After watching the trailer for the upcoming X-Men film Logan today, I was reminded why the X-Men series is my favorite superhero series.
While Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe and Warner Bros.' DC Extended Universe focus more on setting up future movies and introducing completely new elements in every entry, the X-Men series plays around with new ideas and styles in each film, and it's that kind of creativity and originality that makes me come back to this series for every future movie, even if the last one disappointed me.
What really makes the X-Men franchise as a whole (including not just the movies, but the comics, the television shows, the video games etc.) so special is its look at discrimination and championing for "the other". The series uses the idea of mutants, which are superpowered humans who are born with incredible gifts, as a metaphor for those who are continually discriminated against and oppressed for despicably bigoted reasons. The X-Men team was created in the 1960s, at a time when groups battled to fight against discrimination and for equality, so there are clear and distinct parallels within the series' writing with the real world at the time. Thankfully, 20th Century Fox was able to discover great talent who obviously could identify with these ideas, and through sharp writing, strong characterization, and great acting, these messages of equality and tolerance are translated to great effect. Days of Future Past, one of my personal favorite movies in the series, perfectly illustrates it through its opening sequence. The atmosphere founded in the bleak future is grim, as the Sentinels, robots with the sole purpose of killing mutants, mercilessly destroy human beings solely for being different, as the tension and escalation increases, and the danger becomes more and more imminent, as Wolverine is forced to travel back in time to set things right. It's that kind of impressive direction and acting that makes this series so great.
It also helps that the series doesn't really stick to one formula. Sure, there are origin stories (Origins: Wolverine, First Class, Deadpool), epic adventures (X-Men, X2, The Last Stand, Days of Future Past, Apocalypse), and character-focused side stories (The Wolverine, Logan), but what makes the franchise so interesting is that styles are interspersed from movie to movie and are varied in their executions. 2016 has had two different X-Men movies, with the first, Deadpool, being a raunchy action comedy that took plenty of jabs at superhero tropes, and the second, X-Men: Apocalypse, being both origin stories for younger versions of these heroes, as well as a plot involving taking down a God before he creates Doomsday. And next year plans to be a complete departure from almost every other movie with Logan, which will be a character-focused drama that hints at being incredibly gritty, intense, and having far more realistic action scenes. While other superhero movies, as enjoyable as they may be, stick to a very specific formula or attempt to ape off of other successful movies, X-Men is much more interested in doing something that's more out of left field, and as someone who loves movies that go outside of the box, this is something I can definitely appreciate.
Of course not every movie hits a bullseye (the less I talk about The Last Stand and Origins: Wolverine, the better), but I still have such a fondness and appreciation for the series that I will gladly watch every movie that comes out, even if I disliked the previous one. It's a series that is more like a giant sandbox, where directors and writers and actors can take a character or characters and give them their own unique spin and style to them, even if somebody else did it in another way. To me, creativity and variety should be the gold standard for every movie franchise, and it's for that reason why X-Men will always have a special place in my heart and is where I point to for what I want in a superhero movie franchise.
