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Summary: From the comics to the screen
Review: An avid reader of comics for quite a while in my youth. the X-Men was one of the titles I rabidly awaited every month. When rumors started circulating that they were going to make a movie of the comic, I was a bit disappointed. Films from comics have not done well in the past, look at the film for "The Punisher". Though the casting was fairly good for that one, it was not as good as it could have been. Plus the fact that it was a character that was hard to like. There have been a few more in recent years also that though they were pretty to watch for the special effects, they were hard to watch for the lack of story. Picture my amazement when I heard that Bryan Singer would direct the film. Bryan Singer from "The Usual Suspects", and "Apt Pupil". How was he going to make the move from gritty realism to that of a comic book world? He didn't have to! As hard as it is for me to beleive, Bryan made a gritty, realistic, comic book movie, and it is great. With a little help from the casting , and CGI departments, he made an exceptional film. Now we come to the point in the interview where comic fans may be disappointed. The film does not follow any storyline from the comics, so don't get this expecting "The Dark Phoenix Saga" or some other story. It is totally new. Don't get me wrong, there are elements from throughout several arcs, but not enough to say that it is any one particular one. Still, any movie with a short, mean Canadian with claws that come out of his arms with a "SNIKT" sound can't be bad. Buy it yourself and see.
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Summary: Working mother of two
Review: The movie was fantastic! My entire family loved it.
Rating: 
Summary: Good for What It Is. Closer to 3.5 stars
Review: I wish Amazon would change their rating scale. How about 1-100? I had zero expectations coming into this flick, except for the fact that I think Patrick Stewart is a terrific actor and that I was about to watch a comic book come to life. A fine job they did in doing so. Excellent effects, interesting setup (I've never read the X-men comic, so I have no point of reference as to how the movie may have differed). All in all a good rental. By the way, for the person who complained about the dynamic range of the movie, and in doing so, gave it 3 stars, uh, how about taking a few minutes and reading your DVD and Stereo manual. There's a little thing called COMPRESSION that you can turn on to COMPRESS the range of the volume so that you don't have to keep adjusting it the whole night.
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Summary: DVD Casing Has Serious Flaws
Review: I just want to say I went out and got this movie not once, but twice. The first time I bought this movie I took it home, opened it up, and had a hell of a time being careful to remove the DVD from the casing. Whereas most DVD casing has a button you can press to safely the remove the DVD without risk of bending the delicate structure of the disc, this one does not. It's like an ordinary cd case which requires some degree of pulling, but this DVD would not budge with a delicate tug. As a result, the DVD was bent a little and the result was video fragmentation during the first viewing. I returned X-Men and got a replacement, this time being extra careful to remove the DVD. The first viewing went smoothly, so did the second, but the third?? Well, after I had another mishap of removing the DVD from the casing, I got more fragmentation, albeit was a little less than before. It only occured during one scene. Now I enjoyed X-Men, I liked the movie a lot, and that's why I bought it. But FOX gets an F on the DVD casing, a horrible design that can do more harm than good. You're better off removing the DVD and leaving it on your stereo for months than putting it back in the case, seriously.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding Creation
Review: Sometimes movies come out that are just wonderful without having to reflect on why they are. This movie is one of those. It is not the best movie ever, necessarily; but it by far exceeds the type of movie it could have been. Rather than bombarding the viewer with cheesy special effects and a mindless plotline, director Brian Singer has effectively created a universe that is surreal, haunting, and enjoyable; much like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and American Beauty. The performances in this movie are moving and the actors play their characters dead on. I hope that Singer will bring many of the elements and positive outlooks that he reveals in the DVD interviews to future sequels. Fans of the comics and animated series should commend all involved in the production of this movie.
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Summary: X-Actly X-Ceptional
Review: I am not a comic book fan. The last time I read one I think I put it away and reached for Dr. Seuss. So I was a bit surprised at how much I enjoyed this comic-book inspired film, and it has recieved an exceptional treatment on this DVD edition. True, the story is more or less a showcase for the good and evil mutants' various abnormal attributes, but watching it all unfold is admittedly fun. As for the DVD, the picture quality is beautiful, with rich, bold colors and well-detailed dark scenes. There is basically nothing at all about the picture that distracts, which is always a plus for true videophiles! The overall production design on this movie is magnificent and meticulous. As for sound, if you like to be fully immersed in every sound effect, growl from Sabertooth and Wolverine, or flick of Toad's disgusting tongue, you will not be disappointed. Crystal clear, well-defined audio is a hallmark of this disc. My surround speakers can't remember when they've had such fun...well, maybe Gladiator.. The special features are a nice presentation, with the ability to reinsert cut scenes into the actual film being the coolest one. I could have done without the cut-and-paste interview with Bryan Singer, but its nice to at least get badly recorded sound bites of his thoughts than nothing at all. My only "wish" for what I think would've been a cool special feature is a detailed featurette of how they turned Rebecca Romjin-Stamos into the shape-shifting mutant Mystique...truly a work of art!
Rating:
Summary: orphans of the nuclear holocaust?
Review: Is this what humans are spiralling towards? In this colorful and rousing action film, the characters are well fleshed-out and sympathetic, possibly a metaphor for mankind's pariah populace--human detritus that are so markedly different from the rest of humanity they are shunned and treated with suspicion. This creates a cycle of hate that pits the mutants against government witch hunt factions. The action scenes are entertaining, drama exists in the mutants' relationships with one another, and the violence never seems gratuitous. Alternate views of aberrants being persecuted and interrogated by society exist, most recently in The Subnorms, which paints the mutants more as ordinary humans than superheroes. Overall, this movie was very intelligently and imaginatively done.
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Summary: Movie is great, bonus features/extra footage disappointing
Review: I actually rented this before I received it as a Christmas gift. I was especially interested in the 10 minutes of additional footage, since I had heard there was far more than that left on the cutting room floor and wanted to see what was put back in. It was a bit of a disappointment. Although the extra footage is certainly welcome and adds some extra character flavor, it's not in the same aspect ratio as the rest of the movie. In addition, the footage is much darker than the rest of the film, making one wonder why they didn't bother to keep the quality the same as the rest. There's a feature called "interactive version", which basically plays the regular movie and inserts these bonus footage clips into the play stream as it reaches them. I found this a very poor way of doing it, especially because it doesn't overwrite the footage that's duplicated -- you actually end up seeing the same scene twice (once in bonus version, then the theater version). There's also an annoying pause as the DVD jumps from the movie to the bonus clip, then back. At a time when most other movies with bonus footage are either giving you two versions of the movie (one with, one without) or simply releasing the movie with the extra footage worked in as it was intended, I find it hard to believe that Fox had no interest in doing the same. The other features, such as Hugh Jackman's screen test, are entertaining, but the real reason I wanted this was the movie itself and the bonus footage. The movie, of course, is still great, but the DVD as a whole is just a little lacking, mainly due to how Fox chose to incorporate the extra footage. This is why I give it four stars instead of five.
Rating:
Summary: Awesome movie with an awesome DVD release
Review: I am so glad "X-Men" turned out as good as it did. Bryan Singer is a wonderful director and writer, and I felt he did an excellent job with it. He co-wrote the script along with Tom DeSanto. The cast is perfect for their roles, especially Hugh Jackman. There's so many big-name actors that could've been wrongly-chosen to play Wolvervine, but this Australian actor was born to play Logan. He has the look and everything down. I am so glad Fox didn't make the mistake of getting together a director and production team that would turn the film into a camp-fest, like Warner Bros. let Joel Schumacher do on the hideous "Batman & Robin". The only complaint I had on X-Men was the editing. I read the movie tie-in novel before I saw the movie, and the movie leaves out several things I liked. For instance, the script had scenes showing when Storm and Cyclops first discover their powers. It had the Blackbird Jet appearing in the beginning when they rescue Logan and Rogue, causing it to appear twice. Also some scenes from the book I liked were filmed and then cut, and appear as deleted scenes on the DVD (I'm glad they let you view the movie with the scenes intact). Actually the only cut scenes I miss that much are when Storm is teaching the class (which only snippets of this scene made it into the final cut, being interwoven with a monologue from the Professor), and subsequently when she talks to Rogue after class ends, and the scene where Cyclops asks Logan if he will follow orders in the Ready Room, and gives Logan his uniform. I thought the "Ready Room" scene was great because it gave the two characters a scene with just them where they could become friends without any distractions. But other than that, the movie rocks. It has to be the best comic book adaption since Tim Burton's first "Batman" in 1989. The DVD release is excellent, as I mentioned, as are most Fox DVD's.
Rating:
Summary: X-tremely Good Film
Review: The movie was a good one, with plenty of interesting characters based off the comics and lots of great action scenes. Some good one-liners as well, and it is an overall good film in its own right. I think that we will see a Star Trek- or Superman-like franchise before long though, with lots of films gradually declining in quality, but the first one was great anyway.
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