The makers of the movie of X-Men, based on the bestselling Marvel comic-book series, faced the proprietory expectations of a fanatical fandom; Internet debate among X-philes began as soon as the film was announced. Who would play whom? And would the film betray its source? Comic-books, despite the visual element of the medium, are not necessarily any easier to adapt to film than a novel – Superman and Batman weren’t badly done by, but look at the messy Spawn, the incoherent Tank Girl or Sylvester Stallone’s needless meddlings with Judge Dredd.
Perhaps that’s why Bryan Singer, who made his name with the intricately compelling thriller The Usual Suspects, was chosen to direct and co-write X-Men. It seems to have paid off, making the movie a huge box-office success, and, without short-changing us on the action or the eye-popping sets and effects, Singer has come up with a movie that has a great deal more complexity than your usual comic-book blockbuster.
Part of that has to do with the premises of the original X-Men series, which played with character dynamics in a way usually foreign to the genre of shazzaaam!s and superheroes with powers in inverse proportion to their conversational skills. The very concept of X-Men, too, offers a wider range of possibilities for exploration than most action comics.
The X-Men are mutants, creatures who are a step further along the evolutionary line than the rest of humanity. How they got like that we don’t know – this is not a simple case of being bitten by a radioactive spider or being born on a different planet. The idea seems to be that humanity in general will get there eventually, that we all contain the potential to become supermen of this kind (the movie’s tagline is “Join the evolution”). The catch, though, is that the mysteriously acquired powers of these mutants are not chosen or always controllable – young Rogue (Anna Paquin), for instance, has the misfortune of killing any ordinary person she touches with her naked hands, which is something of a drawback when it comes to interpersonal relations.
The other catch is that the rest of humanity, as yet unevolved to this higher plane, is rather suspicious of mutants. Singer uses this to inject a moral dimension into the movie: the opening sequence depicts Nazis herding Jews off to the camps, and then we fast-forward to a near-future in which a McCarthy-like senator is inveighing against these strangers in our midst, alluding to a list of known mutants and calling for registration of all such oddities. The parallels with the way humankind has often dealt with “the other” are obvious.
But the mutants are fighting back, in a way familiar to anyone who can spot the differences between the philosophies of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, or between that of the Freedom Charter and black consciousness. One lot is trying to assimilate and be of use to the world in general; another lot is defined by its oppositional position and sense of exclusion.
Ignore the fact that, as one commentator aptly noted, the emergence of a mutant superpower strain nowadays would turn its bearers into superstars rather than outcasts. The friction between two camps of mutants is the engine that generates the movie’s conflict of good and evil and thus its thrills. The goodies are led by Patrick Stewart (telepathic powers) and the baddies by Ian McKellen (mental control of all metals), and the face-off between these two elder statesmen of British stage and screen has a whiff of the Shakespearean about it.
For the rest, there is a marvellous cast of mutants: Wolverine (Australian Hugh Jackman; remember Paperback Hero?), has an adamantium – that’s a metal – frame and pop-out claws; Storm (Halle Berry) conjures nasty weather as a weapon; Mystique (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) can change appearance at will; and Toad (Ray Park) has a tongue like a sticky lasso. Director Singer expertly manipulates the interactions between these characters, from a soupçon of sexual tension to the hand-to-hand (or tongue-to-lightning-bolt) combat. Wolverine and Rogue are richer personae for the self-doubt and lack of self-knowledge they have to deal with. Oh yes, and the action sequences are great.
As The Usual Suspects demonstrated, Singer has a knack for plot convolutions, so X-Men has more narrative than most such movies, making it more than a string of fights and explosions. He also leaves enough strands untied and mysteries unsolved to leave us gasping for more. Which we, no doubt, will get.