“Do you know what happens to a toad when it’s struck by lightning?”

 

We knew as soon as we saw the X-Mansion and Professor X and Magneto in their very own Doomsday teaser trailer. We knew when we saw the supposed leaked merchandise. Hell, we knew when Ian McKellan said he destroyed New Jersey as Magneto. I’ve always loved the X-Men. They were among the first comics I ever collected in the ‘90’s. I read Trade Paperbacks of Proteus, Dark Phoenix and Days of Future Past. I collected the Jim Lee and Chris Claremont-era comics, including the 1990s game changers. And yes, I’ve loved the movies. Well, some of them.

I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t feel like going through all the X-Men movies, so I picked my favorites and let it go from there. The timeline for these movies are insane, with each movie kinda making its own canon and timeline, it gets confusing. Doomsday appears to have the characters from the original movies like Cyclops, Magneto, etc and fusing them with other characters like Gambit.

 SPOILERS ABOUND

 X-Men: Growing up, my friend and I would discuss who would make the best on-screen Wolverine. We never thought it would be an unknown actor best known for Broadway and is Australian, Hugh Jackman. His introduction on screen is comic book perfect, fighting in Canadian cage matches and smoking cigars. A more 20^th Century not-shackled-by-the-Comics-Code-Authority Wolverine on Cyclops: “You’re a dick.” We’re also introduced to Rogue, although it’s younger than we’ve ever seen her in the comics. In the comics, Wolverine is always mentoring young female mutants and acting as a teacher, father figure and protector, like with Jubilee and Shadowcat. Anna Paquin’s innocence and little ass shake in the beginning of the movie right before she sends her boyfriend into a coma is exactly what you’d expect in a mutant X-Men movie. Patrick Stewart, normally playing Captain Picard on Stark Trek is perfect as Professor X, as is Halle Berry as Storm. Bond girl Famke Janssen plays Jean Grey, who has some psychic ability but there’s foreshadowing to more power. Ian McKellan brings a great gravitas to Magneto. Mystique, played by then-supermodel Rebecca Romjin, does a great job. She’ll also have a role in Doomsday, transforming into Yelena Belova, according to the trailer. There’s also Sabertooth, who seems to have an obsession with Wolverine. Comic book fans know what it is and it takes several years and several movies later to find out their brothers (?). We’re now set with the good guys and bad guys, several battles take place. Magneto wants to use Rogue’s absorbing powers to power a machine that can make humans into unstable mutants. The X-Men stop all Magneto’s bad guy Brotherhood, and the human politicians are saved.

 

X2: X-Men United: Starts off with the greatest superhero opening of all time. Nightcrawler bamf-ing his way through the White House and Secret Service. We learn a lot more about Wolverine’s past and watch tear through soldiers using his claws. We’re introduced to Adamantium, a metal now in the MCU. This is probably my favorite X-Men movie, next to Days of Future Past and Doomsday. We’re introduced to the Rogue\Bobby\Pyro love triangle. I really like Pyro’s lighter; it’s such an instantly recognizable icon for this movie.  Magneto’s plastic prison and escape is another great scene in the movie. William Stryker is a military scientist obsessed with killing mutants, even turning his own mutant son into a weapon against them. His assistant Yuriko is another mutant with a healing ability and metal claws. Her death is made more tragic when we discover earlier that she’s just another mind-controlled mutant. The attack on the X-Mansion is the stuff we only dreamt about in the comic pages. Wolverine kills countless soldiers and Colossus punches them through walls. We find out how Cerebro works, something that I’m sure will make another appearance in Doomsday. We see Bobby’s home life, how unstable Pyro really is and Wolverine’s unending search for beer. The final battle is pretty cool, too. Magneto turns Cerebro against Stryker and the humans, but not before blowing a bunch of soldiers up by magnetically grabbing the pins to their own grenades. Jean Grey, who I haven’t really mentioned because I kept forgetting she was there, sacrifices herself to save the X-Men by becoming Phoenix. The movie ends with Professor X talking to the President of the United States, saying mutants and humans have to get along.

 

 First Class: Takes place in the ‘60’s, right before the Cuban Missile Crisis. Shows the introduction of some key X-Men, especially the friendship of Charles Xavier and Eric Lensherr. For me and a lot of people, this served as the introduction of Jennifer Lawrence and Michael Fassbender. Every time they were on screen, they had a presence I couldn’t ignore. Jennifer Lawrence looked absolutely gorgeous in her ‘60’s attire and Fassbender’s character was…magnetic. I could watch Magneto tear through Nazis with his powers while drinking German beer all day (he would have made a great Bond). And although it wasn’t Mystique’s real face, I can’t help but notice how beautiful she was in the movie – which also served as a focal point for her character. The movie also revealed that Mystique (Lawrence) was actually the stepsister of Charles Xavier. She also has an instinctual connection with Magneto, so she’s torn between the two competing philosophies as well as Hank McCoy, Beast. There’s a great scene where the new recruit Mutants are showing off their powers including Havok and Darwin.  6th Degree-er Kevin Bacon shows up as the main antagonist Shaw. Magneto wants to kill Shaw and does so with the help of a Soviet-made helmet and a Nazi coin. We also see how Xavier gets paralyzed, thanks to a bullet deflected by Magneto. A great movie with a Mad Men\James Bond kinda thing.

 

 Days of Future Past: I’m going to refer to the Rogue Cut since it’s longer and makes the movie that much cooler. In this movie, the two generations of movie mutants combine – it’s simultaneously 1973 and 2023. In 2023, highly advanced Sentinels have hunted mutants down to virtual extinction with the exception of new and old X-Men. This includes Wolverine, of course. They bring back the dynamic of Bobby (Iceman) and Kitty (Shadowcat) and have them be together. Deleted scenes also show Wolverine and Storm together in that way too. Well, Professor X states that in 1973, the creator of the Sentinels, Bolivar Trask, use an assassination by Mystique to harvest her mutant DNA and create these deadly new Sentinels. We can go back in time, but only Wolverine can survive the process. We go back to a bone-clawed 1973 Wolverine sleeping with the boss’ girl. He then goes to an abandoned X-Mansion and a Charles Xavier that can walk but has no mutant abilities. Oddly enough, this comes from a serum that Hank McCoy came up with. I don’t understand how suppressing psychic abilities will allow somebody with a physically broken back to walk again, but we’ll keep that to ourselves. We find out the Vietnam War has decimated the teachers and students at the X-Mansion and Charles is a broken man. His need for the serum is like a junkie to heroin and is acted brilliantly. We’re introduced to Quicksilver (somebody that has been a great addition to the X-movies but also to Wandavision. We find Magneto imprisoned in the Pentagon in a plastic prison (again). By the way, he’s there for the assassination of JFK wherein he bends the bullet fired by Oswald to hit the President. When he retrieves his helmet, you can see broken wings and a bloody Nazi coin as part of a display. The new X-Men fight in a race against time (literally) to stop Mystique from killing Bolivar Trask. There’s another great scene where the world at large is introduced to mutants involving a fight between Beast and Magneto. We see 1970’s Sentinels at the White House with Richard Nixon. Meanwhile, the future rages on – Wolverine injures Kitty while she is somehow sending his mind back in time. In the original cut, she perseveres but in the Rogue Cut, they bring back Rogue. Yes, the original Rogue from the first movie is busted out of the future Sentinels headquarters by Bobby and Magneto and brought to their hidden base to take over for Kitty. There are big battles in both the future and past. Mystique does not kill Nixon or Trask. One scene I had a problem with is that you later see Mystique disguised as William Stryker rescuing Wolverine from the river. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to have the actual Stryker doing this, since he does end up giving Wolverine his adamantium in the future? The future resets, and has Wolverine teaching history at the X-Mansion along with Storm, Cyclops and Professor X. Is this where Doomsday comes in?

 

 Logan: Yes, there have been other Wolverine movies that defied the timeline setup in the original X-movies. We find out he’s been around since at least the Civil War and has fought in virtually every war since then with his equally immortal brother Sabretooth. He also went to Japan and fought the Yakuza on a bullet train. Now there’s a superhero movie unlike any other that has come before it. Logan. I think it’s supposed to take place after the new future Wolverine established in Days of Future Past. This is the most depressing mutant movie yet. We find out that mutants weren’t killed off by advanced Sentinels or a battle with Magneto, but with crops that destroy the mutant gene. The good guys didn’t win. Wolverine, barely alive with his healing factor on the fritz, is a drunken limousine driver who uses his claws more brutally than any other Wolverine we’ve seen before. We find he’s taking care of an elderly and senile Professor Xavier (who accidentally killed the X-Men in a psychic episode). We’re also introduced to Laura, X-23. She’s a little girl speaking Spanish with double the claws and berserker episodes. She later becomes an adult and we see her in Deadpool & Wolverine about a decade later. She’s Wolverine’s biological daughter and one of a bunch of new mutant kids genetically engineered in a lab. She’s being chased by cyborg Reavers, and when Wolverine and Professor X help out, they’re chasing them too. Patrick Stewart deserved an Oscar for his performance, but didn’t get it. Between Dr. Strange and Doomsday, it’s far from his last performance. He’s tragically killed by another clone of Wolverine, a younger version (like Hugh Jackman from the original X-Men). Wolverine gets the kids to where they need to be to be safe and kills a lot of bad guys and his brutal clone. As depicted in Deadpool & Wolverine, his death scene is heartbreaking and makes a brother cry. One more cool thing, is that a mutant named Yukio foresaw Wolverine’s death: “I see you on your back... There's blood everywhere... You're holding your own heart in your hand. It's not beating." It more or less shows his death in Logan, with his daughter holding his hand and sobbing, “Daddy” before he dies heroically, like an X-Man.

 

 

 

I think I got everything!