It has been over twenty years since X-Men The Movie was released. I remember seeing it at the time and being impressed. Not blown away, but impressed. Perhaps my memory has been altered in the past few decades, but in general, I remember thinking at the time that something had substantially changed. Something that had formed a part of my childhood was now an important part of popular culture. It might be hard to remember, but at the time, comic books were still fringe pop culture for nerds and children, not big business.
So rather than talk about the contents of the movie, I am going to make a statement that might be oversimplified and that some people might not totally agree with, but that most people reading this will think is a reasonable statement: this movie was the beginning of the modern comic book movie, and all of the success of the major superhero films, based on Marvel and DC characters, stem from the success of this movie.
There had been comic book movies before, going back to World War II, including ones with the Marvel Comics character Captain America. Superman: The Movie, released in 1978, was a big budget movie that was released to critical and commercial success, and spawned a mini-franchise. The 1989 Batman movie was also a critical and commercial success, and had actors like Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson in it, and also spawned a series of sequels. Marvel Comics also had the Blade movie, which was also commercially successful and had sequels. There were television shows, as well. Taking comic book characters and making movies out of them was not a new idea.
But for whatever reason, this movie was the turning point from super-hero movies being a niche and sporadic thing, often done with low budgets and with camp appeal, to the genre being a regular source of blockbusters, many of which are considered to have artistic merits. It would be a few more years until the Marvel Cinematic Universe kicked into gear, but this film was the turning point.
And it is difficult to say exactly why that was. The X-Men movie did have a certain gravitas to it, starring such actors as Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen. It also was a step-up in special effects and artistic design. Nothing in it looked like the rubber suit characters of many previous movies or television shows. It wasn't perfect, there was some bad dialogue and I imagine the special effects haven't all aged well, but in general it was a well-produced package that was true to the source material, but accessible to outsiders. And that is why, twenty years later, whatever the specific merits or faults of the movie, it was the watershed moment in the formation of what is now one of the main genres of commercial movies.