X2: X-Men United

Director Bryan Singer
2003
RT rating: 88%
My Rating 9/10 (I'm adding my ratings to these too)

As I referenced in the X-Men post, Bryan Singer was able to usher in era were comic book heroes not named Batman or Superman could be successful at the box office too. With X2, Singer set the stage for comic book movies being able to move beyond the basic good versus evil format.
The film features 3 opposing forces. Like the original you have Professor X and his X-Men and Magneto and his brotherhood, but the film adds William Striker as the leading forces for homo-sapiens in their presumed fight for survival against mutants. Playing Striker with a calculated brilliance is Bryan Cox who is unmerciful in his approach to mutant extinction without ever being over the top. Striker's plan is to build his own cerebro from information he got out of an imprisoned Magneto and use his sons powers to eliminate mutants once and for all.
Of course, this creates a mutual enemy for all mutants and as the film begins to move into motion we see both sides put into an uncomfortable alliance. This alliance allows for some great secondary debate between the two sides about their ability to co-exist with regular humans.
This type of debate and the fact that there is as much effort put into the story and characters as there is into the special effects and fight scenes is what I love about X2. Films like Fantastic Four or Mission Impossible 2 fail because they are more concerned with the flash and don't put the same effort into the story they are telling. Singer also deserves credit for his very calculated approach to adding characters into the story. He could easily have over saturated the film with new characters (including characters fans may truly have wanted) but he is very careful about who he brings in because he does not want to stunt the growth of the characters he has already introduced. In particular, two characters introduced/developed that I love are Pyro and Ice Man, whose stories are  great as we see a new generation falling on opposite sides of the mutant debate.
In later years films like Spider Man 2 and The Dark Knight would pass X2 in terms of relevance and box office results, but watching this one again I am reminded how good this was and I feel strongly again that Singer deserves a great deal of credit in terms of establishing a successful formula for starting a super-hero franchise.