Chandler’s Trailers: “X-Men” (2000)

       Bryan Singer’s “X-Men”is in many ways not your usual comic book adaptation: first of all, it dispenses-  for the most part  -with those annoying origin stories (except for a brief, powerful vignette demonstrating the genesis of the hatred toward nonmutants within a young boy who will mature to become arch-villain Magneto [Ian MacKellen]) which occupy far too much time in such features; here the audience is plunged into a story midstream, though the events are skillfully relayed so that the momentum of the early scenes manage to impart a continuous flow of revealing bits of character which disavow the need for the usual grueling term of marathon expositional explanations. In these early scenes, actions do ingeniously reflect character. Singer rather wisely expresses enough respect for his audience to assume that those familiar with the comic are sufficiently on top of the situation, and armed with an apparently rare understanding (in Hollywood anyway) that the comic book formulas are almost preternaturally limited in (Westerns are said to be based on only six or seven different narrative threads, whereas comics might be charitable granted two) imaginative scope, and that novices will be intelligent enough to follow a rather uncomplicated narrative of good against bad.

To read the complete review, click the following link to:  https://chandlerswainreviews.wordpress.com/chandlers-trailers-short-bits-for-emerging-cinephiles-and-a-better-america/