The first big blockbuster movie of the summer is already upon us, and its subject is so timely it’s almost scary. Come to think of it, it is scary.
The movie is X2, the sequel to the enormously popular X-Men movie of some summers ago, and what it offers us is nothing less than a full-blown popcorn epic about the Clash of Civilizations.
It’s not the Clash of Civilizations you’re probably thinking of, but it may as well be.
The events depicted in X2 don’t actually touch upon the much-debated Great Struggle between the Arab-Muslim world and the West, at least not specifically. The civilizations butting heads in the movie are humans (homo sapiens) and mutants (homo supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, or something like that), but director Bryan Singer’s a smart enough cookie to know a good allusion when he sees one.
The X-movies take place in an alternate reality where mutants may as well be Muslims. We’re told that a wave of mutant-generated terrorism has increased human fear and suspicion to the point where people are bandying about the possibility of a Mutant Registration Act. (Sound familiar?) There’s even talk of declaring a State of Emergency where every mutant in the country would be rounded up and arrested. The movie sets the stage by opening with nothing less than a full-fledged attack on the President in the Oval Office by a fanged, devil-tailed mutant intruder. His mission is both suicidal and political in nature: “Mutant Freedom Now” is the message inscribed on the assassin’s dagger.
The satanic-looking intruder turns out to have the disposition of an angel, though, which tells us a lot about the movie’s real agenda. Despite what we hear, it’s virtually impossible to make a good old-fashioned reactionary movie in Hollywood, even in the post- Sept. 11 era, and X2 doesn’t rock that boat. The mutants in X2 may be a complicated and sometimes unpleasant lot, but the movie’s sympathies lie squarely with them, not with the humans who are also the film’s primary villains. The mutants in X2 are more human than the humans, truth be told, and the chief human bad guy is the neo-con conspiracist love child of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
X2 is smart enough to exploit the paranoia that’s become the defining emotion of the post-Sept. 11 world, but the message here is ultimately one of peace, love and understanding (and when was the last time you connected those words with a summer action movie?). The movie comes off as mostly sound and fury, but the subtext is a warm-fuzzy plea for cross-cultural understanding. Then there’s the 2-hour-15-minute running time, adding physical weight to the argument that maybe this really is a movie that should be taken seriously, even as it entertains the hell out of us.
In any event, none of this diminishes the fact that X2 is a kick-ass action-fantasy and, in some ways, a pretty remarkable movie in its own right. The story is richer and more intricate than in the original X-Men (itself a pretty fair ride), and the characters are fleshed out in ways that make them even more intriguing. On the surface, Singer’s film has all the black/white, good/evil dichotomies necessary to fuel a good action movie, but the movie also reveals all sorts of subtleties and ambiguities that make things even more interesting.
In X2, Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and his team of super-powered mutants find themselves in the middle of a sinister plot hatched by various forces bent on jump-starting an all-out war between humans and mutants. In a last ditch effort to avert total global destruction, the X-Men team up with their old nemesis, the uber-mutant Magneto (Ian McKellen), and things only get more interesting from there. The movie is filled with uneasy alliances, conflicted heroes who do bad things, and conflicted villains who do good things. It’s quite a ride: Contradictory agendas blow up in more than one face, dangerous secrets are revealed, and a main character or two bite the dust.
The movie’s first half ranks right up there with The Road Warrior and the Terminator movies as genre-defining state-of-the-art stuff. Having seen the original X-Men is advisable but not crucial, as the new movie brings us up to speed in due course on everything we need to know. We’re made familiar with the players, their peccadilloes, political and romantic leanings, and with the various mutants’ strange powers — mostly a variation on the theme of unnatural ways of manipulating nature (fire, ice, wind, electro-magnetism, etc.). We’re updated on some of the loose ends from the first film, such as the shadowy origins of the mutant Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) and, even more critically, we see that his amazing, twin-peak pompadour is still in the gravity defying business.
X2 gives us all the basic building blocks that we require in a movie like this, but in several significant ways, this is not your grandfather’s action flick. The pace sometimes verges on the stately, the music is operatic as often as it is speed metal, and there’s a notable interest in arresting images, characters and details. The acting is also a half-notch above what we’d normally expect in a project like this, particularly the performances of Jackman and McKellen. It’s marvelous fun just watching McKellen’s Magneto as he floats through the air with the greatest of ease, folding and arranging the molecules of the very air around him with the grace and authority of a master conductor.
Singer has the eye of an artist, and he fills his popcorn movie with images that might have been mere sensationalist pap under the stewardship of a lesser director, or one more interested in milking the material’s potential for camp. An extended shot of a room full of frozen bodies becomes something like poetry, as does a swat team’s nocturnal invasion of the X-Men’s lair, or a wall of ice that suddenly materializes to separate a mutant from his pursuers. Some of the images are bizarre as well as lyrical, such as an essentially naked Rebecca Romijn-Stamos (pure poetry herself) shifting shapes as she attempts to seduce Wolverine. Some of the visuals manage to be both beautiful and disturbing, none more so than the silent image of liquid metal bleeding from the eyes, nose and mouth of a dying mutant.
Singer alternates the slower, more thoughtful stuff with enough bombast to keep everybody awake and happy. It’s all nearly too much, in fact, so that by the 100-minute mark, we’re almost exhausted and overwhelmed when the movie begins its final assault of life-and-death battles, disasters, illusions and revelations. The film’s last half-hour forgoes the fancy stuff for sheer forward momentum, some of which may be a bit much for the wee kiddies. (Parental units take note: The movie’s action sequences can be fairly intense, with some of the slicing and dicing done by Wolverines’ talons being particularly nasty.)
The level of filmmaking is high enough that Singer’s even able to get away with some unabashed mixing of metaphors. Ultimately, his mutants stop being Muslims and come to signify The Other, in whatever form that may happen to take at any given moment. At one point, the mutants take on an African-American cast when their self-created superhero monikers are referred to as their “real” names, the clear implication being that their given names (John, Eric, whatever) are slave names. Even more significantly, there’s the young boy who eventually reveals to his parents that he’s a mutant, in a priceless scene that plays exactly like a gay kid coming out to his parents. “We still love you,” says Mom with a hesitant smile, adding, “But have you tried … not being a mutant?”
As in the last X-Men film, the narrative gets just a touch convoluted, and the special effects sometimes look a little cheesy (in a very expensive way, of course), but basically the movie’s a winner. Summer’s off to a rousing start with X2, a comic-book movie that works just fine for grown-ups, and a tale almost as epic and fantastical as the one history is dealing us in real life right now.
Film Critic Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lgoldenb@tampabay.rr.com or 813-248-8888 ext. 157.
This article appears in Apr 30 – May 6, 2003.
