Is it weird to say I don’t get the appeal of the X-Men
movies? X-Men is something that
has been with me for basically my entire life as a nerd. When I was a kid growing up in the ‘90s
the animated series was in its heyday, I’ve seen all of the live action films
at their premiere, watched X-Men:
Evolution when it was coming out weekly, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the
Claremont, Kirby, and Morrison comic runs on the characters. In my whole life there consuming and
critiquing nerd culture content there really hasn’t been anything as continual
as the X-Men and yet I’d never call myself a legitimate fan.
A lot of that
has to do with the X-Men’s status quo always coming off far too barebones and
uninspired, in the sense that it’s considered some brilliantly cerebral
superhero riff even though the subtext rarely factors into the actual story and
the status quo is less about a clash of ideologies than it is just about having
ideologies that have been arbitrarily assigned good and evil status. That whole sort of “good enough”
aesthetic has always translated over to the X-Men films to and I’d be lying if
I said I didn’t see some of it in the newly dropped trailer for X-Men: Apocalypse.
