Fox's X-Men Universe

X-Men

Film · 2000 · 104 minutes · Original Trilogy

In a world where mutants are feared and distrusted by ordinary humans, Senator Robert Kelly campaigns for a Mutant Registration Act that would force all mutants to publicly identify themselves, alarming both Professor Charles Xavier, who runs a school training young mutants to coexist peacefully with humanity, and Magneto, a Holocaust survivor who believes conflict between mutants and humans is inevitable. Rogue, a teenager whose touch drains the life force and memories of anyone she contacts, flees home and falls in with Wolverine, an amnesiac mutant with retractable claws and a healing factor; after an attack by Magneto's enforcer Sabretooth, the pair are brought to Xavier's school. Magneto's Brotherhood of Mutants abducts Senator Kelly to Genosha and uses him as an unwilling test subject for a mutagenic device, while separately building a second, larger machine atop the Statue of Liberty to convert the human world leaders gathered nearby at a UN summit into mutants. Because performing the transfer himself would kill him given his age, Magneto instead kidnaps Rogue to use her power-draining ability to channel his own energy into the machine. Xavier's X-Men — including Cyclops, Jean Grey, and Storm — race to the Statue of Liberty to stop the device and save Rogue before it kills her. The X-Men prevail, rescuing Rogue and defeating the Brotherhood, and the film ends with an uneasy truce as Magneto is imprisoned in a plastic cell, setting up the franchise's ongoing conflict between his and Xavier's opposing visions for mutantkind.