Techtite DVD Reviews

The Film: I really love the direction "superhero" action films are going lately. No longer is it deemed that a film based on a comic book must be dumbed down to appeal to its readers, who contrary to biased opinions, are hardly "dumb"! That's largely because the intelligence level of comics themselves has vastly improved since the "good ol' days." Gone are the days of your grandma's Archie comic books, with modern comics dealing with three-dimensional characters fighting against equally well-written foes. With its storyline based on such comics, X2: X-men United is chock-full of nail-biting action. This is the sort of opening to a summer movie season every movie critic hopes for.

In case you missed the first film (and the comics), here's the Cliff's Notes version. In the not-so-distant future, select humans have reached the next stage of evolution, with very special gifts. Since everyone is different, each gift is different, as well as the choices they make when they discover them. Some so-called "mutants" (as the fearful, "regular humans" call them) use their powers for good; the rest use their powers for evil. As of the end of the last film, the heroic "X-men" just barely thwarted a plot by the evil Erik Lensherr, aka Magneto (Ian McKellen), who thought that he could end prejudice against all mutants, by making everyone a mutant...even if it meant killing most of the weaker humans, during such a transformation . His plan backfired, though not before killing the biggest advocate against mutants, Senator Kelly (Bruce Davison). All notice of this death was thwarted when the shape-shifting mercenary, Mystique (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) took the Senator's place in Washington. The story picks up from there.

On the most part, little has changed since movie #1. Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) still recruits children for his "School for Gifted Children," which, unknown to the outside world, is not just a private school, though a place inhabited entirely by mutants. The best and brightest of his students get to be part of the X-men team, fighting to save the very humans who fear them from the forces of evil. Unfortunately, this time around such humans are their worst enemy, with a prejudiced blowhard named William Stryker (Brian Cox) wishing to curb his fear of mutants, by committing genocide of all mutants worldwide. Using a sort of mind-control drug on apprehended mutants, he has found a way to do just that...though telling you how would be, well, telling.

Subplots are here as well. Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) continues to seek his past --and an explanation for his artificially-added, metal-plated skeleton-- by attempting to return to the scorched remnants of the lab which created him. Meanwhile, the telekinetic Jean Gray (Famke Janssen) seeks comfort from longtime boyfriend Scott Summers (James Marsden), as she deals with her telekinetic powers growing in power, faster than she can learn to control them. Much like any good sequel, these stories aren't a mere Xerox retread of the prior film's back story, but rather add to and enhance the ongoing story that was already built.

My favorite of these sub-stories would have to be the developing romance between Rogue (Anna Paquin) and Bobby Drake (Shawn Ashmore). See, while Bobby has been at Xavier's school long enough to learn to control his ice-powers, newcomer Rogue still cannot control her ability to absorb someone's very mind, power, and emotions, with merely a touch. This would be very troublesome for a young, lovelorn girl --to not be able to so much as kiss her boyfriend, or risk killing him-- and Anna Paquin's performance here is very well played. My favorite moment would be the one glimpsed in the trailers, where a unfettered Bobby decides to dive in for a quick peck, only to have Rogue exhale a breath of cool mist. Neat.

Of course, action buffs will much more prefer talking about the even cooler (and frankly, inevitable) prison escape by Magneto. This was an inspired scene as well, because it was so brilliantly crafted. We all knew that Magneto's escape from his solid-plastic prison (to curb his magnetic/metal powers) would be inevitable for the sequel to proceed, though fans feared it would be stupidly solved. I myself worried it would be something simple like "Oh gee I'm a new guard here and I forgot a penny in my pocket silly me." Instead, his escape is brilliantly sinister and well-crafted because, quite frankly, few would've seen it coming. This is perhaps the most nail-biting, ingenious, devious "prison break" I've seen in any film, fictional or otherwise.

Flaws? Not as many as the comic geeks would insist. I have already heard of a list online, of 40 "flubs" in the film, though come on, now; how can a film based on fiction be filled with "flubs"? At best, I would confess the film has 40 adaptations that were not in the original comic stories, which needed to be abridged to conform to a mere 2 hour feature film. Come on, now, X-fans. Recently, we've had the very non-latina Jennifer Garner cast as Stiletto in Daredevil. In Spider-man, Peter Parker was genetically altered to shoot webs, instead of the classic wrist web-shooters Parker invented from the comic. It's pretty geeky to assume that X-men is beyond adaptations as well. After all, isn't the whole point of comics to imagine new ideas, not conform to the old?

Of course, any one theater patron will leave a film with a totally different feeling than the person beside him. I can only speak for myself when I say that I really loved this movie. It's only flaw would be that in order to truly enjoy the film, you must also be a fan of the comics. This is particularly important in the finale, which to the layman may seem very disappointing, but is in fact alluding to one of the best serial tales in X-men history (if curious, use your favorite search engine to search for what X-men fans call "The Phoenix Saga"; a search which currently leads to over 482 matches on Yahoo alone). If purists whine that the film isn't 100% accurate to the original tales, that's their problem. I really enjoyed seeing this. So will you.

The DVD: First things first: Full Screen, or Widescreen...? That's the question often asked when two versions of a film are offered, and it's not as easy as you think. Sometimes a widescreen DVD is the real deal; more often, it's simply a cropped version of the Full screen image! In other words, instead of getting to see a film "the way it originally appeared in theaters," you're seeing an image that was cropped, twice.

Above is a sampling of the sort of cropping going on in X-2 discs. The left image is the scene as it appeared in theaters (as screen-grabbed, from the still-downloadable film trailer). The image in the center is the pan-and-scan, full screen image for regular-sized TV sets. Note that this image is what you'd expect it to be, with the need to crop the original letter box image to the left and right (note that Storm is no longer visible at the far left, and a spectator of the latest mutant sighting is no longer visible on the right). Then there's widescreen, which actually shows the full image from left to right, but ---get this--- in order to fit neatly into a standard widescreen TV, they apparently cropped the bottom of the picture! While this is a fair compromise --it's better than cropping both the top and bottom for a faux widescreen image-- there's no way of seeing the film the way it was in theaters. <Sigh.>

Be this as it may, picture quality is superb (don't let my screen capture devices' poor quality above fool you) and unlike other DVD sets, the extras are identical no matter which version you get. Let's start the long list of extras with a remark about the audio commentaries: one by director and cinematographer, with a second track by the writers. Yeah, I know; what about the stars? I don't mean to sound crass but couldn't these stars take the time from their (cough, cough) "busy" schedules elsewhere to offer us an audio commentary?

The longer list of extras are on disc two. We're given a multi-angle look of the scene which introduces Nightcrawler, with a separate featurette about the first rehearsals of the best battle in the movie, between Wolverine and Deathstrike. This isn't even getting into the whole slew of behind the scenes featurettes, with the longest one titled "The Second Uncanny Issue of X-men," and additional clips like: "The Secret Origin of X-men" (a back history of the comic itself), and two Nightcrawler featurettes titled "Nightcrawler Reborn" (mostly his personality in the comic books), and "Introducing the Incredible Nightcrawler" (how this character's original introduction in the comic books was translated to mesh better with this film's particular story).

Yes, there are deleted scenes, totaling 11. The extended Wolverine and Deathstrike fight is as self-explanatory as it is the most alluring deleted scene for fans. Then there's "Wolverine Kills the Intruder," where one of Stryker's soldiers gets a more permanent end to his fight with Wolverine. Another extended scene implies that Mystique had time to download more from Stryker's computer than simply specs about Magneto's prison cell (deleted probably because it made more sense for her to download what was necessary and get out of there). Yet another scene has Nightcrawler use his teleportation skill to transport some of Xavier's school children to safety. Topping off this first "page" of deleted scenes is a nice moment between Jean and Storm in the X-men jet, which starts with Jean trying to control the jet by telepathy only yet failing, and Storm asking if the reason for her stress is because Logan is back. Cute scene.

Six more deletions on page two of this menu. "Jubilee at the museum" shows this popular X-heroine looking at museum propoganda musing if we're evolving or "de-evolving"; an underhanded comment about mutants that makes Jubilee nervous enough to nearly show her powers in public. "Pyro starts the campfire" is a quick scene that is self-explanatory, while "One of the children is sick after Banfing" shows how come people have a weak constitution to Nightcrawler's teleportation skills. Yet another deletion is of Rogue telling a pair of children escaping Xavier's then-invaded school of gifted children to tell whatever house they come to that they've run away from their school and need help; an understandable deletion because wouldn't Stryker put two and two together if he found such missing children reports nearby? The final two deletions would have led to a surprising twist to the movie, where Xavier is not merely "fooled" into thinking he's suddenly back at his school, but is led to believe he's successfully escaped Stryker's clutches and arrived there himself. This would've been an amusing twist to the final moments of the film; one where we think he's escaped yet he hasn't. At least it makes a nice pair of deleted scenes for this DVD, doesn't it?

Top this off with a few impressive photo galleries and the obligatory theatrical trailers collections, and what do you have...? A DVD that's even better than the film, that's what. Seeing as how the film was a solid thumbs up to begin with, that's saying a lot, isn't it? This may be the sort of sequel that leaves non-X-men-fans in the dark at times, and yet for true blue fans it's one of the best movies to have come out in all of summer 2003. That, too, is saying an awful lot!

	Final Rating : Large Crater. While leaving most non-comic-fan viewers in the dark, X-2 is mostly a movie strictly for the comic book's fans. However, it is a spectacular film for the fans, isn't it?
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X2: X-men United

A Techtite Review