Review for X-Men Trilogy

Introduction

This might just be where I’m beginning to learn from my mistakes. Twice during the last year, I’ve opted for the cheap boxset release for perceived value for money, instead of just getting the single films out of those sets that I really wanted, and I actually wound up spending more as a result. The X Men, and X2 are films that I proudly own on DVD, and were top of the pile for the Blu-ray upgrade. Last year, the opportunity arose to do so relatively cheaply. I had two options, the trilogy, or a five movie collection which also added Origins: Wolverine and First Class into the mix along with The Last Stand. That I never bought The Last Stand tells you ahead of time what I think of Brett Ratner’s take on the X Men, and I didn’t think much of Wolverine when I saw that on TV. I haven’t seen First Class, but the bottom line was pay less for two out three films that I wanted, or pay more for two, or maybe three films out of five that I wanted. This time I went where my wallet dictated and ignored that collector’s instinct. It was a wise decision too, as these are by no means the definitive sets, and in the interim there was another stab at a Wolverine movie, while this year will see the First Class-verse collide with the first X-Men movie-verse. They’ll keep churning them out, new extras will keep being found, the discs will continue to get imperceptible upgrades, and I’ll have forgotten that all I really wanted was The X Men and X2...

Introduction: The X-Men

In the near future, mutations in the genome are gifting some members of the human species with strange abilities. This has led to divisions, with many ‘normal’ humans resenting and fearing the mutants, and some calling for segregation and registration. The most vocal of these proponents is US Senator Kelly, who has introduced a bill to that effect. Mutants of course oppose him, but they themselves are split into factions. Professor Xavier’s group wishes for mutants to coexist peacefully with humanity, both working for the common good, while Magneto’s group wishes for mutants to reign supreme over a human underclass; the superior beings ruling the lesser for their own good. The battle between these two factions will embroil two unlikely mutant loners, an amnesiac named Wolverine, and a young girl in fear of her own abilities named Rogue.

Picture: The X-Men

The X Men gets a 2.35:1 widescreen transfer at 1080p resolution. All these gorgeous high definition transfers are beginning to look alike to me. Gorgeous colour and clarity throughout, the joy in finding more detail, seeing things that I had never seen on DVD... When the menus do finally deign to load, and I’ve pressed play, I’m happy as a lamb. This transfer of The X Men appears to be from the original film source, and there doesn’t seem to have been a lot done in the way of post-processing for HD presentation. There’s a nice bit of grain, the film has an imperceptible flicker to it, which becomes perceptible during the end credits, and there is the odd speck here and there. The film looks fantastic, and the only niggles I might have are odd moments of softness (Rogue’s house at the start), and a certain lack of shadow detail in darker set scenes. Also, the HD transfer does show up a little the creakiness of some of the 14 year-old effect sequences, notably the disappearing stab wounds on Rogue, and the X-Plane taking off.

Sound: The X-Men

You have the choice between DTS-HD MA 5.1 English, DD 5.1 English, and DTS 5.1 German and Spanish, with plenty of subtitles for the film, the commentaries, and the extras. The audio certainly comes up a treat on this Blu-ray, with the surrounds put to great use in bringing across the film’s action, effects and music, while the dialogue remains clear throughout.

Extras: The X-Men

You get two discs worth of X-Men in this collection, a 50GB feature disc, and a 25GB extras disc, not that the feature disc is shy of extras itself. In fact it seems packed full of the content that was originally available on the DVD release and the 1.5 upgrade which I never double-dipped on.

The animated menu screen loads up as per usual for Blu-ray, for some reason seeming to take longer and longer with each new disc.

The X-Men has those in-movie features that these releases are so fond of, requiring you use your colour buttons to access. You can listen to the audio commentary with Brian Singer and Brian Peck, presumably taken from the 1.5 disc, and it’s a pretty nice commentary track.

There is the Bonusview content which I hate. Personal reasons. My player’s manual tells me the best audio presentation comes through bitstream, not PCM which is how I set it up. But if I want Bonusview content, I have to turn the secondary audio on from the set-up menu, which degrades the main feature audio to the core DTS track, and turning it on and off for picture in picture commentary and interviews is an utter pain. I usually ignore the Bonusview content and settle for leaving my player as is, with a whinge in each review wishing that the Bonusview interviews could be presented separately on the disc. The X-Men Bonusview footage mitigates this somewhat by having this content subtitled.


Another button lets you look at production stills and behind the scenes photos during the film.

Enhanced Viewing Mode lets you watch 6 deleted and extended scenes inserted ‘seamlessly’ into the film as well as a bunch of behind the scenes footage. Note the air-quotes around seamlessly. You have to wait for a symbol to appear on the screen and press a button on your remote, which isn’t exactly seamless. The deleted footage too is presented in SD letterbox format, and if you don’t see the difference between that and the HD feature, book an eye test now. You can watch all this stuff separately, which is recommended, and there is 64 minutes worth of footage in total.

You can also watch the deleted footage separately from this, with optional commentary from the two Brians.

Fox Special: The Mutant Watch lasts 22 minutes and is that mockumentary that bookends the making of featurette from the original DVD. There is a 6 minute interview with Brian Singer, 2 animatics sequences, an Art Gallery with Production and Character Design Slideshows, 3 TV Spots, a Music Promo, and trailers for the rest of the X-Men films and Wolverine, Daredevil and Fantastic 4. Most of this content is recognisable from the original DVD releases, and is presented in SD format.


Notably missing from this release (so don’t throw those DVDs away just yet) is the Spider-man Easter-Egg. Back in 2001, no-one had Spider-man, and you could get away with the Easter-Egg on that first DVD release, but subsequently Columbia released the feature films, and I guess the trademark issues got a little contentious.

Disc 2

This looks like more of the 1.5 content, with a Brian Singer intro to the disc where he conducts the Fox Fanfare. The big extra here is the Evolution X Interactive Documentary, which has a total running time of 2 hours and 16 minutes. That doesn’t include the little jump to featurettes that you can access when the X image appears during playback, or separately from a sub menu. This is broken up into The Uncanny Suspects Featurette, the X-Factor featurette, the Production Documentary Scrapbook (hefty at over an hour), a Special Effects of the X-Men featurette, and Reflections of the X-Men featurette. Pop-ups include the Hugh Jackman read through and screentests, a fair few multi-angle featurettes, costume tests, and premiere footage. There are also several stills galleries to peruse as well. You also get a section chock full of TV Spots, Trailers, and Internet marketing, and the movie trailers are the only HD footage that you’ll find on this disc.

Conclusion: The X-Men

1998 was a key year in terms of comic book adaptations to the silver screen. Up to that point, such films were still riding the coattails of Superman: The Movie and more significantly its sequels. This was the era of the camp, and comic (as in humorous) superhero movie, visual hits of fantastic colour, and thunderous sound, but little of substance, and it had seemed as if Joel Schumacher’s Batman movies had finally knocked the final nail in the genre’s coffin. You wouldn’t believe that today of course, where the summer cineplexes are saturated with the stuff. In 1998, a quiet, middling-budget comic book movie was brought to the big screen, and it wholly reinvented the genre. Blade was the film, Marvel’s vampire superhero, and all of a sudden you had a dark, gritty, and stylish film, which didn’t pander to the audience, it had depth, it had intelligence to its script, and it played to adult audiences as well as younger fans. Blade was the crowbar that the comic book movie needed to crack open Hollywood. The X Men in 2000 was the first film to reap the rewards of that assault, and so a franchise was born...


The X Men is still my favourite of the lot, and yes it benefits from a smart, multi-layered script, a more realistic and dramatic take on the subject matter, and it has a message about intolerance of difference that not only feeds through the franchise, but is ever relevant to audiences who can assign whatever feelings of isolation to the film that are brought to mind. Sexuality, race, religion, and simple ideology always seem at times to split people into militant groups, and a minority invariably gets persecuted by the majority. That is so effortlessly mirrored in the X-Men’s tale of mutants and the fear they engender that the allegory is sure to evoke some feelings in viewers.

The original X-Men feature gets it most right in my mind, and that mostly because it was a proof of concept movie, one ‘last’ chance in a series of last chances to get the comic book movie concept to work. It’s not a mega-budget summer blockbuster, and as a result it feels a smaller, more intimate film. It’s a film about characters, about people, and about the journey that they go on, and in this first film, it’s really about the two most outcast of the mutants, Wolverine and Rogue, both running from their demons. They get caught up in a wider ideological conflict, the conflict between the mutants and humans, here embodied by Magneto’s espousal of homo-superior, versus Senator Robert Kelly’s mutant registration act, while Professor Xavier and his X-Men try and walk a middle line and maintain a balance. As we are constantly reminded in the film though, a war is coming, and we can see the seeds of that conflict planted here.


The film does benefit from its smaller scale though, with the special effects supporting character performances and not supplanting them, a smaller cast of characters, Magneto, Mystique, Toad and Sabertooth, Wolverine, Jean Grey, Cyclops, Storm, Rogue and Professor X, with barely a few character cameos to enrich the background of the world. And once again, it’s really a film that focuses on the emotional worlds of the characters, a film that examines their motivations and their fears, and it really does an excellent job in establishing people who truly believe what they are doing is right, not just black and white villains. You can sympathise with Magneto and Mystique, as well as Senator Kelly and of course the X-Men, as all of their fears and hopes are understandable.

Of course once the proof of concept was in, then the sky could be the limit for the sequel budgets, and some of that well defined character focus began to ebb in favour of the summer blockbuster spectacle, which is why The X-Men is my favourite of the trilogy, and still an astounding film.

10/10

Introduction: X-Men 2

X Men 2 picks up where the first film left off, with Wolverine heading north to Alkali Lake to explore his mysterious past. But while he is out of contact, relationships between mutants and humanity deteriorate further when a blue-skinned mutant makes an attempt on the life of the President. Following this, a military scientist named William Stryker convinces the President to order a military intervention on a known stronghold of the mutants, Charles Xavier’s academy. Professor X orders his X Men to investigate the attack on the President, to mitigate the harm it has caused. Storm and Jean Grey attempt to track down the would-be assassin, while Charles visits his old friend Magneto in his plastic prison. Wolverine returns just in time to be left babysitting the younger mutants in the mansion. Which is when Stryker’s forces attack. But Stryker has more intricate plans than just a little shock and awe, and with Professor X and Cerebro at the heart of his scheme, courtesy of a mind control serum; the war between Mutants and Mankind has truly been joined.

Picture: X-Men 2

X-Men 2 gets a 2.40:1 widescreen transfer at 1080p resolution. It’s a splendid transfer, with no issues that I could pick nits about. It’s a clear, colourful, and well presented recreation of the film. The image is clear and sharp throughout, skin tones are even, shadow detail is consistent, and black levels are strong. It’s also got an evenness and consistency of quality that exceeds that of the first film in this collection, and the special effects still stand the test of time today.

Sound: X-Men 2

You have the choice between DTS-HD MA 5.1 English, DD 5.1 English and Hungarian, and DTS 5.1 German and Spanish, with plenty of subtitles for the film, the commentaries, and the extras in these languages, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish and Icelandic. The sound design really does kick up a gear in the sequel, made instantly apparent by Nightcrawler’s entrance. This a robust, and bombastic audio track, expressing the film’s action sequences and music well, but keeping a decent balance with the dialogue, and effectively conveying the subtler moments as well.

Extras: X-Men 2

Once more with the animated menu screens, and once more with the two disc presentation.

This time the feature disc only really has the in-movie extra features to speak of, which are accessible via the colour buttons on your remote, or from the extras menu.

Both of the commentaries on this disc are repeated from the 2003 DVD release, the first is with director Bryan Singer and cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel, while the second features producers Lauren Shuler Donner and Ralph Winter with writers David Hayter, Dan Harris and Mike Dougherty. You also get the Bonusview interviews popping up (which on this disc lack subtitles), as well as the in-feature photo gallery. From the appearance of the footage in the Bonusview pop-ups, they look to be excerpted from the bonus footage on disc 2 anyway.

Otherwise you get those Marvel Universe trailers again.


Disc 2 takes everything that was on disc 2 of the DVD release, and puts it onto a BD 25, the History of the X Men, the Pre-Production, The Production, the Post-Production, and the Deleted Scenes, almost 3 hours of footage in total. It’s all in SD anyway, so you may as well put the DVD into the player if you have it instead, it will load faster.

However there is some HD material on this disc, the six image gallery slideshows, and the three trailers for the film have been upgraded to 1080p for this release.

Conclusion: X-Men 2

I think X-Men 2 is getting better with age. Certainly I enjoyed it more, watching it on Blu-ray now than I have at any time since I originally saw it in the cinema. It’s a fun, action, summer blockbuster, which also manages to develop its characters and tell a smart, thoughtful and engaging story. I guess the past few years of dull, vacuous films full of non-existent characters and mass destruction, rendered in CG eye candy have made me nostalgic for when the multiplex stock in trade could offer a little more than that.


X2 still has its issues, the screen love affair with Wolverine meaning that certain characters get relegated to second string, it’s a little overlong, the pacing isn’t quite right, and with the franchise achieving full summer blockbuster status, the character focus of the first film has to give way to those epic eye-candy special effects sequences that are the genre’s stock in trade. Thankfully it’s just a partial yielding, and character does still play a strong part in the sequel.

Thankfully the story is still smart and balanced, with the discrimination allegory still at the forefront of the tale of the impending war between mutants and humanity. I’m still disappointed that Toad and Sabertooth didn’t return for this film, which leaves Magneto’s contingent somewhat thin on the ground. The human side of this conflict gets greater focus in this sequel with the character of William Stryker and his hatred of mutants becoming a more martial and imminent threat in comparison to the first film’s Senator Kelly. That Stryker has a historical connection to Wolverine’s missing past adds dimension to the story. Also, the Nightcrawler character adds much heart to the film, with his conversations with Storm about the power of faith versus the power of rage. Alas this would be Nightcrawler’s only appearance in the franchise to date. This lack of subsidiary character continuity is one problem that continues into the next film, but an annoying aspect that raises its head in this film is the tendency for superhero movies to kill off the villain at the end. That hardly happens in the comic books, and by delivering a momentary visceral triumph at the end of a film, weakens the universe that you have to play with as storytellers. Of course Stryker would return in another way to the franchise, but that isn’t exactly the same thing.


Taken as a sequel to the original X-Men, and with no expectation of what would follow, X-Men 2 is a fun, entertaining summer blockbuster thrill ride which manages to blend character, story, action, and spectacle to entertaining effect. It’s fun to watch, and it nourishes the grey matter as well, and stays on the good side of overegging the superhero pudding, bigger than the first film to be truly epic, but still small enough to handle.

9/10

Introduction: X-Men: The Last Stand

It seems like all Magneto’s prognosticating was for nothing, as the world has found something of an uneasy balance between humans and mutants, and there’s even a mutant in the government, with Hank McCoy as the Secretary for Mutant Affairs. And while Cyclops and Logan may have their personal issues coming to terms with the loss of Jean Grey, the world seems to be heading in the right direction. Except someone only goes and creates a ‘cure’ for mutants. One quick injection and the Mutant X gene is switched off, and said mutant can once again join the ranks of humanity, finally made normal. For some mutants whose powers are hard to control, that’s an attractive prospect, but it isn’t long before the government are using the cure as a weapon against dissident elements such as Magneto’s Mutant brotherhood. It’s when Jean Grey returns, resurrected as the Phoenix, previously hidden powers now at her disposal, that Magneto finally has the mutant WMD to bring all out war against homo sapiens!

Picture: X-Men: The Last Stand

The 2.35:1 widescreen 1080p transfer is the best of all three, clear and sharp throughout with a strong, consistent filmic quality that impresses. There is a nice layer of film grain, while the print is stable and free from dirt, damage or flicker. The special effects too hit new heights, with only one or two obvious green screen moments serving to jar the suspension of disbelief. But then there’s Brett Ratner’s uninspired direction, as he opts for spectacle and visual excess, forgetting to counterpoint it with subtlety, character nuance, and dare I say it, acting.

Sound: X-Men: The Last Stand

It’s a step up in terms of the audio too, with me one speaker shy of properly appreciating the DTS-HD MA 6.1 Surround English track. You also have a DD 5.1 EX English track, DTS 5.1 German and Spanish, and DD 5.1 Hungarian, with subtitles in those languages, and in Danish, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic. It’s a loud and emphatic surround track that pushes the boat out in terms of action and impact. Once again though, the result is tainted with un-subtlety, with overblown audio for the mutant power effects, a bombastic music score (with in some scenes an annoying rhythmic high pitched squeak that makes me think the disc is unbalanced in my player), and dialogue that you’d much rather mute.

Extras: X-Men: The Last Stand

Once again we get two discs worth here, and although I haven’t seen the Last Stand DVD, I have no reason to doubt that similarly to the first two films, the third film release also simply repeats the DVD content on its Blu-rays.

We have animated menus!

Disc 1 is once more loaded with in-movie content, which you can access from the main menu, or from within the film using the colour buttons on your remote, although the in movie videos once more require Bonusview compatible players.

You have two commentaries here, the director and writer commentary featuring Brett Ratner, Simon Kinberg, and Zak Penn, and the producer commentary with Avi Arad, Lauren Shuler Donner, and Ralph Winter.

The Bonusview pops up little interview PIP snippets during playback, and these too are subtitled if you need them. I guess X2 is the odd one out in that regard.

You also get a pop-up photo gallery which you can watch during the film’s playback.

Outside the film, you’ll also find the Deleted Scenes, 24 of them running to just under 20 minutes in total. Given the number of alternate scenes, including three endings, it’s obvious that the filmmakers didn’t even know what film they were making until it was released.


Finally there are the Marvel Universe trailers, X Men Origins Wolverine, X-Men, X2, Daredevil, and The Fantastic Four.

There’s a whole second disc of extras here, ironically the most extra content of all three features, and unsurprisingly, I wasn’t inclined to watch much of it.

The following featurettes are in SD.

Brett Ratner’s Production Diary – 41 mins
X-Men Evolution of a Trilogy – 45 mins
X3: The Excitement Continues – 21 mins
Generation X: Comic Book History – 1hr 9 mins
Fox Movie Channel Presents: Life After Film School – 26 mins
Fox Movie Channel Presents: Casting Session – 10 mins

The Anatomy of a Scene: Golden Gate Bridge featurette lasts 12 minutes and is in HD.

X Men Up Close offers a movie and comic book look at the characters, heralding each character with an SD show reel lasting a few seconds, before offering text and image X-Cyclopaedia entries in HD with comic book art, and their comic book biographies.

By the time I got around to the Vignettes, Blogs, Previz Animatics, Galleries (x2), and Trailers (x3), I had lost the will to navigate through the disc noting runtimes, and just took it on faith that these mini-featurettes were indeed present and correct.

Conclusion: X-Men: The Last Stand

The spoof movie is big business in Hollywood. A movie hits it big in the box office and a year or so later a parody shows up. Ever since Airplane, filmmakers have been poking fun at their favourite genres and the latest big thing. Right now on my local supermarket shelves are Blu-rays for The Starving Games, and I remember when 300 came out, Meet the Spartans wasn’t too far behind it. You’d think with that kind of track record, that films like X-Men would get spoofed too, but I don’t recall such a film ever being made. That’s because Brett Ratner made an X-Men parody all by himself, and got it released as part of the franchise!

X-Men: The Last Stand is abysmal. Brett Ratner took a thoughtful, inventive, and multi-layered story and turned it into popcorn fodder, lowbrow mind-numbing pap. The X-Men was all about the allegory, mutants standing in for alienation of whatever stripe that the comic book readers might associate with it. The first two films under the aegis of Brian Singer delivered that with subtlety and a degree of realism, made all the more effective as he focused on character and story. Brett Ratner just wants big bangs on screen, and the message is simplified, processed, turned into a Happy Meal, ground up, liquidised and blended, into which a baseball bat is dipped, and he then goes and repeatedly strikes you in the face with it, screaming almost incoherently, “Here’s the message, here’s the message!” The minute you hear Mystique spout, “I don’t answer to my slave name” you’ll have to repress an urge to switch this disc off, and that urge only intensifies as the film progresses towards its inevitably pathetic conclusion.


The writing is dire, all semblance of character depth has been ditched for shallow cliché, the dialogue makes the teeth itch, whether it’s the President’s inevitable ‘God help us now,” or Xavier’s “I don’t have to explain myself to the likes of you,” it seems that all that’s missing is an air traffic controller lamenting that it’s the wrong day to quit amphetamines. The ingredients for what could be a strong, addition to franchise are there, the mutant cure, the Phoenix saga, but it takes less than ten minutes to realise that the film has just lost 100 points in its IQ... And then Vinnie Jones appears!

X-Men: The Last Stand is the kind of film that you see in a trilogy collection, and then wish that you could buy a twin pack of the first two movies instead. It’s the Robocop 3 of the franchise. Given that I found this trilogy in a bargain bucket for £6.50, and the inclusion of the third film still makes me feel cheated, that’s really saying something.

2/10

Summary

Two out of three isn’t bad. Realistically, the price I paid for this collection more than makes the upgrade to HD worthwhile, even if I have no intention of ever watching The Last Stand again. I will always wonder how the third film would have turned out had Brian Singer remained in the director’s seat, but continuity of director is no guarantee of excellence, as the Spider-man movies proved. And Singer did leave to make Superman Returns, which while less of a turkey than X-Men 3, is a turkey nevertheless. But the first two features are still two of the best superhero films ever made, and stand the test of time surprisingly well over ten years down the line. When it comes to the extra features, this set is really a quick cash-in, simply transferring the original DVD content to Blu-ray and adding some snazzy HD menus, and the odd HD trailer where possible. But the films themselves look and sound fantastic, making this well worth the double dip.