X-Men

X-Men (2000) — Mutants are people born with a genetic difference that manifests at puberty as a superhuman ability. Charles Xavier runs a school that shelters and trains them and advocates coexistence. Erik Lehnsherr / Magneto, a Holocaust survivor who controls magnetism, believes coexistence is a fantasy and prepares for war. They were friends. That relationship is the spine of the entire franchise.

The plot turns on Rogue, a runaway whose power — absorbing life force, memory and ability through skin contact — makes her untouchable in the most literal sense. Magneto abducts her to power a machine that converts humans into mutants, intending to force acceptance by making the world's leaders into the thing they fear. The process is fatal to the person driving it, which is why he needs her rather than himself.

The X-Men stop him at the Statue of Liberty. The film establishes the shape of everything that follows: Xavier and Magneto as friends who agree entirely about the danger and completely about nothing else, and Wolverine as the outsider who has no memory of his own past and therefore no stake in either argument until he chooses one.