No superheroes in X-Men, something better

Rating: 7/10 (28 April 2009)

The reason that this film is one of the best comic movies yet, is simply because of the characters. Especially Wolverine (played by Hugh Jackman) is a very interesting character. He's rather funny, cool and has an interesting past. And if you have some interesting characters, you'll need some interesting actors. That was the case in this film. We have Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, (our own) Famke Janssen and Ian McKellen, who all brought their characters alive.
But I think this film is too busy. It was like having a spectacular climax in every five minutes of the film. There were just too many visual effects, sometimes it just became too much. I think it had been better if the filmmakers took a little more time to tell the story. What about a running time of 120 minutes (instead of 104)? Fortunately they solved that in X2 (which has a running time of 133 minutes).
The plot was rather good, actually. It was renovating. It differed from normal superhero movies, from which the normal structure is: normal man - something weird happens to him - he gets special powers - he uses them for the good - another man gets powers too, but uses them for the bad - fight between the "superhero" and the "villain". This film wasn't a film in which the good fight against the bad. There was just no clear line between good and bad. And I thought that worked out very well. It isn't a cliché story about simple superheroes. This is a more realistic story where superpowers are seen as some kind of disease.
And I finish my review with a little minus point. That is the music. I love to see superhero movies which have beautiful themes in it. Think of Spider-Man and Batman, those films have very well composed music. I missed that in this film. There was no concrete theme in it, and the rest of the music wasn't rather special either.
So X-Men is a very nice story about people who have gifts. Not about superheroes who save people, but something much more interesting. There were good characters in it, which were portrayed great by the actors. They only had to take more time to tell the story, it seemed a bit over-stuffed to me.