Jun 03, 2003 08:05 AM
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(Updated Jun 03, 2003 08:07 AM)
X-Men 2 has a number of traits distinguishing it from other superhero movies. First off, it's an ensemble piece about an entire team, rather than a single hero. Also, like the comic, it is an allegory about adolescence and prejudice. In the world of X-Men 2, mutants develop their powers as they enter puberty, a very exaggerated view of the physical changes accompanying adolescence and the resultant angst. Anybody who's shot up a foot in a year or who has had one bad acne outbreak after another can understand. The prejudice angle can be seen in the film's treatment of mutants as a despised minority. The mother of one character even asks her son, ''Have you ever tried not being a mutant?''
For those of you who missed the first movie, or don't remember it, here's the setup: mutants are human beings born with superhuman powers. Since many of these powers can be destructive and dangerous, they are feared and hated by a majority of normal humans. The mutants themselves are split into two main factions, one, the X-Men, led by Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and another, the Brotherhood, led by Magneto (Ian McKellen). Xavier and his followers are relatively pacifistic, and believe mutants and humans can live in peace together. To promote this idea, Xavier has established a school, where he and some other mutants instruct mutant adolescents in the safe, responsible, and ethical use of their powers. Magneto and his followers are mutant supremacists: they don't believe that peace between mutants and humans is possible, and they believe that mutants should rule over humans.
The end of the last movie saw the amnesiac Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) embarking on a road trip to try to learn about his past. Magneto, after a failed terrorist attack, had been incarcerated in a plastic prison designed to negate his powers. His shapeshifting accomplice, Mystique (Rebecca Romijin-Stamos), has been posing as the late Senator Kelley, who'd died in the first movie. She has apparently been dividing her time since then between blocking all the anti-mutant legislation that she can and looking for a way to spring her boss.
X-Men 2 begins with a bang, as a demonic, teleporting mutant called Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming) teleports into the West Wing and attacks the President, while fighting his way through at least a dozen security agents. Shortly thereafter, one of the President's military advisors, William Stryker (Brian Cox), urges the President to authorize an attack on Xavier's school, and the arrest of all the mutants within. The President, not surprisingly, agrees.
The X-Men are also understandably concerned about the attack on the President, and two of them, Storm (Halle Berry) and Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) try to track Nightcrawler down. Stryker, meantime, attacks the X-Men's school and abducts Professor Xavier, whom he plans to use as a living weapon. (Memo to Singer: the first X-Men movie also involved the villain kidnapping somebody. Get a new plot device, please.) Obviously, it's up to the X-Men to rescue the good professor.
X-Men 2 provides a fair number of treats for those familiar with the comic, such as the spectacle of a tall young man transforming his body into steel. Fans of the comic will recognize this fellow as Colossus. A scientist being interviewed on TV is identified as ''Hank McCoy'', another character from the comic. Non-fans, by contrast, will probably want a scorecard to keep track of all the characters. This is a problem inherent in just about any ensemble work. Another problem is that some characters get more screentime than do others, and the latter aren't as developed as they should be, which again is a problem seen in many ensemble works.
The director, Bryan Singer, had loosely based this film on the graphic novel, God Loves, Man Kills, which also pitted the X-Men against a powerful human bigot and his followers. Doing so let him neatly sidestep one of the bigger problems plaguing comic book adaptations: trying to distill decades of storylines into a comprehensible plot-- and the X-Men have existed, in one form or another, for 40 years.
