Got nothing better to do, so I might as well rant on a little about...
X-Men 2
Best. Superhero film. Ever.
(and contender for my favourite film of all time)
There's two reasons why this is. The first is pretty inane... and that is that whenever Hollywood comes to make a comic book character they're desperate to widen the appeal beyond the nerds and fanboys, and so they always concentrate "on really, you know, getting in touch with the inner drives of the character, what makes him tick, you know... because I feel that really he's a complex character that speaks to us all on many levels about our own problems". Or some **** like that. Bull****, next time I turn green and ten foot tall and run around going "HULK SMASH!" and swatting around tanks like they were made of polystyrene... THEN he'll speak to my inner drives. Spiderman, Hulk, Daredevil, X-Men... they were all movies exploring the origins of the characters and searching for some sort of extra layers. That's great, really it is... Spiderman in particular is a great movie, and The Hulk (though much maligned) is fantastic and very stylish right until the end, where the filmmakers ran into the same problem Stan Lee always had with the Hulk - finding an appropriate nemesis for somebody who is essentially brainless but indestructible.
X-Men 2 throws that whole "touch their inner drives" crap out the window. He shoots lasers from his eyes! ZAAAPPPP! He has claws! SNIKT! He blows things up! KABOOOM! It's the first comic book movie to actually feel like a comic book, it's all action from the opening scene through to the end. The complexity is there, the plot twists and turns like a slippery snake, and it certainly doesn't treat the audience like fools - you've got to be on your toes to follow the movie because it DOES move so fast, and change so much. So from a pure action-adventure enjoyment point of view, X-Men 2 is hard to top.
But there's a second reason why it's good. A more serious reason. X-Men 2 was made around and after the World Trade Center attack, when the whole of Hollywood was running scared from any sort of controversial topic, and even the future of action films themselves was debated. Everyone was rallying to President Bush's line, adn Hollywood was no exception. Movies already made, like The Sum Of All Fears (a perfectly good spy/action/thriller filmed before 9-11 but with a plot line of a nuclear attack by terrorists on the mainland USA) were quietly dropped from their release schedules and appeared on our screens over a year later. Other movies in production, like Spiderman, made changes to their scripts to follow the new line of thinking (in Spiderman's case this was particularly poignant, as the original ending had been filmed already, actually ON the WTC) and in the reshot finale the people of New York make a conscpicuous appearance to support Spiderman and help him defeat the Green Goblin "You take on one of us, you take on us all!" shouts one of the common Joes of NYC, and he might as well have wrapped himself in the flag and saluted as he said it.
Compare to X-Men 2. First of all, in X-Men 1, nobody dies. Wait, I lied... the bad guys ACCIDENTALLY kill one person. X-Men 2 the bodycount is enormous - the gloves really come off for the sequel. But more importantly. X-Men 2 is a movie written and filmed in the months AFTER 9-11... who are the bad guys? THE AMERICAN MILITARY! A Hollywood movie shows the good guys (the X-Men) actually teaming up with the
terrorists from the first film (Mageneto and co) to TAKE ON THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT! Wow. Think about it. X-Men 2 doesn't just take a different tack to most Hollywood blockbusters at the time - it stands alone in facing the exact opposite way. The American President is made to look weak, the American military is made to look corrupt and downright evil... and all the while the good guys stand alongside the bad guys in hacking down, blowing up, zapping through dozens of US soldiers.
President Bush said, in the wake of 9-11, that you were either for the US, or you were against it. X-Men 2 sticks a big two fingers up at that simplistic bivalent view of the world. There's shades of grey all around, factions team up and divide from each other according to their own plans and motives, people lie, change teams, and the whole thing is a total condemnation of US foreign policy in the wake of the 9-11 attacks.
And sometimes it feels like I'm the only person who noticed all this.
I wonder if in ten years time X-Men 2 will be getting deconstructed piece by piece in media and film studies lectures, essays and exam questions set about it's relevance? I doubt it, because it's a superhero movie, and nobody takes them seriously. Which in the case of X-Men 2 is a real shame.