X2: X-Men United nailed the X-formula better than any other X-movie

20th Century Fox has produced X-Men film for almost two decades with a simple formula. Every movie featured two main plotlines: one which was more grandiose and blockbuster-friendly (and usually a comicbook adaptation), the second one which provided a personal emotional arc to a particular character. Sometimes they intersected in serviceable ways: The first film’s personal arc belongs to the runaway Rogue (Anna Paquin), who is horrified by her mutant powers, while Magneto (Ian McKellen), representing the other end of the spectrum, is trying to turn world leaders into mutants.

The plots of the two stories often do not mesh: X-Men The Last Stand, director Brett Ratner and writers Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn seemingly couldn’t decide whether to focus on Magneto, Jean Grey, Rogue, or Wolverine. The film is so bloated that its mega-arc about a bittersweet “mutant cure” falls flat, and none of the cast members get space to breathe.

It doesn’t help that Wolverine evolved from major mutant player to the X-brand’s central mascot as of 2000’s X-Men, so even movies where he isn’t the central character, like Days of Future PastThey are forced to work in his shadow. But one film makes the standard X-formula work, not only by combining the emotional arc with the event arc, but by making fitting use of Wolverine’s leading-man status. 2003’s X2It combines comic book stories as a way to examine the mutant battle. The previous film hinted only at this, but many later films failed to deliver on it.

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Original 2000 X-MenThe strength of the cast is what makes this film work. Everyone is likable, especially Hugh Jackman, but Ian McKellan’s haunted gaze really seals the deal. On the other hand, it’s a pretty bland direction. It’s one of the reasons why, two years later, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man X-Men2003’s The Incredible Hulk is still a nostalgic favourite: it seems to be curious about its hero and the world he lives in. 2003’s X2It is much more powerful, thanks to its comic book backbones. The horrifying God loves man, but he kills him arc, and Wolverine’s traumatic history with the Weapon X program.

Chris Claremont was the author of the entire series. God loves man, but he kills him is about a fire-and-brimstone minister who attains troubling celebrity status by enabling the public’s rampant anti-mutant hysteria, with the U.S. government’s tacit blessing. William Stryker is a minister who wants to kill all mutants. He has been implicated in murdering other mutant children and his own. It’s up to the X-Men and Magneto, teaming up as they so often do, to reveal Stryker’s genocide plan before he can kick it off.

A personal Story X2The plot revolves around the workings of Weapon X. This was a government-sponsored secret program which created assassins such as Wolverine and Sabretooth. The project’s experiments famously added the adamantium to Wolverine’s skeleton, replacing his rad bone claws with rad metal claws. There is no single Weapon X storyline in the comics, as it’s constantly evolved over the last 50 years, but the X2 movie version lends Wolverine an efficient superhero origin story and gives him the sympathy he needs to subsist as both X-Men’s most notable character and its most notable asshole.

Bryan Singer, who later disappeared from Hollywood due to a number of allegations of sexual assault and misconduct, and his writers reworked the stories when they merged them: William Stryker was no longer a pastor but a scientist at Weapon X. Brian Cox portrays him in a way that is rooted in cruel sovereignty. Jean Grey’s (Famke Jenssen) main role is to help set things up. The Last Stand’s eventual lackluster “Dark Phoenix” adaptation, but this burgeoning plot point doesn’t make a mess of things. And instead of having committed filicide, Stryker’s mutant son is left alive as a lobotomized tool that Stryker uses to keep mutants in check.

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The Stryker plot and the Wolverine plot mainly work in concert because they’re both about the same thing at their core: villains who see mutants as less than human. Nearly every X-Men piece of media reflects the shifting ways mankind perceives mutants. This gives X-stories an opportunity to explore how people treat those who are perceived as outsiders or minorities. These films do not differ. That theme — which shifts from era to era, with mutants standing in for everything from those with AIDS to LBGTQ folk to immigrants — has kept the X-Men relevant since their creation in the 1960s.

Even the best X-Men movies often miss this idea. It’s the curse of having a blockbuster about a multitude of people with cool nicknames and flashy powers. Inevitably, the scale will tip in favor of spectacle, leaving the characters’ indefinite struggle for recognition and equality as a kind of “Oh yeah, I guess that’s still going on, huh?” while the battle royale continues. The fight for civil rights is the X-Men’s most human story, but it’s mostly led to samey action sequences in The Last Stand, Days of Future PastThen, Dark Phoenix — cold sequences of military dudes yelling “Go! Go! Go!” as they attack mutants while political leaders look uncomfortable.

X2But translates the fight for equality in a surprising painful way. Stryker’s initial attack on the X-Men’s manor is a tyrannical display of force, and the way he looms over his tragic son and sneers at Wolverine while espousing his beliefs makes him easily the most hateable baddie in the X-Men franchise. By filtering the theme of mankind’s distrust of mutants through this particular dynamic character, X2The imbalance that many X-Men movies face is when they have to also play by the requirements of superhero-movie.

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Stryker’s presence also helps the film to feel smaller, since the mutants can react more humanly when they have a human adversary. Magneto is given a savage persona when faced with a threat that will threaten them all. Nightcrawler is introduced in X2’s opening sequence with an impressive special-effects-heavy battle, but revealed to be a quiet, religiously devout character, seems to symbolize this change of finding a relatable heart within the blockbuster extravaganza.

Having Wolverine — the easiest character for the X-Men films to use, but the hardest to master — as the physical conduit for painful exploitation of mutants gives the movie much of its ultimate singularity among the long-running series. Wolverine’s trajectory in the X-films is typically that he’s a jerk who doesn’t really want to help anyone else, until he does. That dynamic gets replayed throughout the franchise (it’s basically his whole arc in the first film) and even from scene to scene in some of the movies, and it’s often a way to insert some levity through grumbling quips.

Wolverine has a past that is not only tortured, but also wounded. The character is a mixture of a screamer, an animalistic force, and a little boy who has been lost forever. His extended life will make him bear the weight of the nightmare he created for a longer time.

Wolverine’s utter despair in the face of his tormentors makes his very personal struggle feel universally deadly, as pain is the intended goal of all the bigots who wish to see mutants gone. Stryker, as both the representative of that ideology and its perpetrator, refines the overall storyline to a bitter, evil man. “One day, someone will finish what I’ve started!” Stryker threatens Wolverine in the finale, a promise that allows the film to end without an improbably tidy resolution to the war against mutants.

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In the last 20 years, a handful of X-films has outdone themselves X2 In terms of one or more load-bearing threads. Matthew Vaughn assembled this piece with style and aplomb. X-Men First Class’s story about the formation of the X-Men works well mainly because its director actually seems interested in them as a cast of characters rather than a bunch of people to bounce off Wolverine. And Logan delivers the emotional arc of its titular character with compelling poignancy because there’s really no other choice — every aspect of the film revolves around him in some way.

No film to date has been able to capture the larger mutant conflict as well as its effect on a single character. X2 did. It isn’t a perfect film; director Bryan Singer mostly relies on the strength of the casting and the material. Except for some inspired sequences, his formulaic directing style doesn’t do the story any favors. He was already on his third franchise film when he finished. X-Men: ApocalypseThe comic book derivatives ruined any hopes of a personal tale. X2 is an outlier in its franchise and in Singer’s filmography — a rare example of two sides of a story finding peaceful cohabitation instead of strangled partnership.