X-Men far superior to its sequels

Rating: 9/10 (9 November 2006)

I just watched the first x-men film again (just felt like it) and I have to say it far outweighs the other two. The film has an enormous amount of exposition, several key characters to introduce and this is expertly executed by Bryan Singer. The characters are in no way unbelievable and from the opening scene, which depicts a young Magneto arriving at Auschwitz in 1944, the film grounds itself in reality. It is for this reason alone that I prefer the first of the trilogy.
Too much in cinema now we have directors and fans alike sharing the belief that for a sequel to exceed its predecessor, it must be louder bigger and ultimately have 'more'! But so often this 'more' amounts to a detrimental effect on the realism and impact of the original. Is this the reason why so few sequels exceed their prequel? I believe so. We've seen it in films like Matrix Revolutions, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, the disastrous Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and more recently The Lord of the Rings The Two Towers.
It could be argued that The Lord of the Rings The Return of the King was superior to The Two Towers, but neither one had the same impact on me as The Fellowship of The Ring. This ultimately amounts to the fact that Fellowship, like the original X-men film, were films that were made with the intention to tell a story not with the intention to thrill an audience. When a story is told well, when invigorating and believable, relatable characters are properly introduced it's very difficult to fail. It feels as if the first of these films has one singular voice that gets the message across whereas the others have several voices all shouting at the top of their lungs hoping to be heard.
Essentially my hope is that one day filmmakers will realise that not everyone wants to see more explosions or have more meaningless characters paraded in front of them in order to appreciate a film.
Simply tell the story well and the rest will fall into place, after all, it did in the first one!