A couple things to note: Denzel was mid to late thirties when he played this role, which I think wasn’t a great fit - he appears too old and mature in his mannerisms in the younger scenes, that it felt forced, although he was appropriately aged in the last third. Denzel is well cast overall because he, like X, has an internal rage against the white man (other than Denzel the only actor who stood out to me was a relatively minor role played by Delroy Lindo); unlike X, though, Denzel sublimates his rage (or rather, a contained, disciplined antagonism toward the white institutional order he had to operate within) - his basic psychology seems to me to be as follows: "Yes, I live in a white man's world, it's biased against blacks, I don't like it but I can't change it, I want to have a positive impact and will do what i can in the roles I can get, that requires timing, patience, and strategy, and that revealing my resentment would cut against the positive effects I want to have”. One may note that he named his child born in 1991 during filming Malcolm…

To continue this point further, I have a feeling that I don't really like Denzel, because from my perspective he accepts a degree of internal compromise in exchange for access, reach, and institutional stability; he self-censors, and he plays the game without effectuating real change. But I do see the tradeoffs here; he is able to effectuate reach in a way that would otherwise be denied him, he is successful and famous, it works for his psyche in that he didn't implode under contradiction (unlike, say, Mel Gibson, whose refusal to sublimate eventually erupted in uncontrolled disclosure). It has taken me a pretty significant degree of personal development to see the strengths and tradeoffs of his perspective.

And this is another benefit of a limit condition God image of Abraxas - if one can put oneself in another's shoes and dispassionately assess the tradeoffs of their psyche’s compared to one’s own, how does one really even understand what is "good" versus "bad" or "evil" in this context? It becomes largely situation dependent, so the categories themselves enter a gray area, they collapse in distinction to an extent. This is not nihilism or moral relativism; rather, it reframes judgment as tragic and situational rather than metaphysically absolute. Judgments take on a much more subdued and dispassionate tone if one sees the God image itself as a combination of all good and all evil - because under the privatio boni (God as all good), one perspective would be “right” and others would be “wrong” and sentenced to Hell, so the metaphysical stakes are so much higher.

Roger Ebert thought this was his #1 film of 1992, and Martin Scorsese thought it was one of the top 10 films of the 1990s, but from a technical and story standpoint this is really not the case; it was overlong, didn’t take enough risks, and stuck too close to the source material. They gave it this rating I think due to the arc of X himself and because it grappled with the race issue in ways that hadn’t really been done before in film, rewarding cultural-symbolic importance, not cinematic risk or execution, but the film itself was, overall, to me perhaps a 6/10.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5826614&forum_id=2...id.#49618717)