I remember a Marvel panel at the 1991 Atlanta Fantasy Fair, where they said Spider-Man was in development, with James Cameron to direct (we all know how that turned out) and X-Men to be directed by Richard Donner. Well, that one was close, as Lauren Shuler Donner was the producer.

Going into the film, I hoped it wouldn't suck, given Marvel's track record, up to that point (which was pretty bad). Even so, it took a while for this to come out. The announcement of Bryan Singer was interesting, as I liked his previous films; but, this was going to be something wholly different.

I agree that Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan were perfectly cast and that Hugh Jackman took his opportunity and ran with it. Anna Paquin wasn't bad; but, I felt her role was rather under-developed, especially given its importance to the plot. The rest were cyphers. Famke Jansen I had seen in Model By Day, based on the comic book (yep, she had done a comic book movie before, on tv) and she was fine in it; but, again, her role was under-written . On the villains side, they were mostly just there to fill out numbers; and, quite frankly, Magneto doesn't really need back-up.

The movie is very hit and miss for me, though more hit than miss. I was okay with it, in the theater, though I notice more flaws at home. All of that said, I was happy because it didn't suck. It wasn't Batman or Superman; but, it also wasn't Captain America or the Punisher. The costumes weren't that big of a deal, as they did suggest uniform, which I liked, though a little color would have been nice. There are some accents; but, the lighting rarely showed them off.

As a film, I gave it a B-; it accomplished most of what it set out to do and created a movie universe that could be explored in further detail, as would happen in the sequel.

I was also happy that, even though Wolverine was played by an Australian, they didn't give him an Australian accent, like in Spider-man and His Amazing Friends and Pryde of the X-Men. Still, his Aussie would have been better than the cartoon voice artist. Also glad that when Nightcrawler turned up, he didn't sound like a Peter Lorre-esque pedophile, like in Pryde of the X-Men.

I didn't know what to expect walking into the theatres in 2000. It honestly didn't occur to me that superhero movies could be good. I couldn't imagine them doing anything close to getting X-Men right. I just went to watch it in order to shake my head at it.

And I was blown away.

It opened with a young Magneto during the Holocaust. And then we had Jean Grey and Senator Kelly debating public policy!!! How X-Men is that? And then two perfect actors portraying Professor X and Magneto had this great confrontation scene. Rogue trying to kiss a boy. And then Hugh Jackman as Wolverine was perfect.

And the emotional scenes work so well. Mostly between Rogue and Wolverine. Little touches like Rogue seeing a mom touching her child's face.

This was X-Men on screen. I hadn't believed it would be possible.

The flaws are thus annoying. Halle Berry did a poor job as storm. The climactic battle was not very good.

But the film was so much better than I expected, so much better than it had any right to be.

And to this day, I think it's better than any live action superhero film that came before it (and only about 10 films since it have surpassed it in my estimation.)

I definitely credit this film with the wave of superhero films since, and think they all owe a lot to X-Men. I think they all draw from it and stand in its shadow.

And its flaws would thus get replicated. Climactic battles would prove hard for lots of otherwise great superhero films.

And X-Men is in fact still ahead of the curve in having a great villain in Ian McKellan. The 54 films to come out since have no more than 5 truly great villains between them.

I watched this film over and over again and thought to myself, "If they could just do this again, but clean up a few bits, you'd have a perfect superhero film." And, sure enough, they did just that two years later...

He was and is a favorite director of mine. Usual Suspects remains one of my 5 favorite films ever and I had been quite excited to learn he'd be directing X-Men.

I considered choosing him a ray of hope in a project I was otherwise trepidatious about.

In hindsight, I'm more than a little ashamed I didn't touch upon this. Definitely my favorite scene from the film, and I was really upset when they re-shot it for First Class.

I was only kidding.  You set yourself up so well with that comment about authenticity that I had to go for it.     Actually, I tend to agree with you that the Raimi films were quite faithful to the original material.  Still, I find the webshooters to be an odd choice.  From what I've read online, Raimi justified the choice by saying that it was more plausible that he developed organic webshooters, that it was too unbelievable that a kid could develop a wonder adhesive that was more advanced than something 3M could create.  He lost me at that point.  I mean, of all the things that he deemed to be implausible, that he would focus on the webshooters was rather arbitrary if you ask me.  After all, a superhero movie is going to have a multiplicity of implausible things.  

Really, the most implausible part for me is that his web shooting power wouldn't come out of his butt