Watching X-Men with BAE, Part II: X2: X-Men United

This is an installment of Watching X-Men with BAE, a special feature where BAE and I are watching all of the X-Men movies to get ready for X-Men: Apocalypse later this month. You can check out the first in installment in the series here.

Where X-Men was really a Wolverine movie in which the other characters were static and peripheral, Bryan Singer’s 2003 X2: X-Men United is more thoroughly an X-Men movie. With varying degrees of success, it deals with the drama and tension of a team of mutants seeking to protect a world that hates and fears them while also keeping themselves safe.

I have some criticisms of this movie. The X-Men who were static in the first film continue to have unsatisfying character development in X2. Cyclops (James Marsden) is still just a dick. The attempt at a conflicted, forbidden love plot between Jean Gray (Famke Janssen) and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) had zero build up. And the attempt to develop Storm (Halle Berry)’s character through her interest in Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming) fell flat on its face. I think Singer gets away with some of this stuff because he’s relying on the public’s knowledge of X-Men mythology rather than on screen characterization to hold the film together. He doesn’t have to give people a reason to care who Storm is, because they already do.

Over all though, it was a fun movie with some cool characters and visuals. The movie introduces two young mutant companions for Rogue (Anna Paquin), in the form of Ice Man (Shawn Ashmore) and Pyro (Aaron Stanford). The two develop different political philosophies as the movie goes along. It’s a great touch.

Also the teenage romance plot between Ice Man and Rogue, already a great tragicomedy, is made funnier by the recent revelation in the comics that Ice Man has been gay and in the closet all along. There’s some really obvious head canon you can develop here around Ice Man dating Rogue because he can’t touch her.

The villains in this film were great as well. Rebecca Romijn (fka Rebecca Romijn-Stamos)’s reprisal of her role as Mystique was spot on. The scenes where Magneto (Ian McKellan) is in plastic jail were really cool. The crux of the plot sees them teaming up with the X-Men to take on the film’s real villain William Stryker (Brian Cox) who is a rogue government official studying mutants to weaponize them. It all has a real classic feel to it.

That being said, there was a fairly annoying Magneto moment at the movie’s climax where he and Mystique try to use a weaponized mutant to trick Professor X (Patrick Stewart) into using his mental powers (enhanced by Cerebro) into killing literally every non-mutant human on the planet.

Personally, I find it impossible to reconcile Magneto the holocaust survivor with extreme views on mutant liberation and Magneto the mutant supremacist who wants to enslave or kill off non-mutant humanity. If it were just an issue of inconsistent characterization, I wouldn’t really complain too much, because, y’know, we’re dealing with a cartoon villain named “Magneto.” Who cares if his character doesn’t make sense? The problem is that Magneto and the Brotherhood of [Evil] Mutants have a politics that is a white liberal misreading of ’60s Black nationalism transmogrified into cartoon villainy. This trope is present in the movie when Magneto asks Pyro, who up till that point had only gone by John, what his “real” name was. The message to oppressed people is something along the lines of: if you want to be like our milquetoast, inaccurate vision of Dr. King we support you, but if you start listening to Malcolm X or Chokwe Lumumba, we understand that your agenda is probably white extermination. Which is insane.

I would argue that Professor X actually has more in common with radical Black nationalism than with King’s politics. He’s certainly not committed to non-violence. He’s also got a secret school where he is raising a child army. You want to tell me he’s not militant? You want to tell me he’s not a separatist? Further, the fact that Professor X seeks unity with non-mutants is not actually inconsistent with radical Black nationalism, if you look at what Malcolm X’s political evolution (his line was that Black unity and strength were a prerequisite to Black-white unity) and the work the Black Panthers were doing alongside like-minded white people.

Anyway, the played out Xavier/Magneto as MLK/Malcolm X trope didn’t start with this movie and certainly didn’t end with it. I was glad BAE and I watched it. I’m cringe-fully looking forward to re-watching X-Men 3 soon.