I can hear the sound of violins

Each Day, A Film:
February 5th 2012 (Retrospective)

Then again, if X-Men had the right feel, X2 was a revelation.



Seriously. If the first film was a teaser, an introduction to the kind of superhero world that hadn't been seen in the movies before, then the second was the most amazing broadening of horizons you could really imagine, in narrative terms - all that and Brian Cox, too.

If I sound like a preacher at this point, well, my apologies, but I do need to preach about X2. Sequels are always a tricky prospect, because on one hand you have the opportunity to take pre-introduced characters and thrown them into new situations, but on the other hand the characters are no longer 'new' to the audience, so you have to work out (a) what their expectations are and (b) how to work with them.

There's something else worth mentioning, too; X2 is longer than your average superhero movie; the majority top out at between 90 minutes (although these tend to be the 'smaller scale' films) And 120 minutes. X2 quite happily saunters up to the two hour barrier, finds a bouncer, and convinces them to give it an extra fifteen minutes on top, just because the film needs it. And as part of this, nothing is wasted; yes, there are some odd beats; Cyclops disappears after the prison break and isn't seen again until he returns, mind-controlled, that sort of thing.

What's also interesting is that the press here at the time - most notably Empire, but also others - made a relatively big thing of the uptick in violence, noticeably in the fact that Wolverine finally got to unsheath the claws and go merrily snikt-ing along throughout the mansion invasion sequence. At the same time, it's the kind of bloodless carnage that you need to keep the right friendly rating for the younger audience, and in a funny kind of way, I applaud that.

Put it this way; if you've seen Punisher: War Zone, you've seen enough claret in a superhero-film-context to last you a lifetime. And if you're a fanboy like me and you're thinking 'You Fool! The Punisher isn't a superhero!", well, you're probably right up until you consider the amount of damage one man can soak up and compare it to the Frank Castle pain-a-thon.

But we're getting off-topic.

If X-Men was a sign of validation, X2 is a sign of the growing confidence the studios had that in picking the wallflower of the movie production dance, they'd secretly found a champion tango-dancer, and they were determined to show off this talent for all it was worth.

Again, laboured metaphor, but if you read the Transporter columns, you should be used to that by now. And yes, this is getting way too 'internal-continuity'. But X2 manages to pull off - by comparison to the brash and bold X3, but again, that's 'coming soon' - a quiet kind of confidence where the film knows it's doing amazing things but doesn't thrust the fact in your face and wiggle it about.

Let's illustrate this with two words: Dies Irae.



And that's more or less the opening sequence. Now, let's go back to meshing, the concept that came up a lot during the Resident Evil series of columns, because meshing, kids, is important, and isn't something to be ashamed of. Sometimes it doesn't work, but sometimes, it does, and X2 is a nicely-done mix of action sequences, reminders how we can't escape our past, and analogies for civil rights movements, all wrapped up into a pretty film.

There's really not much else to say, but if you wanted a slightly more personal viewpoint on this, it would have been one of the films I saw at the slightly-oddly-positioned Odeon cinema in Docklands, which seemed to have kind of glommed onto an older building design whereby entry was through the ground floor immediately to the escalators, because a gym had taken over the ground floor. I don't know if it's still as it was then, and it might be interesting to find out.

I also remember bringing this to The Friend with The Sofa - back when he lived in the neighbourhood, so hey, we're back to happy memories, and that's where we're going to stay, for now.