Outpost Parallax is a weekly Saturday night musing of all things science fiction.
The recent Marvel news on the X-Men movie is encouraging. I don’t normally seek out movie development news, but recent buzz over the X-Men in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has me thinking about the 2000s movies, and the 90s comics.
I was a young teen during the early 90s comics boom, and got swept up in the uncanny and mysterious team known as the X-Men. Combined with the X-Men: Animated Series, I was hooked. Even though I was all-in on Image Comics and Valiant comics at the time, I was not much into the Marvel mainstream Spider-Man, Captain America, or the Avengers.
It’s been decades since I even opened those comics, but some of it is coming back to me: the cool visuals, the crazy story twists, time travel, secret societies, alternate futures, cyberpunk, and I loved all of it. In fact, some of my early exposure to concepts such as cyberpunk came from reading X-Men.
Cut to the 2000 film X-Men. The film is 26 years old and I remember being confused and disappointed with it at the same time. There weren’t many comic book adaptations at the time, but in an era of film where both The Matrix and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace made their mark the year before, X-Men was my cue that perhaps I was moving on from the franchise. The film did not capture my imagination and attention the same way nearly a decade earlier.
The rest of the movie franchise was something I watched at my convenience, and they did not heighten my enthusiasm for X-Men. While the prequel series was good, it still didn’t create that coolness from the comics. The only exception was Logan …that was peak Hugh Jackman and an excellent film.
I’d written off the X-Men once the Marvel Cinematic Universe was in high gear.
After watching Spider-Man: Brand New Day and coming across all the new rumors and development news, the new X-Men movie has my curiosity. Fox had 20 years and 14 movies to “get it right”, and Marvel has 38 movies under their belt. With all the history, failures and achievements in comic book movie-making, the X-men should be primed to be the well-made, thought-proving and entertaining film I’ve been wanting since 1992. I’m cautiously optimistic.
As I wait for the 2028 release of the X-Men, I’m catching up on X-Men ‘97 which is excellent. I’ve already begun finding old X-Men storyline comics. As much as I should be looking towards the future, a part of me wants to revist the old 90s X-men comics and see if those old feelings come back.
