Let’s have a discussion about our favorite and least-favorite films of the X-Men film series.
I kinda like all the ones I’ve seen so far, except for X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. I like the prequels (First Class, Days of Future Past, Apocalypse, and Dark Phoenix) better than the originals; is that strange? I even enjoyed Dark Phoenix, and was rather shocked when Jean killed Raven.
The ones I haven’t seen so far: The Wolverine, the two Deadpool films, The New Mutants, and Logan. Though I’ve started on Logan.
X-2 is probably one of my top ten movies, period. It was beautifully adapted from the story that inspired it, God Loves, Man Kills which is a favorite of mine. A perfect action movie with a wonderfully complex villain and the exact right amount of pathos.
First Class was pretty good. Fassbender elevates everything he is in.
Logan was excellent. A solid A-. I think its weakness is that its desire to be meaningful often bumps up against “Hey, wouldn’t this be a cool action sequence?” But it’s without question the most artistically ambitious of the films.
The rest range from below average to garbage.
I’m not an X-Men expert, but I am a fan. I’ve read most of the comics from Giant-Sized X-Men to roughly late 90s. My husband, who is obsessed with the X-Men, no longer gets excited for the movies because so many have bombed so badly. And they screwed up Dark Phoenix twice, apparently.
I will add that I enjoyed Colossus in Deadpool 2. He’s my favorite X-Man.
Deadpool is easily my favorite marvel movie. It has, heart, violence, and tons of laugh out loud moments. I watch it at least once a year.
I’ll put on most of the other X movies and they don’t bother me but they are mostly just filler material. They absolutely screwed up Phoenix twice and I just watched the 90s comics version with my daughter and the cartoon has way more heart.
I’ve seen all of them but the New Mutants, and they were disappointing all around. I don’t really count the Deadpool films in there, but if you throw those in then the first one was okay.
I liked X-Men, X2, Logan, First Class, Days of Future Past, Deadpool and Deadpool 2.
The following were okay for me: The Wolverine, The New Mutants. It probably helped that I didn’t know who most of these characters in The New Mutants were (as in I recognized the names or maybe saw them once in the comics…).
The following was bad, IMO: Apocalypse. I wanted to like it, but not even Psylocke could get me to like that movie.
The ones I didn’t watch were reviewed as being bad. Two of them were Phoenix movies. I had the misfortune of reading the original Phoenix storyline and seeing it in the 1990s TV show. I am as sick of it as anyone who ever went through the Clone Saga. I am astonished they did it twice, and I believe it did badly each time. (Gee, I wonder why?)
This pretty much lines up with my opinions (except First Class has that ‘let’s sit in a circle and talk about our codenames and powers’ scene that bothers me terribly).
I’m familiar enough with 80’s/90’s X-Men to mostly enjoy these movies, but not enough of a fan to be annoyed by changes to the canon.
I loved X-Men when it came out. But, honestly, that was a bit of a grade-on-a-curve situation. It was a superhero movie with an actual budget, where the film-makers seemed to have actually read some of the comics and had some idea of who the characters were supposed to be. In retrospect, going back to watch it now, it suffers a bit by comparison to the MCU movies, but it’s still a solid movie. By MCU standards, it’s solidly mid-to-upper range, rather than the peak movie it seemed like when it came out.
Even at the time, I thought X2 wasn’t nearly as good, but it was still enjoyable.
X3 was a total trainwreck.
X-Men: First Class is easily my favorite of any of the FoX-Men movies, and one of my top-10 superhero movies overall. I think the retro-style, somewhat ironically, helped it seem fresh and original, while still respectful of the source material (even if not exactly faithful). It managed to give two different characters, Magneto and Mystique, well-done hero-to-villain arcs, which felt organic to the characters and the plot, and were actually emotionally engaging.
I thought Days of Future Past was ok. A let-down from First Class, but still fairly solid.
Apocalypse was a train wreck.
Dark Phoenix was just bad.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine and The Wolverine both just felt really unnecessary and not particularly well executed.
I thought Logan was…ok? I got what they were trying to do, and I can understand why so many people thought so highly of it, and it’s definitely not a bad movie. It just didn’t quite click with me, for whatever reason.
I personally don’t count the Deadpool movies as part of the series (for example, the versions of Colossus and the Juggernaut that appear in the Deadpool movies seem like they’re clearly different characters than the ones that appeared in the earlier FoX-Men movies). That being said, I really enjoyed Deadpool, and I’d probably put it third, behind First Class and X-Men - and honestly, that’s largely because of the historical importance of X-Men and how I reacted to it at the time of release. In isolation, I think Deadpool is probably second behind First Class (pun not intended). I enjoyed Deadpool 2, for the most part, but it seemed like a bit of an unnecessary retread.
Interesting. God Love, Man Kills is also a favorite of mine, but I thought X-2 was only tangentially related to the storyline that it was supposedly based on. I’m not a purist, so I was ok with them drifting so far from the source material, but it’s so far from the graphic novel that I don’t even consider it any sort of adaptation.
I think they did it twice because it’s one of the best known and most iconic storylines in all of American superhero comics. I believe it did badly each time because each movie was just a bad movie on its own (the first time, it was also crammed in with a half-dozen or so other plots and dozens of characters, so it winds up being kind of a minor plot point and Jean Grey doesn’t have much more than a cameo - the main plot was the mutant cure).
I mean, I get it, the “Dark Phoenix Saga” was Chris Claremont in full flower, overwrought, overly-verbose, cod-operatic melodrama, and it’s very definitely not to everyone’s tastes. But while the Clone Saga is and was at the time pretty near universally reviled, the Dark Phoenix Saga is still often referenced as a groundbreaking piece of comic book storytelling. (Again, I’m not trying to argue with your personal reaction - we all like different things. Just that I don’t think it should be astonishing that there have been two tries at properly adapting it to the big screen.)
ETA: Forgot The New Mutants. I’m not sure if that was actualy supposed to be in continuity with the FoX-Men movies. I thought Anya Taylor-Joy’s Majik was delightful, and I would have gladly watched a movie about her. The rest of it, though…blegh.