When we look back on the 20th Century Fox X-Men franchise now, after it went out with a whimper in Dark Phoenix and The New Mutants, it’s a mixed bag. It has some of the greatest comic book movies ever made, like Logan and Deadpool and Days of Future Past. From X-Men: The Last Stand on, that series became very hit-and-miss. But the first two movies remain near-flawless masterpieces of the genre. It can’t be overstated just how impactful and influential they were on the burgeoning superhero film. Without those early X-Men movies, we wouldn’t have the MCU, and they still hold up today.
X-Men worked as both a comic book nerd’s dream (except for the black leather suits) and a solid introduction for casual audiences, and then X2 blew it out of the water with a Dark Knight-level, Spider-Man 2-level classic of superhero cinema. Those early X-Men movies were full of great dialogue, brought to life by some of the world’s finest actors. You had Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, James Marsden, Anna Paquin — it was an embarrassment of riches — and, of course, the two crown jewels in that ensemble were Sirs Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen as the Marvel universe’s opposing mutant rights leaders, Professor X and Magneto.
Stewart nailed his delivery of Charles Xavier’s glass-half-full catchphrase, “Just because someone stumbles and loses their way, it doesn’t mean they’re lost forever,” and he has me in floods of tears every time with his deathbed monologue in Logan. Xavier had plenty of memorable quotes in those X-Men movies, made even more memorable by Stewart’s pitch-perfect line readings. But the greatest quote in X-Men movie history wasn’t delivered by Stewart’s Xavier; it was spoken by McKellen’s Magneto in Days of Future Past, and summed up both of their characters, and their ongoing, decades-long feud.
X-Men: Days Of Future Past Really Cooked With Magneto’s Most Profound Line
Loosely adapted from the seminal comic book storyline of the same name, X-Men: Days of Future Past sees Wolverine traveling back in time to the 1970s to prevent a chain of events that will lead to the rise of the Sentinels and the extermination of all mutants. When we catch up with Xavier and Magneto in the distant future, they’ve joined forces to protect the last surviving mutants and prevent the extinction of mutantkind.
During a brief respite, Magneto tells his old friend, “All those years wasted fighting each other, Charles… to have a precious few of them back…” It speaks to something deeply human within us all: regret. We often get so swept up in our personal grudges and petty grievances that we fail to see the woods for the trees. Magneto may not have liked how Charles wanted to go about making the world a safe place for mutants, but they would’ve been much better off working together toward that common goal than fighting against each other — and he can only see that years later, when it’s much too late to make up for lost time.
McKellen nails his jaded delivery of this line. He’s always brought just the right gravitas to his line readings, and it went a long way toward selling the weight of all the Tolkien exposition he had to convey in The Lord of the Rings. You might not understand all the gobbledygook Gandalf is saying about the One Ring, but you understand the graveness in McKellen’s voice and the glint of fear in his eyes.
This is the greatest line in X-Men movie history, because it highlights the dramatic conflict at the core of the X-Men story. After all these years, all this needless bloodshed, Magneto is reflecting on the futility of his conflict with Professor X and the X-Men, and wondering what it was all for.