While the cultural phenomenon of Batman ushered in a wave of comic book adaptations throughout the 1990s, the Caped Crusader’s own movie series burned out quickly and none of his imitators caught fire in quite the same way. As the new millennium approached, the genre waned once again, almost to the point of fading from cinema screens entirely. For better or worse, the first X-Men movie in 2000 was the real launching point for the modern era of big-budget superhero blockbusters. Its success led directly to Spider-Man, the Dark Knight reboot, and soon the Marvel Cinematic Universe that it would eventually merge into.

X-Men of course also introduced American audiences to a little-known Australian actor named Hugh Jackman, who would quickly become a superstar. Although Jackman has been plenty popular in other genres as well, the mutant hero Wolverine remains his signature role. To date, he has recurred as the character in eight separate films, plus uncredited cameos in two others, across a span of twenty-four years. Whether his recent crossover with Deadpool will be his final appearance wielding the razor claws or not has yet to be determined. In the meantime, a revisit of the original X-Men shows that Jackman fully inhabited the character right from the beginning.

Title:	X-Men
Year of Release:	2000
Director:	Bryan Singer
Watched On:	Blu-ray
Also Available On:	4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Disney+ FuboTV Various VOD rental and purchase platforms

I liked X-Men well enough when it came out, but it’s never been one of my favorite superhero movies. That opinion hasn’t changed any with this latest viewing. The association with disgraced director Bryan Singer doesn’t help much. However, in general, the film suffers from by-the-numbers plotting and strains a little too hard to introduce the comic book characters into a plausible real world. Most famously, Singer ditched the superheroes’ iconic colorful outfits to have them all dress in equally-ridiculous black leather instead. Coming out of the 1990s when the black leather look had become such a terrible cliché to convey edginess and badassery, that decision led to much eye-rolling among fans. Today, it dates the movie hilariously.

Largely ostracized from filmmaking now after a series of personal scandals he can no longer successfully dodge, at the time, Singer was an up-and-coming auteur whose acclaimed thriller The Usual Suspects (released when he was just 29-years-old) had been a surprise smash hit and won Kevin Spacey (now disgraced as well, and for mostly the same reasons) his first Oscar. Although Singer’s follow-up, Apt Pupil, may have been a misfire, he was still a critics’ darling and seemed to be on track to make serious movies and win some awards of his own. That he would choose, at that moment in his career, to helm a big summer tentpole superhero movie – right as the genre seemed to be at an ebb – felt like a risk that could have gone disastrously wrong.

Based on the long-running Marvel comic book set in a world where genetic mutations have granted superpowers to a small percentage of people, who are feared and persecuted by the rest of the population, the basic concept of X-Men has always been an easily-deciphered metaphor for just about any minority or outsider group that has ever felt marginalized by the world at large. As such, its appeal must have been tremendous for a young gay man trying to establish himself in the Hollywood mainstream.

To give him some credit, Singer assembled a hell of a cast for a frivolous comic book movie – including respected veterans such as Patrick Stewart as Professor Xavier and Ian McKellen as the villain Magneto, rising stars Famke Janssen as Jean Grey and Anna Paquin as Rogue, to hot new talent just bursting on the scene like Jackman as Wolverine and James Marsden as Cyclops. Fashion model Rebecca Romijn is a standout in the small but eye-catching role as the shapeshifter Mystique. Ironically, the worst performance in the movie is given by future Oscar winner Halle Berry as Storm; her dialogue delivery is stiff and disinterested, and she completely botches her character’s triumphant one-liner at the film’s climax. (That the script misses an obvious opportunity to cap the joke with “It croaks” in favor of a much weaker punchline does the actress no favors.)

Singer wrangles the logistics of a big summer action movie skillfully for his first attempt at a production of this scale. The action scenes are well-staged and the visual effects hold up better than many comparable movies of this one’s vintage. (Compare the mostly-competent CGI here to the embarrassingly cartoony plane crash at the end of Air Force One from just three years earlier.) Those qualities, plus Jackman’s breakout performance as Wolverine, are strong enough to override the silly and predictable plot about Magneto’s plan to fire a magical mutation transformation weapon from the Statue of Liberty that will turn all the members of the UN into mutants (a scheme seemingly inspired by 1966’s Batman: The Movie).

Comic book fans, who’d felt burned by Joel Schumacher’s last couple of dreadful Batman sequels and the many tepid Batman knockoffs that proliferated in the 1990s, were so excited to get another good superhero movie again – not to mention perhaps the first halfway decent adaptation of a Marvel title – that X-Men landed as a sizable box office hit in the summer of 2000. In the years following, it spawned a lengthy series of sequels and spinoffs that are still ongoing today. Admittedly, many of those have been of variable quality, some downright awful. However, Singer’s immediate sequel, 2003’s X2: X-Men United, managed to hone all the parts that worked in the first movie, improve the parts that didn’t, and is widely considered a superior refinement of the formula.

Looking back on it with a couple decades’ distance, X-Men is still a pretty entertaining movie, and Hugh Jackman is charismatic as all get-out in it. I can’t begrudge its success and don’t mind keeping a copy of it in my collection, even if I have conflicted feelings about certain aspects of the film’s legacy outside what appears on screen.

The Blu-ray

20th Century Fox first released X-Men on Blu-ray back in 2009. Although a 4K Ultra HD edition was later released in 2018 (as part of a 3- Movie Collection bundled with the sequels X2: X-Men United and X-Men: The Last Stand), this title hasn’t been high on my upgrade list. Among other reasons, I don’t particularly want to get stuck owning a copy of The Last Stand. Furthermore, I remain a little wary of movies from the early 2000s being transferred to 4K. Especially when it comes to those with extensive CGI visual effects, I expect a number of picture quality limitations may be forever baked into the final product, and a 4K scan of digital composite work originally performed at 2K or less will just reveal those flaws more starkly than ever.

With that said, the original Blu-ray leaves quite a bit of room for improvement. Image quality generally has a processed appearance, with noticeable sharpening artifacts. The 2.35:1 framing also often looks a little tight, as though the picture may have been zoomed in a bit during the transfer. Nevertheless, the disc is watchable on the whole, and has pretty good contrast and colors. Mystique’s deep blue skin comes across vividly.

Whether the 4K version rectifies any of the issues in this transfer, or just magnifies them, I can’t say. At this moment, I’m not inclined to pay to find out.

The Blu-ray’s DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack holds up better than the video. The mix is very loud and immersive, with tons of directional surround envelopment and a fair amount of throbbing deep bass. When Professor Xavier dons the Cerebro helmet, sound effects bounce all over the room. A rain effect early in the movie also upmixes nicely to height speakers.

The two-disc set has quite a few supplements, starting with a very dry audio commentary by director Bryan Singer and a gimmicky “Enhanced Viewing Mode” interactive feature that requires you to manually select a pop-up icon while the movie is playing in order to branch off to deleted scenes or behind-the-scenes footage. (The disc also has an option to watch these segments independently.) Following that are a cheesy half-hour Fox TV special framed as though it were a Senate hearing held by the Bruce Davison character, a Bryan Singer interview, animatics, an art gallery, TV spots, an ad for the soundtrack CD, and trailers for three of the X-Men sequels. Disc 2 then houses a five-part “interactive documentary” that would run two-and-a-quarter hours straight through, if not burdened with more annoying pop-up prompts that branch off to side-topics. Some additional trailers, TV spots, and other marketing material wrap up the contents.

Related

• X-Men
  • Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)
  • X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)
  • X-Men: First Class (2011)
• Famke Janssen
  • GoldenEye (1995)
  • Lord of Illusions (1995)