Best comic book adaptation ever?

Rating: 9/10 (15 July 2000)

X-MEN, besides being the best comic book adaptation since the original SUPERMAN, works nicely as a cultural allegory and is directed with a confident hand by Bryan Singer. The story, with its climax on the Statue of Liberty, is, admittedly, a bit comic book-y, but - do I really need to say this? - it IS based on the Marvel comics. However, the movie captures the comics' tone perfectly, and has its tongue-just-far-enough-in-cheek to acknowledge the absurdity of the situation without giving in to camp. Perhaps most refreshing is the movie allowing itself to spend the first hour getting to know each of the X-Men (and their counterparts, The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants) -- their personalities as well as their powers. The movie's central theme - growing up feeling different - plays out amongst the heroes: Professor X as a father figure to the X-Men, Wolverine as a big brother to Rogue, Cyclops as the son trying to make Professor X proud, etc. This new "family" manages to gel enough to challenge the evil mutants' plans at the end, with the fireworks and fisticuffs you'll expect. Some of these scenes suffer because of a (relatively) low budget and a studio which rushed a movie to summer that was supposed to come out at Christmastime (or perhaps, "X-Mas"?). Once Fox counts up all the profits from this movie, I would hope they would spend enough on "X-Men 2" to replace some of the unconvincing wire work seen here with those do-anything CGI effects. Another smart move would be to replace Michael Kamen (whose last project was conducting an orchestra with Metallica) with pretty much anyone else, and giving that person time enough to write a decent score. With 30-odd years of X-Men history, there are plenty of additions and subtractions that could be made to the cast of the sequel. However, each charactor in "X-Men" merits a return, in smaller or larger ways. The most important ingredient is obviously Singer, who has a firm grasp on just how to translate that long history to film, and how to do it with style.