Originally Posted by
Castle
X2 though not necessarily needed to talk about in 2003 because it came out at a different time, was a very dark movie, compared to what we have now, The third act X2 is darker than anything from the dark knight trilogy. The moment when that little girl orders Xavier to start killing his own people only for magneto to come and reverse it to start killing humans, that was a very dark moment and one and if not the most deadly planned massacre we have ever seen in a comic film. although both plots are similar,with Joker planing to have two boats one with criminals and non criminals to blow up each other.
The fantastical/Realism lined out in X2 are not equal to anything in Nolan films because Nolan never used any villain or heroes that had super powers and Batman himself had no superpowers, while Bryan Singer could not escaped that in X2 although what he did was ground how they used their powers that it looks almost invincible and very scaled down to another film like ....I don't know ...Endgame.
Jean was Phoenix at the end of X2 but it was just so blurred you have to look well to see the bird's shadow that could be mistaken for an air craft, Magneto and Storm never truly fly like Iron Man or Superman, they just levitate a bit from the ground up in one dimensional space. That was the kind of realism X2 had with superhumans.
Nolan knew his strengths, I think he tried to experiment with the dark knight rises but not everything worked. Still I would say he finished well and left the series with class and dignity unlike Bryan Singer who did not finish well by doing the quite terrible xmen apocalypse and obviously his private life issues.
Black Panther is far off though, it's your standard MCU movie that maybe takes itself more seriously that the rest. The social political stuff in black panther is limited, it never overtakes the comic book stuff, whereas X2 sometimes was called too preachy about it or maybe having too much close parallels with real life events. Nolan's style was maybe more symbolic in social political topics than parallel.