With X-Men: Days of Future Past breathing down our necks as the third superhero movie in a two-month span, Hit Me with Your Best Shot does a bit of time traveling all its own. Nathaniel R’s selection for tonight is the first X-Men, the movie that kicked off the present superhero fad 14 years ago, and the subject of the very first episode of HMWYBS, so long ago that The Film Experience wasn’t even at its current home.
I wasn’t playing along yet at that point, so I get to take advantage of this rerun to share my pick for the best shot of a movie which, across such a huge gulf of time (14 years is about what, three generations in pop culture?), has a sort of elegance and classicism that makes it seem downright artsy compared the later films in the genre it birthed. Director Bryan Singer and cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel use their pointedly limited color palette (blues, blacks, browns) and anamorphic widescreen frame with deliberation and care uncommon in 21st Century popcorn movies (though, strictly speaking, X-Men is a 20th Century popcorn movie). It’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but there’s a gratifying level of restraint and human-sized filmmaking, perhaps a reflection of the time the film was made – CGI wasn’t as ready and cheap and 2000 as it was even just a couple of years later. The resultis a film that has aged unexpectedly well (when I last saw it in 2006, I didn’t care for it nearly as much as I did now) as superhero movies have gotten bigger, noisier, busier, full of higher stakes, and altogether more generic. And this isn’t even the good Bryan Singer X-Men picture.
Anyway, the film is positively laden with dramatic blockbuster-style images, the kind that are very impressed with their own dramatic weight and mood, but still work for communicating ideas in a blunt, burly way. It’s filmmaking that’s longer on iconography than sophistication and grace, but that’s exactly the right fit for a superhero movie, wouldn’t you say? Shots that go “WUMPH!”, and not shots that sneak in and tap on the shoulder.
And with that, here is the WUMPH that I picked:
If the film has a protagonist, it’s Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine; and while this is not the first shot in which Wolverine appears (Singer has a fetish in this movie for introducing characters in the background of shots), it is the first shot that is “about” Wolverine. Here we find him pounding back something alcoholic in between bouts as a steel cage fighter, which is, we gather, how he gets all his money.
X-Men, thematically, is about feeling isolated because of who you are, and finding comfort and acceptance with those who understand what that isolation feels like. And as such, it has all sorts of metaphorical expressions of that isolation, whether narrative (secondary protagonist Rogue, played by Anna Paquin, and her inability to touch other people without killing them), or visual, such as the final shot in which former friends Erik Lehnsherr (Ian McKellen) and Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) are divided by the fact that Erik present lives in a plastic cube hovering in the middle of a giant empty room. Or, of course, in this shot, where we meet Wolverine as a caged animal. Theoretically, this use of his powers in the service of earning a living and supporting himself could be read as a fine act of self-sufficiency and behaving within the limits one was born with, but the impact of this “here’s Wolverine” shot says otherwise: the life he is living has trapped him. X-Men depicts the process by which he learns how not to live in that cage; beyond this one character, the film – the whole trilogy, for that matter – is about the desire to live with freedom outside of the prison that has been both self-inflicted and elected by outside society. Three whole films exist as an attempt to repudiate this image; to allow characters like Wolverine to exist without cages and without the psychological torments that lead to that glass of booze. It’s never explicitly referenced again, but it’s a shot that lingers symbolically for a long time after, and that’s what made it my easy pick for, if not necessarily the “best” thing in the film, then maybe the most resonant.