MARVEL-OUS WILL MOVIE AUDIENCES TAKE `X-MEN' SERIOUSLY?

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

The big question looming over today's release of the $75 million ``X- Men'' is whether audiences will go for the serious notions director Bryan Singer (``The Usual Suspects,'' ``Apt Pupil'') threads through the movie's outlandish superhero action. Can discourses on tolerance, responsibility and identity play to a public that's been overcamped in recent years by the purely escapist antics of the comic book-derived characters The Mask, Men in Black and Batman?

Funnily enough, the same question came up nearly 40 years ago, when Marvel Comics editor Stan Lee created the then-revolutionary concept of introspective superheroes with super problems: The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man and, toward the end of that medium-changing creative burst, the original X-Men.

`I'd always wanted to do intelligent comic books, but my publisher wouldn't let me,'' explains the forever-young Lee, who began writing comics in the late 1930s and is still creating costumed characters on his popular new Internet site, stanlee.net. ``He felt that comic books were for very young kids. By 1961, I'd had it up to here and was ready to quit. But then he asked me to create a superhero team, and my wife suggested that I write the new book the way I wanted to.''

The Fantastic Four became an immediate hit due in large part to its psychologically tormented characters and their soap operatic relationships. Two years later, X-Men enhanced that basic concept with a layer of reference to the civil rights movement that was sweeping the nation. The heroes - Cyclops, Jean Grey (a k a Marvel Girl) and several others who were replaced over the decades - were mutants, born with special powers that made them outcasts feared and hated by normal Homo sapiens. They were organized by the wheelchair-dependent telepath Professor Xavier to harness their powers for the good of ungrateful mankind ... a task complicated by the fact that Xavier's former friend and fellow mutants rights advocate, Magneto, had a countergroup of disgruntled superfolks bent on conquering the world.

In Singer's film version, the basic conflict between Professor X's good guys and Magneto's evil Mutant Brotherhood drives the plot. But the prejudiced subplot is prominently emphasized, with a reactionary senator trying to curtail mutants' rights and two X initiates, Hugh Jackman's angry drifter Wolverine and Anna Paquin's confused teen-age Rogue, encountering substantial fear and loathing from people who just don't understand.

``I took making this film every bit as seriously as I take making any film,'' notes Singer who, though initially unfamiliar with the X-Men mythos, studied it with characteristic intensity. And there's the trick. Singer says balancing the film's contemplative and adrenal elements was an intuitive exercise, but one that required being as true as possible to the comic's spirit.

``As long as everything serves the story and nothing eclipses it, then it's all good, it's all exciting, and that's how one keeps a balance,'' says Singer, who worked on the movie's script with a good half-dozen writers. ``There needs to be conflict and, with all the powers, there's spectacle. The action serves the characters and the characters serve the action, and it all, hopefully, serves the story.''

While there's certainly irony in the notion that big-budget action movies have grown so degraded that it's a trick to keep them true to more intelligent comic books, Lee admits it was just as tough when he was trying to sell magazines at 12 cents a pop back in the '60s.

``The more realism you can inject into a fantasy story, the better it is,'' Lee explains. ``I always tried to get into the psyche of the characters that I wrote, but there was only so much that you could do of that in a comic book. I would come up with a concept for a story, make sure it had a compelling villain and a struggle that would interest the reader. Then I had to have another angle - the B plot - which was the hero's personal problem. Then I had to make sure there'd be excuses for enough action. Finally, having done all that, I'd throw in the soul-searching parts of it while everything else was going on.''

The genre, obviously, has its conventions. And X-Men has specific expectations. Among the most discussed aspects of Singer's movie on X-fan Web sites was the decision to replace the heroes' trademark, colorful costumes with basic black leather duds.

``What I needed was to find a happy medium, a style that was sexy but at the same time durable and practical,'' Singer explains. ``If we had gone into the variety of colors and everything, I think you would have found that everybody looked, on-screen, like cheerleaders or Power Rangers. The elegance would be lost.''

Lee concurs (for the record, the original X-Men, as conceived by Lee and artist Jack Kirby, wore uniforms that were matched for drabness only by the Fantastic Four's. It was later X incarnations by other writers and artists that went in for Spandex overkill).

``Bryan absolutely did the right thing,'' Lee's convinced. ``These characters would have looked silly prancing around in color costumes. You can get away with that in a comic book, but a movie has to look real.''

Lee's not including the ultra-stylized Batman films which, like the Superman series of a decade or so earlier, were based on a franchise owned by DC Comics, Marvel's arch-competitor of more than six decades.

DC has long had better luck at bringing its characters to the big screen. Some of that is undoubtedly due to the fact the publisher is owned by the same company as Warner Bros., the studio which has produced most DC- derived films, while free-standing Marvel has always had to shop movie rights to outside entities.

But could the fact that Marvel's heroes are generally more complex also have worked against their success in the lowest-common-denominator action movie arena? ``X-Men's'' fate will provide something of an answer, but the man who complicated comics forevermore has a much simpler view of the situation.

``Look, the first 'Batman' was an interesting movie, crazy, but well done,'' Lee admits. ``I think every movie stands on its own, whether it was taken from a comic book or not. It just depends on how well you do the picture.''

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7 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) WOLVERINE

(2 -- cover -- color) STORM

(3 -- cover -- color) PROFESSOR XAVIER

(4 -- cover -- color) JEAN GREY

(5 -- cover -- color) CYCLOPS

(6) ``X-Men's'' James Marsden stars as Cyclops, a mutant superhero with the power to destruct large objects with an energy beam that is emitted from his eyes.

(7) Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), left, Storm (Halle Berry), Cyclops (Marsden) and Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) prepare to battle the evil Magneto and his crew.