X-MEN: FIRST CLASS

Ah, the things good casting and thoughtful writing can accomplish! Thanks primarily to such, Matthew Vaughn makes X-Men: First Class, the origin story of the Marvel team, a superior action movie with one of the best finales a superhero movie can boast of. Just the cast roll call is enticing: James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender as Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr, the two mutants who combine forces only to become enemies as Professor X and Magneto respectively, Jennifer Lawrence as Raven before she became Mystique, Rose Byrne as Agent MacTaggert, one of the sole trustworthy humans, January Jones as the icy femme fatale Emma Frost, and Kevin Bacon as the mad villain Shaw. Most of the cast had a well established reputation before X-Men, and brought to the movie the sense of class associated with their names. Bacon was, of course, a veteran by then with a talent for playing insane criminals. McAvoy had The Last King of Scotland and Atonement under his belt while Fassbender had garnered applause for his work in Hunger, Fish Tank, and Inglourious Basterds. Lawrence had a Best Actress award to dangle at the young age of twenty from the previous year’s Winter’s Bone and January Jones was making a name for herself on AMC’s Mad Men before being demoted to extra in later seasons. Rose Byrne, who had fought for the planet in Sunshine, gets the more exciting job here of preventing nuclear war with the help of mutants.

            Even such a cast can be wasted, however, but X-Men: First Class offers a story worthy of the names it boasts. Forgetting the zigzagging quality of the earlier films, Vaughn wiped the slate clean, taking us to the creation of the super team. The time is 1962 and amidst the Cold War, paranoia of otherness run high.

            “We are children of the atom,” Shaw says of his generation but mutants, it turns out (and Wolverine explored this two years earlier, taking us back to the Civil War), formed long before then as the next evolutionary step in humanity. X-Men: First Class opens in Poland in 1944 where Erik is a young prisoner in a Nazi camp. His ability to move metal with his mind catches the attention of Shaw, who kills the boy’s mother to learn his secret.

            But it was in the atomic age that mutant births surged and became the subject of public discourse. In the outside world, tensions between the USA and the USSR are at a boiling point. Through the course of the film, the Cuban Missile Crisis will go from social background to climax, but while the Cold War rages, the mutants are fighting battles of their own.

            They can no longer hide their genetic differences (perhaps explaining why half of the X-Men are among the superheroes reluctant to relinquish their identities in the Civil War comics; they want to hold onto what little secrecy they have left) and so decide to use their special abilities for the service of mankind, hopefully winning their trust during a time of fear and global mistrust.

            At least, that’s what Charles Xavier wants. He’s a smart, confident, and has studied genetic mutation extensively while at Oxford. There is no apparent reason for humans to dislike him. Even his adoptive sister Raven (Lawrence) wants only to be accepted for who she is before becoming Mystique. For much of this film, though, she conceals her characteristic blue scales for the look of a classical young beauty. If she must hide her true form, best to conceal it with the look of the all-American beauty.

            Meanwhile, Erik (Fassbender) travels the world hunting down those responsible for the death of his family, but Shaw still eludes him. Unbeknownst to Erik, Shaw is also a mutant capable of absorbing energy. To him mutants are superior beings who can only advance to their fullest potential through the extinction of humans and engaging the USA and USSR in nuclear warfare is a good way to start.

            Ironically, of all the mutants, Erik’s ideology is the most identical to Shaw’s. His experiences in the prison camps have developed into an understandable distrust of humans. Superficially, Erik appears to be Shaw’s natural ally, except for the fact that Shaw killed his mother.

            The X-Men comic books are products of the atomic age and X-Men: First Class makes much use of the movements of the Kennedy years. The Cuban Missile Crisis, of course, becomes the white elephant of the movie as Shaw manipulates generals of different armies to move missiles into Turkey and Cuba as a catalyst to war. But there are other, more nuanced, references. Indeed, the contrasting attitudes toward humans of Xavier and Erik are an almost identical analogy to the ideological clashes between Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King. They unite temporarily as leaders of an oppressed demographic, yet disagree fundamentally on how to handle the group that has oppressed them. Xavier wants mankind to stop fearing mutants; Erik believes no human can be trusted. But Erik is a stand-in for Malcolm X in ways besides the obvious. Besides believing in justifiable violence, he pioneers the concept of ‘mutant and proud’ or ‘mutant is beautiful’. His most touching moment involves his exchange with Mystique in which he encourages her to stop trying to be human and celebrate her natural blue form.

            There are other mutants to tell of. The film’s breeziest sequence features the rounding up of an assortment of mutants, each with unique abilities. It’s a smooth, easy going montage reminiscent of the Animorphs book series for young adults popular in the late 90s which was in itself a Power Rangers knock-off. Among those discovered are Angel, a nightclub dancer with dragonfly wings played by Zoë Kravitz, a mutant dubbed Banshee (Caleb Landry Jones) for his ability to produce ultrasonic waves with his vocal chords, and Havoc (Lucas Till) who operates more or less like an energy sponge. Finally, there is the monkey-pawed scientist (Nicholas Hoult) who will become the Beast precisely for not accepting his true form.

            Agent MacTaggert is the principal good human besides Oliver Platt’s ill-fated CIA operative. Rose Byrne, despite confessing to having no familiarity with the comics when taking the part, turns out to be the ideal modern action heroine. She strikes an endearing combination of classic action girl ingenuity and bewilderment with contemporary feminist fire. She’s in awe of her unusual friends, but needs no rescuing.

            The best thing about X-Men: First Class, and why it’s one of the best movies based on a comic book, is because it takes its material seriously while never forgetting that superhero movies should be fun above all else. This fun was wearing off of the old franchise, so Vaughn disregarded everything that came after the second movie, with the Wolverine movie existing in its own sphere for now, and started fresh righting everything that was going wrong.

Vaughn had been involved with the first films, but when taking the director helm for First Class he said, “This is going to be very different. What I’m doing no one has done in superhero films. It’s James Bond, it’s a political thriller and it’s an X-Men movie. It’s not like the other X-Men movies which I think is important. I think they need to sort of take on a new…you know, what Batman Begins did for all those Batman movies? We bloody well need it.”

            And different it is. His climax, featuring the American and Russian military ships at a standoff in the shores of Cuba, exemplifies everything Vaughn got right. The thrills are real and exciting in that cohesive way so often lacking in popcorn entertainment, but Vaughn never treats his alternate take on history seriously. Human lives are saved and the injuries sustained by the mutants force them into becoming the characters we know so well. If that was the worse to come out of the real Cold War then the creation of Magneto was a small price to pay. But there it is, two mutant allies that became arch enemies due to their regard of humans. Are they Jekyll and Hyde? No, not quite. They are more like two famous leaders of recent history a little closer to home.