X-Men97 is a good argument against new X-Men movies

I only got around to watching the X-Men97 finale yesterday. It was tremendous and ridiculous fun. Lots of angst, weird morality and piles of people fighting each other with mutant and techno-virus super-powers. As a series, it just got better and better but so much of it was weaponising nostalgia as its mutant superpower. The story morphed from nostalgia about the original cartoon to nostalgia for how the comics at the time felt but using the same chopping up of comic plot lines into its own story.

Great fun and a pretty good advert for why 90’s Marvel comics were dominated by a bewildering range of X-titles.

The thing is though, I don’t see how those same qualities are easily captured in a movie. Both this recent animated series and the comic books it derived from, worked so well because of a broad cast of messed-up mutants and their dysfunctional relationships. The early 2000s movies did lean into the most messed up relationship at the heart of it all: Xavier & Magneto. However, in film, the rest of the soap opera aspect of the X-Men didn’t work nearly as well. Partly because so much of it is absurd. Sure, you can get at the Cyclops/Jean-Grey/Wolverine love triangle but that whole thing is really only part of the way more messed-up space-opera, time-travel, doppelganger relationship story that bundles in Phoenix and Madelyne Pryor and the Summer’s children. The cartoon could pack in a Madelyne Pryor plot arc in a couple of episodes and still have time for a whole bunch of other stuff.

With a live-action film for a general audience, even a film about magical mutants demands a degree of naturalism and pacing that works against the kind of breakneck speed the X-Men cartoon ran through these plot lines. The stories also require characters going through whiplash turns of personality traits that again, can work on a daytime soap, in a comic book or in an animated show but is much harder to make work in a feature film. Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine did manage to capture why the character is compelling but he is nowhere near the level of plain arsehole that he is in the cartoon (and yet still compelling).

I’m definitely eager for another season of X-Men97 but I don’t know if I’m at all interested in another X-Men movie.