Watched on Blu-Ray

X-Men Sunday
Rewatch Road To Dark Phoenix Step 1 of 9

In preparation for the new X-Men movie, which starts in June, I'll rewatch the old trilogy, the Wolverine solo films and the new trilogy to be optimally prepared for Dark Phoenix.

What I like so much about this very first mutant adventure is that everything here is still completely unpolished and little calculated.

The atmosphere still possesses a high degree of 90s cheesiness and also the selection of mutants, especially on the side of the bad guys, is very mixed.

Sabretooth is nice, but also nothing special. He is impersonated by the same actor (Tyler Mane) that played Michael Myers in the Rob Zombie Halloween. Toad, on the other hand, is simply boring. It doesn't help that he is played by Ray Park (Darth Maul).

Despite the mentioned cheesiness, the makers managed to bring the unbelievably iconic comic characters to life through excellent casting and thus to shape the careers of some actors or, as in the case of Sir Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen, to add another step to immortality.

Without wanting to anticipate the reviews for later movies too much, I think that some actors of the old trilogy simply fit better than in the new one. I find Rebecca Romijn-(Stamos) as Mystique much more involved and fitting than JLaw. Her theme is great. Famke Janssen is also fantastic as Jean Grey and has a more varied appearance than Sophie Turner, who could not convince me anywhere apart from GoT.

Today, almost 20 years after this first part, Hugh Jackman is a fucking legend. There is no other role that I associate with him more than Wolverine. All the more funny is it, how relatively slim he still is here in the first part. I mean, he's in good shape, but still far from the hellish beast he is in Logan. It's a give and take: the series owes him a lot, but his career wouldn't be the same without the X-Men either.

You can tell that here in the first part of a series that nobody knew how it would go down with the audience, they were still working with the handbrake on as far as the story was concerned. The introduction of the characters is cautious, but the story is quite simple and far removed from the multi-layered levels of later movies. However, the philosophical questions that have always been part of the X-Men stories are already addressed: identity, otherness, racism, integration and acceptance.

Trick-wise, X-Men is hopelessly outdated. Due to the likeable characters (the teasing between Wolverine and Cycops are a lot of fun), the good pacing and the (unfortunately) timeless themes you can still watch the first movie of the series without any problems.