X-Men at 25 is more relevant than ever

There’s much to love about this film, including plenty of memorable standout scenes; seven of our favorites are featured below. It’s got stellar casting, snappy dialogue, and breaks up the action with quieter character moment that advance the story without slowing the pace. X-Men also takes pains to establish key relationships: Charles and Magneto, Rogue and Wolverine, and the romantic triangle of Jean, Cyclops, and Wolverine. We care about these characters: their isolation, their pain at being feared and rejected because they’re different, and the different ways they process those feelings.

Despite humanity’s poor treatment of them, our mutant heroes are still willing to risk their lives to save an ungrateful humanity. That’s what makes them heroes, even if it might be easier to believe that Magneto and the Brotherhood’s open hostility to humans is justified. (“Mankind has always feared what it doesn’t understand.”) X-Men is hardly subtle about delivering its core message. The film pits bigotry and fear towards a targeted “other” vs. striving for acceptance and peaceful coexistence, unapologetically championing the latter. If any of that sounds suspiciously “woke”—well, as with Superman, it’s not the film that’s changed.

Without further ado, here are our seven favorite scenes in X-Men:

Young Eric at Auschwitz

X-Men wastes no time setting up its primary theme. The very first scene takes place in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1944, where a young Erik Lehnsherr and his parents are being herded into a concentration camp by soldiers in the rain. Erik is separated from his parents, and the sight of his wailing mother being dragged away causes a distressed Erik to try to rejoin them. He’s restrained by soldiers and his intensifying emotions unleash his mutant ability. He can manipulate magnetic fields, bending the metal gates keeping him from his parents into an “X” before the soldiers knock him unconscious.

Erik becomes Magneto, and those early experiences in the concentration camp indelibly shaped his character and world view, fueling his nefarious plans for mutants to displace humans as the dominant species on Earth. Lest we miss the point, the very next scene is Charles Xavier and Magneto listening to anti-mutant members of Congress calling for a Mutant Registration Act. Magneto insists that he knows firsthand where all this will inevitably lead; Charles counters that humans have changed for the better, perfectly encapsulating how these former friends turn into reluctant adversaries.