piecing together Stryker’s plan (as each member knows only a part of it), then discovering Stryker’s base of operations.
This central premise comes of the comics – reportedly, the “X-Men” series “God Loves, Man Kills.” It seems the prerogative of superhero movie commentators to either claim encyclopedic nerd-like omniscience on all things comic book, or to play incredulous elitist who scorns the genre. I am neither, for while I respect many comics, I don’t have enough intimacy with “X-Men” to know really any of its plots – to my detriment. However, as adaptations, comic book films have the advantage of decades’ of writing to borrow from freely, and it becomes a dire temptation to steal freely from all over at once. Singer and his writers are wise to limit their adaptation to a contained, logical thread. In the interest of perpetuating cinematic X-Men, in doing something akin to serial comic development, pragmatic adaptations seem wiser than willy-nilly appropriation.
Delaying the climax, X2 separates the X-Men group early on, only to reunite them after sufficient individual adventures. This guarantees moments for every character (and every character’s powers) to shine, without Storm’s storming negating Pyro’s pyromania, or some such. That’s a simple enough solution to the challenge of a superhero team story – where, as in X-Men, writers often struggle to create the perfect scenario demanding one use of each player’s powers.
(This separation also gets beyond the plot-ending ultra-superpowers of Professor X, who takes on brainwashed damsel duties for much of X2, leaving his charges without their greatest asset. The films on either side of X2 do something similar as well.)
Singer describes this division as an intentional echoing of The Empire Strikes Back, which is telling. In retrospect, X2 is the middle chapter of a trilogy, though this wasn’t wholly intended at the time. Unlike Lord of the Rings or The Matrix or Pirates of the Caribbean, X-Men is resolutely not a macro-movie, filmed at once with artificial divisions. Each entry is reasonably standalone, even while the series-wide arc escalates the mutant/human conflict for all its worth. Aping Empire isn’t some high-fallutin’ attempt at mythmaking, but simply Singer’s acknowledgment that the second Star Wars is among the greatest of sequels – and a great template for the X-Men mold, for how it deepens established characters, widens its universe, and ups the stakes.
The situation with Stryker is a unique one – odd that the central villain of a superhero story is not a supervillain, but a reasonably pudgy guy with no powers. Stryker does have a few select brainwashed mutants, but his antagonism is almost wholly “us vs. them.” In light of this, the X-men unite, as the title promises, with the normally villainous Magneto and Mystique joining forces with Wolverine, Jean Gray, Storm, Rogue, Iceman, Pyro, Nightcrawler… All this following a remarkably cool – and cruel – Magneto escape from plastic prison, involving the ingenious smuggling of metal. Needed because Magneto is not wholly heroic, is still the series’ central villain, despite this one-film truce. That he can ally with his enemies on occasion is a testament to the flexibility of the core X-concept, and the strength of Magneto as character.
Summarizing events as such passes over notable moments. Naturally, Wolverine gets the opportunity to go all badass against Stryker’s men, shrugging off their bullets while using his adamantium claws as God best sees fit – within the realms of a PG-13 movie. Even in this bloodless form, it took Singer some doing to get X2 negotiated down from an R, because stabbing deaths are apparently that much more taboo than gunshots. Would that a more proper vehicle for Wolverine existed (be careful what you wish for).
Another worthwhile scene involves Iceman’s mutant “coming out” with his parents – one of X2’s lone moments of obvious metaphorics (in this case, phrasing mutation as homosexuality, in no uncertain terms). Overreliance upon this approach was one of X-Men’s crutches, and to do it but once in a film (and to simplify the metaphor into a single form of otherness) increases this moment’s potency. Besides, the scene ends with a raging sequence of explosions, which is always nice, and there is also an alarmingly hilarious adamantium-licking kitty cat.
Then eventually X-Men team up, character dynamics are tested, and everyone reaches Stryker’s evil lair…Alkali Lake. Waitaminute! This place has meaning! Indeed, pragmatically adding new elements to the “God Loves, Man Kills” framework, here X2 fulfills that niggling promise of X-Men, to examine Wolverine’s amnesiac origins with greater care. Now we can unequivocally state it: Wolverine’s adamantium skeleton is the result of a secret military experiment, in film continuity headed by one Colonel Stryker. And not only that, but there are other super-healers under Stryker’s present employ, to add a little action sequencing to all this backward-looking soul searching. What a nifty way to incorporate necessary character revelations into the greater plot! For those knowing the answer, Wolverine’s past could’ve been steeped in tedium and hand-wringing, but Singer anticipates and sidesteps that issue. Though, let it be known, the term “Weapon X” has yet to enter the cinematic X-Men lexicography.
X2 is a good movie, most enjoyable, but it doesn’t lend me many more avenues of discussion. Maybe just taking a few more plot points as they come about… (Potential spoilers)
Stryker himself proves easy enough to foil…but there remains the issue of Professor X and Cerebro. As Magneto sees it, this is an opportunity for genocide, one way or another, and it’s simple enough to switch X’s polarity to KILL ALL HUMANS. Thus Magneto returns to his baseline villainy at the tail end. And don’t fret your pretty little head about humanity – hardly a summer blockbuster would actually eradicate the human race in such a way. Though there’s still the unremitting pain which every person on Earth endures at the finale of X2, which is kind of surprisingly cruel (mostly unaddressed), and potentially even fatal – I can’t imagine anyone driving at the time, or operating heavy machinery, endured Professor X’s unwitting psionic attack with flying colors.
Though perhaps that’s the point – X2 concludes with the promise of greater antagonism to come, in that classic middle chapter sort of way. Similarly, anything following the Empire Strikes Back guidebook must identify a Han Solo stand-in, a character to (presumably) perish, only to return shortly in the sequel. I won’t say just who that is, though it’s perhaps oblique enough to reference the “Dark Phoenix Saga.” Yeahhhhh…that was something I knew nothing about in 2003 when first watching X2, and only know of now largely thanks to X2. My cinema-going buddies had to fill in those blanks, but the intimation is the same nonetheless – some badass stuff is about to go down! And…credits!
Yeah, it’s a cliffhanger, but not in a way which makes X2 feel truncated, ala The Matrix Reloaded or some such. For the self-contained Stryker story is nicely resolved, and it’s only the greater, series-spanning arc which is still in the air. Which is right and good for this sort of a franchise. It ups the stakes with each entry to maintain interest, without becoming too enamored of its own continuity.
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