Suprisingly Strong

Rating: 7/10 (15 July 2000)

As a devoted fan of the comic book when I was younger, I expected this movie to be a real flop. I expected my critical eye to be overworked spotting flaws and unnecessary deviations from character. I've seen other comic book adaptations and they never translate well. The best was the first Batman movie, and it could hardly be said to have been particularly true to the comic.
X-Men was MOSTLY true to the comic. Obviously any movie is going to have time limits and as such cannot portray hundreds of issues of story in that time. Given these limits, the essence of the characters and origins were all as sound as they could be. In fact, a few of the changes made were improvements over the comic book.
The only thing I expected this movie to be good in was effects. Given the high bar set by movies like the Matrix, I expected a strong effects and stunts show. This was really the one place where X-Men was average. Many of the stunts flopped, failing to capture the speed or essence of what they were trying to portray. You could tell which stunts were done with wires, and which were cgi. It was very transparent, which in this day and age is unacceptable.
There also were no particularly stunning camera angles during the stunts like Matrix had. They tried once or twice, but none really came off as they should have. It may seem unfair to compare ANY movie to the effects wizardry shown in Matrix, but this movie and subject matter was perfect to exploit such dazzling effects work, and it was very disappointing to see how poorly many were done.
By no means do I want to imply that the stunt work was BAD overall, nor that is substantially detracted from the overall strength of the movie. It was primarily a minority of the action that had these problems. This one is worth seeing. I was merely disappointed by the missed opportunities to do something truly spectacular when the movie opted for simpler, less dazzling effects, and on the rare occasions when it reached for the stars, it was executed poorly.