Very good... almost great in places...

Rating: 10/10 (3 April 2001)

As far as comic book adaptations go, there seem to be two kinds of film: the good ones (Tim Burton's Batmans) and the hideously bad ones (Superman IV, Batman Returns, Batman Forever etc). The 2000 adaptation of X-Men belongs in the former category, thanks to some excellent casting and a well thought-out story.
People have criticised the film as deviating too much from the official X-Men canon. I kind of suspect these people are the same "geniuses" who levelled the same criticism at Batman, so I will run the following question by you all: suppose that you had some kind of trait that made you extremely different from the rest of the populace. Would you be running around in multi-coloured spandex, parading around like a hero, or would you be having deep crises about how you react to other people's fear. As a sufferer of a present-day equivalent of the mutations shown in this film, I know what my answer is.
The modification of the story to show Rogue as a young woman who has only just discovered that everyone she touches is severely wounded by it was a master stroke. Not only was it great to see how human the mutants really are (more so than the normies in this film, as a matter of fact), but casting a delicate, intelligent young woman like Anna Paquin in the role was a perfect capitalisation on the writing. Coupling this with the way Wolverine is shown as the result of a horrid military experiement who is now just trying to survive as best he can was a brilliant idea, too. Hugh Jackman was a perfect choice for the role. As a man whose past combines pieces of these two characters' histories in a more figurative sense, I found these two actors utterly believeable in all respects.
The only thing wrong with the movie, in my view, is that the think tank which made these excellent moves with the good guys ran out of steam when the bad guys were written. Mystique, Toad, and Sabretooth just don't have the same level of character development allocated to them as Wolverine, Rogue, Cyclops, and Storm. Mystique gets one line in the whole film (the rest are her pretending to be someone else), and Toad is merely there to provide excuses for gratuitous special effects shots. Capping that off is the fact that Magneto is shown as a survivor of the holocaust who takes on the same kind of attitude as the Nazis. Granted, he is being somewhat provoked by the section of humanity that is afraid of mutants, but once again my experience as part of a small percentile of the populace that has had outright lies told about it by the rest tells me that more motivation would have been required for Magneto to become so like his real enemy.
Aside from the uneven development of the characters, however, this is another near-great modern adaptation of a comic book. It works on numerous levels and is extremely pleasant to watch.