This piece originally appeared as part of my weekly newsletter, The Full Lid . If you liked it, and want a weekly down of pop culture enthusiasm, occasional ketchup recipes and me enjoying things, then check out the archive and sign up here. It’s the mid 1990s and the X-Men are beloved superheroes. Charles Xavier is the …
It’s the 1980s and the world is ending. En Sabah Nur, an impossibly old mutant buried beneath his pyramid in Ancient Egypt and asleep for thousands of years is waking up. He views himself as the Mutant Messiah, the father of them all. Aided by his four horsemen he plans to remake the world as …
Matthew Vaughan’s original plan was that First Class would be the opening act in a three movie trilogy that would culminate in Days of Future Past. A legendary story that tied a possible dystopian future to the present, it’s regarded as one of the X-Men classics and for very good reason. it would have been …
The Last Stand was an abject mess, a failure in nearly every way. That was a bad thing for the movie, but ultimately a very good thing for the franchise. The Last Stand’s failure opened the way for something completely different to be tried. That in turn led to the creation of the other essential …
X-Men: The Last Stand is not good. At all. It mashes together the Dark Phoenix Saga and the more recent mutant cure story line, both of which would absolutely be enough to fill a movie on their own and serves neither of them well. It adds profoundly nonsensical twists. It sets up Jean as the …
If X-Men is the dress rehearsal, X-2 is the command performance. Every single issue the first one has is addressed, every problem solved. it remains one of the best examples of modern western superhero cinema and even now it stands as a mark that the franchise has arguably reached again but certainly never surpassed (Logan …
And so, here we are at the end game again. This week, Dark Phoenix will bring the era of 20th Century Fox X-Men movies to an end. They’re a weird, fractious, wildly variable collection of films but as we reach the end it’s worth returning too the beginning to see how far they’ve come and …