Summary
When scraping the bottom of the barrel what is there to do but move on to the next decade.
At first when I saw Disney were resurrecting this old and beloved series I thought to myself this would be little more than a cynical effort in brand exploitation. However, upon watching it I found there to be a lot of elements to like, in many senses this series felt like an X-Men comic book come to life. A number of iconic X-Men moments where depicted in the series for the first time and they were done justice to.
Personally the nostalgia factor was not there during my time with the show as whilst I grew up on X-Men cartoons for me it was Evolution that was my go to X-Men fix.
Something that hampered my enjoyment of the show was how it would jump around in structure, in one episode we would follow the main team but in the next a side story. To me this felt disjointed and often killed excitement I may have had between episodes.
Another thing that somewhat affected the series for me was its allegiance to current year identity politics. We had characters that were non binary, and I am no Morph expert but I do not believe the character was called this in the comics as this is a modern term. As such I believe it was included to tick a box which is the cheapest and laziest form of representation. The series also focuses heavily on the characters feelings towards Wolverine which as a side character this felt odd. The Scott and Jean relationship of which is central to the X-Men lore got less screen time and plot consideration, this could only be done in a tokenistic effort to show diversity on to appease bluehead people online.
Overall, whilst it was nice to see classic X-Men moments on the screen for the first time it was undercut by a need to appease identity politics and the structural issues with the episodes which I found jarring.
3/5
Pros.
Classic moments
A number of good action set pieces
Some fun to be hard
Cons.
Identity politics
Odd pacing and structure
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