Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
6/6/11
The
X-Men superteam created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1963 was the first
of Marvel's comics to receive big-budget big screen treatment thanks to
Bryan Singer's 2000 blockbuster X-Men. It's also proven to
be the most durably intriguing because of all its great characters and
some really cagey casting decisions. So, it was easy to scoff (and
I did), when producer Singer and the 20th Century Fox studio that had killed
off most of the major characters in 2006's underrated X-Men: The
Last Stand announced plans to film an origin story with new actors
in the major roles. Turns out, Professor X and Magneto are even better
characters than I thought, because not only do they survive the transition
from Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen to James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender,
but X-Man: First Class finds oodles of new and fascinating
things to say about them and their friendship-turned-eternal struggle.
Director Matthew Vaughn, who famously dropped out of Last Stand
at the 11th hour, finally gets his turn at the X-helm and turns in a wonderfully
staged retro superhero movie that feels very much like a product of the
60's period in which it's set and speaks to the timeless dichotomy Charles
Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr represent: our choice to either fight for
what we hope or against what we fear. Powered by McAvoy and Fassbender's
strong performances and a truly sensational villainous turn by Kevin Bacon,
First Class is riddled with contradictions to the previously established
X-Men timeline and, as such, must be taken more as an alternate history
meditation on these characters than a true prequel. But if you can
accept the revisionist history and the fact that both iconic characters
lead decidedly B-team collections of mutants, First Class is a rip-roaring
bit of historical sci-fi and a terrific chance to contemplate what makes
not just two iconic characters, but all of us, who we are.
The
year is 1944. In a German concentration camp in Poland, young Erik
Lehnsherr (Bill Milner) demonstrates amazing magnetic powers when the Nazis
drag his parents away. He's brought before Dr. Schmidt (Kevin Bacon),
who is unable to tap those powers with positive emotions, but finds them
exploding forth in a rage when Schmidt murders his mother. In upstate
New York, young telepath Charles Xavier (Laurence Belcher) stumbles upon
a blue-skinned shapeshifter in his kitchen: it's Raven (Morgan Lily),
who becomes his closest friend. Fast-forward to 1962: Xavier
(now James McAvoy) is about to deliver his thesis on human mutation (the
reason all three of them have their amazing powers) at Oxford with Raven
(Jennifer Lawrence) by his side but increasingly concerned about her need
to shift into a human form to blend in. Erik (Michael Fassbender)
hunts and kills Nazis, with particular interest in Schmidt, who now calls
himself Sebastian Shaw and is manipulating the US/Soviet arms race.
CIA agent Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne) sneaks into his Hellfire Club and
comes upon a shocking discovery. Shaw and his associates are all
mutants themselves. Emma Frost (January Jones) is a diamond-skinned
telepath, Azazel (Jason Flemyng) can teleport at will, Riptide (Alex Gonzalez)
summons tornadoes out of thin air and Shaw himself can absorb any kind
of energy, remaining the same age as when he tormented Erik and wielding
amazing destructive powers. She travels to England to discuss mutation
with Xavier and when he goes with her to the CIA reveals that he and his
friend are both mutants as well. The Man in Black (Oliver Platt)
takes them under his wing to a mysterious facility (comic book fans know
we're watching the origin of S.H.I.E.L.D.) where Hank McCoy (Nicholas Holt),
secretly a super agile mutant with hands for feet himself, has created
a machine that will amplify Xavier's powers to seek out more mutants.
Erik comes on board to battle their common enemy and together they recruit
four more young mutants. But as Shaw accelerates his plans to wipe
humanity off the face of the earth with a nuclear apocalypse, can Erik
look past his rage and believe anything other than self-preservation is
worth fighting for?
I could
synopsize X-Men: First Class all day, so dense is it with
mutants, historical events and origins of the characters we know from the
three core X-Men movies and the previous prequel X-Men
Origins: Wolverine. But at its heart, it is focused on
the central theme of the original X-Men, the conflict between Charles
and Erik, who've often been compared to their 60's contemporaries Martin
Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. What First Class does so well
is to take us back to the origin of their schism and in the process really
air out those differences, which prove to be surprisingly complex in a
modern world where all manner of minorities expect to be accepted for what
and who they are. Erik is totally right to believe that mankind,
upon learning of the existence of superpowered mutants, will fear and want
to destroy them. But so too is Charles right in believing that with
time and hard work, mutants could earn the trust of the masses. Of
particular interest is the conundrum faced by Raven and Hank, both of whom
start the movie desperately wanting to look “normal”. Charles isn't
a saint, he DOES want to see the pretty movie star and not the blue-skinned
mutant when he looks at Raven (it adds to the story's complexity that the
Mystique makeup doesn't flatter Lawrence nearly as much as Rebecca Romijin,
who has a quick shape-shifting cameo here), but she's also too quick to
shrink back from the time it would take people to get used to someone different.
Yes, it would be wonderful if we could all accept and be accepted by everyone
around us just the way we are, but people aren't like that, as the speed
with which Erik and Raven come to hate the people around them for hating
them proves.
McAvoy
and Fassbender are terrific in their roles, without really summoning their
predecessors at all, but instead providing their own first-rate takes on
the characters at a different time in their lives. Charles begins
the movie as a carefree playboy whose mental powers provide him with a
parlor trick to pick up girls, but when tested by the moment, proves to
be a truly great man. If Patrick Stewart gave us a Professor X who'd
lived a great life before we met him, McAvoy shows us the guy who would
make the choice to go down that path. And he does so with a great
deal of spontaneity and joy: he's the rare movie Leader of Men who
genuinely enjoys helping others rather than feeling burdened by his calling.
In short, the perfect guy to teach a generation of mutants to be all they
can be. Fassbender, on the other hand, rewinds us to a time before
Erik learned to enjoy his human-hating crusade: he's sincere and
driven, and this tale is a tragedy precisely because he makes us believe
things could have gone differently.
Every
great superhero movie needs a great villain, and it's been a long time
since Kevin Bacon got to air it out the way he does here. In the
opening sequence as Dr. Schmidt, he's pure Nazi evil, the glee on his face
when young Erik goes mad with grief a marvel to behold. By the 60's,
his Sebastian Shaw has skillfully changed with the times, and lives large
like Matt Helm gone megalomaniacal. Jones looks as much like she
walked out of the 60's as any actress currently working, and the filmmakers
have styled her Emma Frost just about perfectly for those purposes.
Once again, as in Unknown, I don't think “evil”
per se necessarily suits Jones, but there's no doubt she looks the part
pretty much beyond belief, and no future list of sexiest superhero movie
villains will be complete without her. The special effects that allow
her to transition into diamond form are pretty nifty, but the best part
of them is old-fashioned foley: the way her diamond hair clinks against
her diamond shoulders is just flat-out awesome.
Byrne
and Lawrence are really good in their roles, and Vaughn has nicely filled
out his cast with old pros like Platt, Matt Craven, Michael Ironside, James
Remar and Ray Wise, who're fun to see even when they don't have a lot to
do. Not all of the assorted mutants on both sides of the divide are
as good as the stars, but Zoe Kravitz and Edi Gathegi stand out as would-be
X-Men whose powers are so improbable you get a good sense of why you'd
never heard of their characters before.
Vaughn
stages all this with an impressive commitment to faux realism and bone-crunching
brutality (that the MPAA cautions only of “a violent image” in a movie
where people are dropped from the sky to their deaths en masse, innumerable
knives are shoved through Nazi hands, and at least one characters is burned
to death from the inside-out is a curiosity). The special effects,
supervised by Star Wars legend John Dykstra, maintain a very high
level of realism in large part because the entire action climax takes place
in broad daylight. The script, by an army of writers including Vaughn,
his partner Jane Goldman and Singer himself, does a nice job of tying historical
events like the invention of the atomic bomb and the Cuban Missile Crisis
to the rise and history of the mutants.
What
it doesn't do a good job of is creating a timeline that can be reconciled
with the earlier X-Men movies. A throwaway line about Mystique aging
really slowly takes care of that issue, but just about everything involving
the length and nature of Charles and Erik's friendship and when Professor
X ended up in his wheelchair from the previous movies is contradicted here.
Emma appears as a teenager in Wolverine,
but is now an adult years earlier. And, of course, there's not one
sideways glance between Professor X and Mystique in those later movies
that would hint at the connection they share here. X-Men:
First Class is best enjoyed like the first James Bond movie with a
new star: most of what you know and love is here, it's just been
rearranged and ever so slightly messed with. To get so hung up on
those “inaccuracies” as to miss how good so much of what's going on here
is would be a shame.
X-Men:
First Class is the rare prequel with a real reason to exist beyond
saving money by casting younger, cheaper actors in famous roles.
It delivers the fun spectacle of a superhero movie set in the James Bond
60's, offers up a delightful alternate sci-fi history of the Cuban Missile
Crisis and fleshes out two of the movies' most iconic comic book characters.
Unlike most superhero titles, it doesn't have much to offer kids in the
audience, but for grown-ups, it's a real feast. |
