Throughout 1994 Walker produced two drafts of his screenplay. The second, dated October 17 of that year, begins with Magneto and his Brotherhood of Mutants (Toad, Blob, and Sabretooth) bringing the Citicorp building in New York crumbling to the ground like a house of cards. The massive death toll and ensuing panic brings about a wave of hate crimes directed towards mutants all over the country. The government calls for all mutants to register, and after hearing her adopted parents discuss the matter teenage Jubilee runs away from home. Meanwhile, the Brotherhood attacks an armored car carrying new member Juggernaut to Riker’s Island, though their plans are interrupted by the arrival of the X-Men: Cyclops, Jean Grey, Beast, and the youngest team member Iceman. The battle ends in defeat when Juggernaut escapes from his mighty confines and the Brotherhood escapes, leaving all but Jean beaten to hell.
Professor Xavier is introduced on page 15 as he watches a Senate session on C-SPAN concerning the perceived mutant threat, and in particular the mysterious “X-Men” who refuse to be registered. Cyclops enters and the discussion turns to a certain mutant who works as an agent for the Canadian government. His name is Logan but he operates in the field as “Wolverine”. After deciding to give up one dangerous line of work for another (James Hudson, a.k.a. Guardian of Alpha Flight, makes a cameo in this part of the story), Logan goes searching for clues to unravel a past he can only recall in flashes. Xavier, Cyclops, and Jean approach him about joining their team, which he initially refuses. Later Cyclops, Jean., and Iceman literally run into the homeless Jubilee while she is fleeing from security guards in a mall. They accept the wayward girl into their ranks. Logan decides to reconsider Xavier’s offer after a brutal fight with his old partner-in-espionage Sabretooth in a ritzy Niagara Falls restaurant lands the adamantium-clawed one in the drink.
Though Logan proves to have the right skills necessary to be one of the X-Men, Cyclops distrusts the man’s motivations and the occasional tendency to unleash an unpredictable beserker attack, as Logan does during his first Danger Room session. But the professor is willing to accept the risk as Magneto and the Brotherhood’s attacks on New York reach critical mass and all-out war between mankind and mutantkind becomes increasingly inevitable. Non-mutant X-villains Henry Gyrich and Bolivar Trask are also brought into the mix to illustrate the lengths those who fear mutants will go to in order to justify their bigotry and then eradicate that which they irrationally despise. Magneto secretly approaches Gyrich to turn over Xavier and his team, leading to the capture of Beast. After making an overture to become the new leader of the X-Men ends badly, Logan successfully tracks down Beast and brings him back to Xavier’s mansion. While the professor is trying help Logan unlock his past by entering his mind, the others realize that Beast was implanted with a tracking device that brings Gyrich’s forces to their front yard. Among them are two Sentinels (one red, one black) that launch a devastating assault on the mansion. The professor and Jubilee manage to lure one into the Danger Room and crush it with a battering ram, and the other is disarmed by Wolverine and finished off by one of Cyclops’ optic blasts.
During the battle Magneto seizes the chance to take over Manhattan (while offering to compensate the mayor by paying for the island what the Indians received – a chest full of beads and trinkets). The island is evacuated and the X-Men, now with Logan as an official member, head for the city to meet their enemies in an epic confrontation. Against the professor’s orders Jubilee covertly tags along in order to prove her own worth to the rest of the team.
Over the course of 127 pages Walker delivers a rousing comic book adventure with everything the fans have come to expect from a great X-Men story well told: widescreen action, emotion, solid character development, and embedded social commentary. He bases the narrative around Wolverine’s quest to recover his past, but does not allow the fan favorite mutant superhero to dominate the proceedings. Some of the dialogue tends to fall into cheesy action flick one-liner territory, thought that’s a modest flaw in the grand scheme of things. With the exception of Chris Claremont’s monumental run on the various X-titles, the comics were never loved for their witty and hyper-literate dialogue. Besides, compared to the script for X-Men: The Last Stand Walker’s draft is on the intellectual level of Paddy Chayefsky.
Walker doesn’t just put the X-Men through a string of blockbuster action set pieces; at times he manages to nail the team dynamic better than it has ever been portrayed in a movie, particularly the heated rivalry between Cyclops and Wolverine. He also injects some unexpected heart and soul into the material. To wit, in one scene that takes place after Beast has been taken into custody and tortured for information, Xavier finally breaks his silence to the others about the true identity of Magneto and his plans to make mutants the dominant species on the planet. Logan questions Cyclops’ ability to lead the team and insists on a democratic vote. Cyclops remains team leader by just one vote, but later it is revealed that he cast his vote for Logan. “You should believe in yourself as much as the others do”, the professor tells him, before he voices his own guilt at not being able to help his friend Beast. Emotional and character beats such as that have not exactly been common in the X-Men movies made so far.
The action scenes would have required a huge budget and a ton of nifty visual effects – both practical and digital – to kick ass on the big screen. At the time only Warner Bros. had a bankable superhero franchise with the Batman movies, though the studio was also trying desperately to get their Superman series back on track. Summer event movies were becoming increasingly expensive by the year, but the Walker-scripted X-Men could have been made on a budget that would have not drained Fox’s coffers nor looked cheap and cheesy as a finished product, but only as long as the money was spent wisely.
