Twenty years later, X-Mens legacy is one of compromise

If X-Men came out today, people would probably hate it. There isn’t a single good action sequence in the film, it has no fleshed-out characters that aren’t named “Wolverine,” and its gestures at drama mostly fall flat — all of which combine to make its astonishingly brisk hour and 45-minute runtime feel much longer. In X-Men’s defense, it had a whole host of problems that virtually no blockbuster movie has now that the MCU reigns supreme, and that makes it interesting. Twenty years later, X-Men is notable as a severely compromised work that still managed to show the promise of superhero cinema even as it tried to run from it.

It took 16 years for X-Men’s story of strange and powerful mutants, hated and feared by those they swore to...

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