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X-Men: First Class: A Chess Match Between Powerful Personalities Fuels a Brilliant Superhero Drama

By Peter Simek |
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The same thing that makes prequels of any well-known or well-loved movie franchise attractive also presents something of a shortcoming. So much of the fun of X-Men: First Class is seeing how its writers set the stage for later drama. How will X-Men guru Professor Xavier lose his ability to walk? What makes super-villain Magneto so angry at the world? How did the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters start? Who the heck bought the mutant superheroes their supersonic fighter?

As a result, you could read X-Men: First Class as an exercise in connecting the dots — a drama constricted by its requirement to adequately play out the background detail in the X-Men wiki entry. Certainly there is an appeal to this, and as a formerly avid collector of X-Men comic books, I was satisfied and titillated (and relieved) by how cleverly and creatively the new movie deals with all of these in-crowd fascinations. X-Men proves once again to be a movie franchise of a comic genre that shows fan-boy deference to its own source material. But the real question is whether the movie can perform this fan boy duty and still churn out a drama that can captivate and wow on its own merits?

The answer is an emphatic yes. And in the context of a summer movie market that has been bloated in recent years with comic adaptations, X-Men: First Class shows that you can still make a widely appealing action film that presents a real dramatic core. This movie is a smart, exciting, and dramatically thrilling blockbuster.

The key here is the movie’s central relationship, a fascinating Shakespearean hero-villain dance between Professor Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and the future Magneto, Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender). The two protagonists couldn’t have had different backgrounds. Xavier grew up in a wealthy upper-class enclave in Westchester, New York — a lonely, though privileged youth that eventually led him to PhD studies at Oxford University. Xavier’s brilliance was aided by the adolescent onset of a power telepathic ability, a mutant gift that allows the young man to read and control other people’s minds.

Erik was the son of Jewish parents who were captured by the Nazis during World War II. The young boy’s own mutant ability (to control any metal substance) was recognized by a creepy evil Nazi doctor, Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon). Shaw, who turns out to be a mutant as well, taps into Erik’s power by harnessing the boy’s anger, fueled by the doctor’s murder of the boy’s own mother. Thus the essential rift between Xavier and Erik’s understanding of the purpose of their mutant abilities is forged. Xavier sees the gifted new breed as an asset to the betterment of humanity. Erik takes on the role of the oppressed and the ostracized, seething in a desire for revenge.

If this all sounds like a parable about social outcasts, racism, prejudice, and benevolent acceptance, that’s because it is, but only in part. The shortcoming of the X-Men has always been its tendency towards a one-to-one didacticism about oppression and bolstering the spirits of social misfits (it is little coincidence that the first X-Men comic appeared in 1963). Conversely, the series has succeeded when it uses its own mutant conceit to examine notions of power and judicial responsibility.

McAvoy and Fassbender prove an able onscreen couple. The young McAvoy’s dapper spunk and kinetic loquaciousness plays out in counterpoint to Fassbender’s brooding, and the tension is driven by the sense that the spurned Magneto may turn at any moment. Nonetheless, the two form a friendship, and with some young mutant recruits, they help avert World War III by disrupting the Russian’s shipment of nuclear weapons to Cuba (which in this historical revision was the result of behind-the-scenes manipulation by Shaw, who tries to incite nuclear war to eliminate mankind and establish a super-mutant race).

Sure, there are some weak spots in X-Men: First Class. In general, the entire subplot revolving around Mystique’s (Jennifer Lawrence) acceptance of her own physical appearance and the sputtering romances unfolding between the blue shape-shifter and the bestial Hank (Nicholas Hoult) and Erik prove flush with saccharine chit-chat about accepting yourself. And the youthful mutants can feel silly and frivolous at times.  But despite the fantasy and the over-blown theatrics, what engrosses is the well-developed suspense and the essential struggle between two central protagonists. An action flick about superheroes, X-Men: First Class is no less a psychological chess game between two would-be friends pulled apart by a conflicting worldviews, dispositions forged by inborn temperament and life’s cruel circumstance.

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