I had no intention of writing as much as I did. Sorry to those who choose to slog through it, but Eddie got my brain-gears turning.

I haven't seen Days of Future Past yet, I'm going this weekend and I'm looking forward to it, based on the trailers. In the run-up to it I rewatched all the X-Men movies, because I hadn't seen any of the first trilogy since 2006 and I hadn't seen First Class since the theater. I figured it would do me some good to refamiliarize myself before DoFP rewrote everything. My memory of the films were that they were all quite good, with Last Stand not being as bad as people say, and about on par with the first one, which was decent, and then X2 and First Class being very good films.

After the rewatch, my feeling is that there's really only one worthwhile film in the bunch, and that's X2. The rest are pretty mediocre.

Let me start by saying that I never read the comics. I was a DC kid, not by choice, that's just how my tastes tended to skew. I picked up one issue of X-Men when I was about eight, and there were three different storylines with like fifteen different characters set on Earth and possibly also a desert planet of some kind maybe? I was completely unable to grasp the story and thus abandoned X-Men altogether. Before that I had seen the animated series a bit, but I was never a loyal viewer.

So I don't care how faithful they are to the comics at all, and I have no idea what riches they haven't yet mined. I'm observing them strictly as a series of films.

X-Men is a decent introduction. It establishes the world pretty clearly and efficiently, sets up Xavier and Magneto and their central conflict, and introduces us to Wolverine. That's about it. The plot is comic booky in a very dopey way, and Magneto's plot is scientifically... not science at all, which I find jarring in a series that plays it as straight as this one does. Any character who's not Wolverine, Rogue, or Magneto receives little to no development. And it's HEAVILY coated in the style of the time, with the Matrix-y leather and wire-fu action, like you said. Wolverine swinging around on Lady Liberty's hat hasn't aged nearly as gracefully as bullet time.

X-2 is a really good action film. It's got a better sense of pace than the first, Bryan Singer's more confident with the action, and all the set-up is out of the way. Wolverine gets more development, Jean and Storm are actually kind of given something to do, and Nightcrawler is a great addition to the cast. It's still a big dumb blockbuster, but it's very well made and entertaining. I could nitpick the movie on little things, and certainly did while watching, but it's solid.

The Last Stand... I still don't hate it. I still don't think it's MUCH worse than the first film, and most of the faults I don't believe are due to Brett Ratner. I don't know why he's so vilified, he's a perfectly competent, workmanlike filmmaker. On a scene-by-scene basis, there's really not much overtly BAD about the movie. But it's an hour and twenty minutes of set-up, and then twenty minutes of "final battle" action that the franchise, and certainly the film itself, hasn't earned. There's no real plot that's ever put in motion, and the decision to tackle both the Dark Phoenix story and the cure is baffling, as they have no impact upon one another. In my memory version of the film I had Wolverine stabbing Jean with the cure to stop her from Dark Phoenixing all over the island, but there's not even that. Dude just stabs her with his wrist-knives.

First Class, as I said, I remembered as being a pretty strong film. However watching it with the context of the series fresher in my mind... I didn't really enjoy it too much. I think my primary dissatisfaction stems from the lack of clarity on what it wants to be. It breaks continuity with previous films so frequently that it feels like it's trying to be a reboot, but it's written like a prequel. This is a problem I have with most prequels (looking at you, The Hobbit), where they're not trying to function as an introduction to the world for the benefit of later chronological viewings, they function under the assumption that everybody has already seen the first films. For example Cerebro, they don't explain it nearly as well as X-Men does, because you've seen X-Men and they've already established it. But they change it from being something Xavier and Magneto work on together to something McCoy has already built. And the film is just riddled with things like that. Even the relationships between characters are established through shorthand, but they've so radically changed the nature of those relationships with decisions such as having Mystique and Xavier be essentially foster siblings. It's confused and confusing.

On top of that, the film lacks a genuine throughline in the plot, and so many scenes feel like treading water. Kevin Bacon's hammy brand of villainy is at odds with the work Fassbender and McAvoy are doing. There are so many moments that exist just to tick boxes, like Xavier getting paralyzed. It's messily handled, it comes out of nowhere, it has no impact, and it's wholly unnecessary to the story they're telling. Plus it means the friendship Charles and Erik frequently refer to in the other films lasted all of a week. It's a deeply flawed movie with an amazing cast, stellar production design, and slick direction.

And if I'm being really petty, there are some godawful visual effects in the film.

That was the big surprise of my rewatch, was how far First Class fell. I genuinely think it may be the weakest of the X-Men films. Though now I question the value of the X-Men film franchise overall. Even the spin-offs, Origins was hot garbage and The Wolverine was two-thirds of a great Clint Eastwood film that turned into a Wolfenstein level at the end. And not in a good way.

I think DOFP works on it's own as a movie.  I enjoyed it.  But in terms of living up to te theme, that's where the digression occurs, I think.

First Class is like half of a fantastic movie, and then half of a lame teen movie. Any time it's Magneto or Xavier doing stuff, it's fantastic, but then all the side-mutants it introduces really suck, and Jennifer Lawrence is AWFUL. I think she's a terrible Mystique, and the writing of the character does her no favors.

Still, you get great moments like Magneto lifting the submarine. Probably my favorite beat from any of these movies.