X2 (2003) (1 Viewer)

Does anyone know if Storm will actually fly in the movie or are they saving that for the next sequel as well?

[Dome Vongvises]

The version of Rogue that's in comics back in the 90's and now. That one.....just scares me.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Continuing my rewatch of various movies in the Fox/X-Men universe following X-Men Origins: Wolverine last night and the first X-Men earlier tonight.

There's an argument to be made that this was the high watermark of the franchise under Fox, and it's the clear standout among the first trilogy. X-Men Origins: Wolverine extrapolates out heavily from this movie to craft the backstory between Logan and Stryker. Danny Huston did a great job as the younger Stryker, but there's something distinctive about Brian Cox that makes him a particularly great villain.

At this point in the franchise, the inconsistencies were mostly minor; the big ones were still yet to come.

And Ian McKellen is so fucking badass. I want to BE Magneto after seeing this movie. Give this guy the damn Oscar for this performance, it really is that good.

He was great in the first movie, but he's even better here.

I really like how they kept Nightcrawler true to his comic roots in terms of flesh color, his origin and religious conviction. However, I wish that they would have included his trademark funky burning brimstone sulfur smell when he transports. Folks that read the comic know that when Nightcrawler transports you better have a gas mask.

Over two decades later, and the teleporting effect still really holds up. And the sound effect when he pops from one place to the other is just perfect, exactly what I imagined in my head as a kid.

You get thrown right into the action - the opening sequence has to be seen to be believed - & Wolverine gets to cut loose - big time.

One of the things I really appreciated with the action sequences in this movie is the way they build and ease. I think a big reason so many action movies are so boring nowadays is because they make everything go at a 10 the entire way through, and after a while that becomes monotonous. Here, there are breaks in the action, changes in tempo, that keep the scenes lively and interesting.

Mystique was even wickeder in this film than the last- just as i was surprised that Nightcrawler didn't get more to do, i was really surprised how much Mystique was involved in.
and it was a kick to see RR-S out of her make-up!

One of the big improvements in this movie over the first one is that Mystique is allowed to be a lot more playful. She feels like a real character instead of just a plot device here.

The brief bit with Colossus steeling up was a joy to behold.
although i didn't hear a russian accent...pity.

Colossus is a character that I feel like only the Deadpool movies, oddly enough, got right.

loved the look on bobbys face as they are forced to leave his parents house...very nice subtle job. the disappointment on his face told us all we needed to know without a wordy dialouge exchange. a beautifully concise character moment.

One of the most impactful parts of that beat is that when he looks through the upstairs window at his brother, their parents are standing behind him, one cohesive unit. Bobby's brother swatted his own family, and his parents still sided with the brother over the mutant son.

Halle Berry was better this time around, btu I wish Cyclops had more to do. Marsden has been my favorite so far(My least fav character from the book)

Berry's performance here was a huge improvement over the first movie. Still well short of what the character could be, but she was just a whole lot more comfortable in the role. Cyclops was underutilized in both movies, but I felt like Marsden got more moments to shine in the first one than this one.

Did all you guys know Pyro was gonna go all Dark Side and everything? Cuz I didn't.

One of the things this movie does especially well is show how characters' worldviews shape their actions. Pyro's reaction to the police surrounding Bobby's house made it inevitable that he was going to be Team Magneto sooner or later.

There were a few Christian reviewers who had words for the first film because they felt it was a "gay agenda" film because of Bryan Singer and McKellen (though the original X-Men premise was a racial allagory).

Bryan Singer definitely went with a mutants as an allegory for homosexuals in his X-Men movies, particularly clear here when Bobby "comes out" to his parents and his mother asks him if he's tried just not being a mutant. But the specificity somehow makes it more universal. A lot of the demagoguery from the politicians and on the news channels that felt a bit too heavy handed at the time now feel depressingly prescient.

Just saw it, but something's bugging me. Why did Magneto rearrange the tiles of cerebro 2? I don't remember Prof. X having to rearrange any tiles when he wanted to focus on mutants instead of humans at the beginning of the movie.

The idea was to visually represent how Magneto was subverting Stryker's plan for his own agenda, but that beat has never worked for me, nor the missing panels with the vents in Cerebro 2. I've always imagined the sphere as being part satellite dish, part isolation chamber. And neither of those works if there's a bunch of

In "X-Men" Logan (Wolverine) was able to smell the difference between Storm and Mystique. He stabbed her with his claws without hesitation. However, when she climbs in the tent with him, he cannot tell the difference?

I'm fairly confident that he wasn't thinking with his big head in that particular moment.

I thought one of the most brilliant parts (sorry if this has been discussed already), was how the writers were able to pull off making Magneto/Mystique protagonists for part of the story, but leave them intact to be antagonists in the third story.

This is the most crucial part of the film's success, in my book. Most of these movies have a clear binary, with two opposing groups. This one has three groups with very distinct agendas, and alliances shift as those agendas collide with events on the ground. Stryker is ahead of both Xavier and Magneto for most of the movie. And while Magneto's agenda and Xavier's agenda are at odds, Magneto doesn't hate the X-Men and doesn't want to see any mutants hurt unnecessarily.

How powerful is Jean's telekinesis supposed to be? That's one thign I never got ahold of in either movie, jsut how how poewrful it was. The 1.5 DVD insert says she can lift tanks, but in 2 she has a hard time knocking a missile off course or lifting the Blackhawk.

One of the things I've never been clear on is if Singer had always intended to introduce the idea of Xavier limiting Jean with a mental block, or if that idea was borrowed from the comics by the creatives who came after him.

Pyro wasn't the only recast. Jubilee and Kitty were replaced too.

This is the one clear discrepancy between this film and the first film. The two Jubilees basically have the same style, but there is no effort to present Pyro and Kitty as the same kids from the first movie. Of the three Kitty Prydes in the first three movie, Katie Stuart here looks the most like the character in my head. Strangely, both Stuart and Kea Wong (the new Jubilee) are credited in the main cast despite having very little screentime.

To back up what Holadem said (and that line was the best line in the film - I pointedly remember some snide X-Men review where they said if Mystique could be anyone, why wasn't she R.R.-S. and a swimsuit model...here's the answer), I started X-Men comics in the mid-80's. During the height of the Mutant paranoia storylines that Claremont was crafting. Looking back at how important comics, X-Men in particular, were to me I can see where some of my current thought patterns might have been shaped. That was a strong underlying theme - fighting to be who you are. Fighting for that most basic of needs.

The usual civil rights parallel is that Xavier is MLK, working with the system and practicing nonviolence and civil disobedience, while Magneto is Malcolm X, uncompromising and radical with an emphasis on empowerment over conciliation. And that dynamic is particularly effective here.

Anna is almost 21 years old now (will be on July 24th according to IMDB).

Going from the first movie to this one, that was one the biggest changes I noticed. In the first movie, Paquin is built like a teenager. In this movie, she's built like a woman. Even though she's still very young and fresh faced here, the character reads as older than she did in the first movie.

Colossus and the kids escaped. Clearly there was an escape plan prepared, as the kids knew where they were going and what they were supposed to do. So I'd assume they escaped, laid low for a week or so until the X-men came and got htem, then returned to the school.

Aside from Xavier and Cyclops at Magneto's prison, Stryker's goons were only able to kidnap six students from the school. So between the established (and clearly practiced) escape plan and Logan's ferocious defense of the school, things went about as well for the X-Men as they could in a situation like that. Logan was exactly the right person to babysit that night.

Oddly enough, I managed to avoid enough spoilers that the death of Jean Grey caught me totally by surprise at the end (I have no knowledge of these characters/plots beyond the movies)

Looking back, it's still a hugely ballsy move to kill off your female lead, and the team member (aside from Wolverine) who has had the most screen time and character development.

Note that Stryker wanted Xavier to "cure" his son, and that when Stryker got his son back, he had at least a labotomy performed on him....Same thing happened to gay folks as few as 30 years ago. Psychologists often did "reparative therapy" (which Dr Laura still advocates), and now, what usually happens is, instead, the parents are brought in to discuss how they have to learn to accept their child's homosexuality, rather than having the homosexuality "cured."...You cannot cure something that isn't a disease, which is similar to something Xavier says to Stryker.

While the mutant rights movement in these movies is clearly meant to parallel the gay rights movement, there are also instances where the parallels are specifically pointing to the HIV crisis. In the first movie, when it's said that parents don't want their kids going to school with mutants, I immediately thought of Ryan White.

Gay people, like mutants, can be "invisible" within the larger community (Barring the most obvious queens and bull dykes). African-Americans do not have this ability, (outside of Douglas Sirk's film Imitation of Life).

That's one of the interesting things about the allegorical parallels offered by the mutant concept, since there is a very clear divide within the mutant community between those who can "pass" as human and those (like Nightcrawler) who cannot. That shapes both the persecution they experience and their reaction to it.

Magneto's idea of making all the powerful people "turn mutant" is just like the idea that makes vampire lore so appealing to gay and lesbian audiences: the ability (fantasy) to take someone and "make them what you are."

This gets to a point that I meant to make in the thread for the first movie, but forgot to: I appreciated that Magneto's plan wasn't just evil for evil's sake. What he was planning made logical sense. He just didn't have all of the information that the X-Men had, which is that his conversion treatment would ultimately be lethal. But it's also a fun flip on the whole But I'm a Cheerleader dynamic, with the mutants trying to turn humans mutant instead of the humans trying to turn mutants human (eg. the next movie).

A special school for mutants that is for "talented kids." This has been a topic of discussion within the gay community for a long time: high schools for gay teens who face violence and prejudice (often supported by faculty) in "normal" schools. Hence, there is the Harvey Milk school. (Don't much like the idea of segregation, as it didn't work, to the least for African-Americans, but it is relevant to a school set up specifically for "gifted" teens.

This was also a point of disagreement between MLK and Malcolm X, with the former insistent on integration and the latter far more skeptical about it being possible or even desirable. But there are practical implications to mainstreaming mutants that don't exist with black kids or gay kids. Until they get control of their powers, mutants are dangerous, and it makes sense to educate them in a safe and secure environment until they have control over what they can do.

Mutant registration is much like the arguments that occured when HIV was first being detected, and even now, there are people who think one should not be able to be HIV positive without it being registered with the CDC.

This is also a clear Holocaust parallel, with the Jews having to register with the Nazi regime as Jews before being rounded up into ghettos or shipped off to concentration camps for work and/or execution.

 

[Jake Lipson]

Bryan Singer definitely went with a mutants as an allegory for homosexuals in his X-Men movies, particularly clear here when Bobby "comes out" to his parents and his mother asks him if he's tried just not being a mutant. But the specificity somehow makes it more universal. A lot of the demagoguery from the politicians and on the news channels that felt a bit too heavy handed at the time now feel depressingly prescient.

I think the social commentary overlay is one of the best features of X-Men, particularly in these early films. I missed that aspect a lot in Apocalypse, which was just about the team having to fight a guy who wanted to take over the world. We've seen that before, and it isn't as interesting or investable as a story like X2 which has a lot more meat on its bones and something to say. I was really surprised when Apocalypse came out that Singer had made something so cookie-cutter because he had not done that with the first two films or with Days of Future Past.

The only issue with the metaphor is that both X-Men and X2 are loaded with scenes of mutant powers putting other people's lives in danger whether they want to or not. X2 literally revolves around Xavier being manipulated into using his powers to kill either the entire mutant race or the entire human race, depending on whether Stryker or Magneto are in control of the illusion at any given moment. Obviously, the movie wants us to sympathize with the plight of the mutant characters and I do. But if Cerebro actually existed, and a powerful individual could use it to instantly kill anyone just by concentrating on it, that would naturally be a huge public safety concern that pushes way beyond the abilities of any real-world marginalized group.

This is part of the fantasy inherent with these stories and that's fine. We can watch this film and use it to discuss real issues in a safe, fictional environment because we know that this setup is not real. It is a credit to the potential in these kinds of stories that they are able to provoke thoughtful discussion of real-world issues within sci-fi/fantasy contexts.