X2
Year: 2003
Director: Bryan Singer
Starring: Shawn Ashmore, Halle Berry, Brian Cox, Hugh Jackman, Famke Janssen, James Marsden, Ian McKellen, Anna Paquin & Patrick Stewart
Runtime: 133 mins
BBFC: 12
Published: 17/11/21
Director: Bryan Singer
Starring: Shawn Ashmore, Halle Berry, Brian Cox, Hugh Jackman, Famke Janssen, James Marsden, Ian McKellen, Anna Paquin & Patrick Stewart
Runtime: 133 mins
BBFC: 12
Published: 17/11/21
2000’s X-Men was a monumental success and helped usher in a new era of more realistic superhero films, though it’s often overshadowed by the more popular Spider-Man series that released in 2002. Considering how popular X-Men was and the many threads that were left hanging, a sequel was inevitable and 2003 was when audiences finally got one. By many it’s considered to be one of the best superhero sequels of all time, which is a very bold statement as the original X-Men is one of the greatest superhero films of all time. So, do I share the sentiment of many others, or is X2 just overhyped rubbish?
Just a few months after Magneto’s (Ian McKellen) plan to forcibly mutate members of the United Nations is foiled by the X-Men, the world is now much more of the opinion that they face a mutant ‘problem’ and something must be done about it. This is made even clearer when the President of the United States is nearly assassinated by a teleporting mutant inside the Oval Office. Colonel William Stryker (Brian Cox) offers his assistance to the President in suppressing the mutant threat permanently.
Following advice from Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), Logan (Hugh Jackman) goes looking for answers to his past at Alkali Lake, a government facility where Xavier believes Logan may have had connections prior to his memory loss.
Rogue and Bobby (Anna Paquin & Shawn Ashmore) are now officially dating and trying to confront the issue of Rogue’s intimacy issues. Fearing for Bobby’s life she refuses to allow any skin contact, but as the two of them grow closer the need for physical contact becomes an ever more pressing issue.
Just a few months after Magneto’s (Ian McKellen) plan to forcibly mutate members of the United Nations is foiled by the X-Men, the world is now much more of the opinion that they face a mutant ‘problem’ and something must be done about it. This is made even clearer when the President of the United States is nearly assassinated by a teleporting mutant inside the Oval Office. Colonel William Stryker (Brian Cox) offers his assistance to the President in suppressing the mutant threat permanently.
Following advice from Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), Logan (Hugh Jackman) goes looking for answers to his past at Alkali Lake, a government facility where Xavier believes Logan may have had connections prior to his memory loss.
Rogue and Bobby (Anna Paquin & Shawn Ashmore) are now officially dating and trying to confront the issue of Rogue’s intimacy issues. Fearing for Bobby’s life she refuses to allow any skin contact, but as the two of them grow closer the need for physical contact becomes an ever more pressing issue.
X-Men 2 (or X2 as it insists on calling itself) is much grander in scale and scope than the original film was. But it does most of this worldbuilding by tying together many threads from the original film that were left unresolved. Logan is undoubtably the main character of this film as it puts his journey to recover his memories at the forefront of the action by making Stryker the villain. Over the course of the story it is revealed that Logan was part of an initiative called Weapon-X, an attempt to turn mutants into weapons of mass destruction, which was headed by Stryker at Alkali Lake. Stryker has never given up on this delusion of being able to train mutants into becoming weapons, and so through staging an assassination on the president is given authority to kidnap Charles Xavier. Once he does this, he plans to replicate Cerebro and use Charles’ telepathic powers to kill every mutant on the planet.
Fighting for the very survival of mutantkind brings Magneto and Mystique (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) back into the fray as reluctant allies to the X-Men. Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) is also given a major push into the limelight for this film as her relationship with Scott (James Marsden), her romance with Logan, and the increasing strength of her telekinetic and telepathic powers places her in charge of the X-Men in Charles’ absence.
The sub-plot of Rogue, Bobby, and John/Pyro (Aaron Stanford) is interesting enough but lacks the emotional resonance of Rogue’s origins in the first film. It does play nicely into a plotline that is given much more room to breathe in X-Men 3, but for this film the conflict over how to correctly use one’s powers is relatively arbitrary when Rogue does everything she can not to use them, Bobby only uses them defensively, and Pyro falls in line with Magneto’s ideals of mutants needing to be the dominant species very early on in the film because of his constant and aggressive use of his powers to harm people.
Fighting for the very survival of mutantkind brings Magneto and Mystique (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) back into the fray as reluctant allies to the X-Men. Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) is also given a major push into the limelight for this film as her relationship with Scott (James Marsden), her romance with Logan, and the increasing strength of her telekinetic and telepathic powers places her in charge of the X-Men in Charles’ absence.
The sub-plot of Rogue, Bobby, and John/Pyro (Aaron Stanford) is interesting enough but lacks the emotional resonance of Rogue’s origins in the first film. It does play nicely into a plotline that is given much more room to breathe in X-Men 3, but for this film the conflict over how to correctly use one’s powers is relatively arbitrary when Rogue does everything she can not to use them, Bobby only uses them defensively, and Pyro falls in line with Magneto’s ideals of mutants needing to be the dominant species very early on in the film because of his constant and aggressive use of his powers to harm people.
X2 does a lot right in the sense that it takes what was established in the first film and expands on it, rather than feeling like it’s a sequel for sequels sake. However, I do often find myself not being as engaged as I was with the first film because the events lack the same urgency or emotional punch. The original X-Men had momentum. Whilst it was small in scope it used the two-hour runtime to its advantage by giving the large cast of characters a decent amount of screen time. X-Men 2 is a longer film with a bigger story, but our characters seem to do less. There’s more action, but it’s frenetically edited and also lacks energy, unlike the original’s cleanly shot and choreographed sequences that punctuated the more climactic moments. Characters like Jason Stryker (Michael Reid McKay), Lady Deathstrike (Yuriko Oyama), and Nightcrawler Alan Cumming) are McGuffin’s more than people. They exist to be a tool, rather than to be a character, which is a real waste.
The films decreased emphasis on the emotional impact of being unwanted in the world in which you live is a real blow to the film and impacts the performances actors give too. Jackman & Cox are the stars of the show here as they are the only actors that consistently show emotion without it being cheesy (looking at you Marsden) and that mostly comes down to it being because they are the only characters that the script allows for that kind of interaction. Even the one scene in the film where this emotion would have worked excellently, when Logan, Rogue, Bobby, and Pyro visit Bobby’s family and he reveals his powers to them for the first time, doesn’t have the emotional distress necessary for the scene to actually carry any weight. It’s given so much more time and focus than Rogue’s origin was at the opening of the first film, yet that scene was so much more impactful because of the believable emotional distress.
Whilst X2 is a good film, and an enjoyable sequel that uses the foundations the original film laid well. For me it doesn’t match up to what the original achieved and instead falls into the trap that most superhero films do of thinking its audience is stupid. If you’re in it for the explosions and fight sequences then X2 has plenty of that, but if you’re after a film that balances action with emotional and political turmoil as a result of human diversity then you’re best just sticking with the first film.
The films decreased emphasis on the emotional impact of being unwanted in the world in which you live is a real blow to the film and impacts the performances actors give too. Jackman & Cox are the stars of the show here as they are the only actors that consistently show emotion without it being cheesy (looking at you Marsden) and that mostly comes down to it being because they are the only characters that the script allows for that kind of interaction. Even the one scene in the film where this emotion would have worked excellently, when Logan, Rogue, Bobby, and Pyro visit Bobby’s family and he reveals his powers to them for the first time, doesn’t have the emotional distress necessary for the scene to actually carry any weight. It’s given so much more time and focus than Rogue’s origin was at the opening of the first film, yet that scene was so much more impactful because of the believable emotional distress.
Whilst X2 is a good film, and an enjoyable sequel that uses the foundations the original film laid well. For me it doesn’t match up to what the original achieved and instead falls into the trap that most superhero films do of thinking its audience is stupid. If you’re in it for the explosions and fight sequences then X2 has plenty of that, but if you’re after a film that balances action with emotional and political turmoil as a result of human diversity then you’re best just sticking with the first film.