Since the first X-Men set up the characters, there is no need for exposition, X2 gets directly into the story and throws us into an amazing experience. It opens up with a daring attack on the president by Nightcrawler, who can teleport and is extremely hard to catch. After the attack the X-Men scatter and try to catch Nightcrawler and learn about who sent him and why. As they try to get Nightcrawler before the authorities do, General William Stryker convinces the president to allow him to put an end to Professor Xaviers mutant training facility. That is as much of the plot as I will give away because X2 is an experience you should go into as fresh as possible.

In X2, we are showed more of the X-Men universe by introducing new mutants, such as Nightcrawler, Pyro, Lady Deathstrike, and also takes us more into the mythology of the returning X-Men. Its brilliant how director Bryan Singer and screenwriters Dan Harris and Michael Dougherty stay true to the comics but also change the storyline to make a good movie. What makes the X-Men movies so much better than any other Marvel Comics film adaptation is how it makes the characters and their universe more realistic, but also tries to incorporate as much as possible from the source material. There are no tight spandex-like costumes like what Spider-Man, Batman and Superman wore, theres realistic dialogue between the characters, and the show how the world would probably react if there were mutants i.e. prejudice and hatred.

X2 also has very good special effects.  Spider-Man and Blade (in Blade II) both looked cartoonish and this hurt both of those films credibility in my opinion.  Not that the special effects look totally real but they look far more realisitc than any blockbuster in a long while.  In one scene there is an obvious use of miniatures that looks very real, it's obvious not because it looks poorly executed but that it would look faker if done by computers.  The powers of each mutant look as if they would if they were real.  For instance, Pyro's flames look more like actual fire than any other use of CGI flames I have ever seen.  Iceman, Cyclops, Colossus and Jean Grey's execution of their powers all look exactly as I imagined them to look.

This movie also makes a lot of smart references to other X-Men who are not in this movie.  There hard to pick out but X2 points out many characters from the comics that we hope will make it into X3.  Since Halle Berry proabably won't come back there's all the more room for Beast or fan favorite Gambit.

My only gripe with this movie is that with all the characters involved in the story; the film loses track of all of them. This isnt a huge problem for me because its not about each indvidual but about the team. For example, Cyclops is barely in this movie, and as leader of the X-Men his part should be substantial. With the caliber of actors in X2, one would hope that they would all get to shine but that film would be quite longer.

X2 is something that movie studios should try to emulate, being smart, fun, and as big as possible; it is a move going treat. Being far superior to the huge disappointment Daredevil and the mega-blockbuster Spider-Man, X2: X-Men United is a great movie going experience.