X-Men: First Class Review

Prequels are like remakes: they’re everywhere these days; and for pretty much the same reason. They give studios the opportunity to return to established brands and familiar faces, again sidestepping the inevitable day when they’ll have to take a chance on something new. Even better, prequels have a built-in justification for indulging the youth-centric trend of the day and casting younger actors in the old roles. So it’s pretty much a win-win; studios get their cash cow and audiences get to see the story of how Superman decided on a red cape or how Wolverine kind of got his claws or how the planet was taken over by apes.

But the thing is prequels are actually very hard stories to tell properly, perhaps among the hardest there are. This is because they rest wholly on backstories that were explained to us as part of the original narrative, so we already know how the story ends; all prequels do is make explicit events that either already were to a lesser extent or were specifically designed so they didn’t need to be. Like remakes, they are by their very nature derivative and so a great deal of creative effort is required to keep them fresh, interesting and surprising, effort that is rarely shown.

But where remakes and prequels differ most substantively is in their reception. People generally accept these days that the remake trend is a bad thing, but prequels aren’t quite so ignominious and even though their intentions are no more laudable and their quality is not so much higher, prequels aren’t entirely unpopular. I don’t know why, whether it’s nostalgia or the blindness of fandom or what, but for some reason we allow hacks like JJ Abrams to stitch together a bunch of bland special effects and hackneyed Star Trek jokes and get away with calling it the revitalization of the franchise. We brand Batman Begins as a masterpiece, even though it’s just an assemblage of Karate Kid clichés and easy nonexplanations that utterly fails to reveal anything new about its title character, his motivations or the logistics of his transformation.

X-Men: First Class similarly strives to explain a great many things about how its titular team of freedom fighters came into being. It addresses more than just the origins of the group itself, but also the formation of their antithesis in the Brotherhood, how Xavier became crippled, how Magneto became an asshole, how Beast got his fur, where Cerebro came from, where the inspiration for the Blackbird came from, even kind of where Mutants themselves were born. The problem simply is that if you’ve seen any of the previous movies you already know the answer to half of these and probably don’t care about the other half. And yet still, at its best moments, ­X-Men: First Class is just a two hour laundry list moving through the key points of the backstory with little to nothing in the way of invention.

And sometimes it doesn’t even get that right. Take Magneto. His motives, his distrust for humanity, ultimately derive from his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp. You already knew this because you saw the first movie, which never once stopped telling it to you, and the only thing this movie adds to this story is a face, a singular character to act as the symbolic whole of Magneto’s troubled past. It also gives him someone to hunt down throughout the film.

One problem with this is basically that you never once get the feeling he’s falling from grace. Magneto doesn’t join the Not-Yet-X-Men to help Mutants; he doesn’t have any grand goals, he’s just realized he can’t get revenge on his own. And that’s a constant; he never once wavers in this conviction, never for a moment considers a greater calling. And so he’s basically unapproachable; it’s hard to relate to wannabe assassins – no matter how valid their motives – and the actor does nothing to instill any empathy into his character. In fact, given his constant impetuousness, his early killings, his ruthless interrogation of Emma Frost and his reckless training methods, he’s pretty much an asshole throughout and it’s a foregone conclusion that he’s going to grow up to be a bad guy; the only surprise is that anyone in the movie actually believed he wouldn’t.

The biggest problem though is that the object of Magneto’s obsession is actually Sebastian Shaw, a Mutant himself, thus placing the symbolic whole of Magneto’s troubled past onto the wrong party. If the hell he endured during the Holocaust is what destroyed his faith in humanity and led him to be the dark avenger of the oppressed Mutant race, then having his sole – or at least primary – malefactor be revealed as a Mutant is entirely counterproductive. It’d be like making a revenge flick about a Jewish guy seeking retribution against the other Jews who killed his family in WWII Germany; it makes no sense. Because we spend the whole movie watching Magneto try to avenge himself on a fellow Mutant, we never really see him develop into the Mutant Malcolm X we know and love. It’s not until Shaw is out of the way that this gets back on track, but one can’t help but think it arbitrary that Magneto would take human fear so personally when the guy who hurt him most was of his own kind.

The reason for this misjudgment is of course obvious. Shaw is a Mutant because he’s the main villain and thus creates better action scenes if he has superpowers. It’s a simplistic rationale for a simplistic movie, but one that could have been accommodated by having Magneto’s target be a human allied with Shaw. Of course that would require Shaw’s motives be altered, as in this movie he basically is a psychotic pro-Mutant avenger… much like Magneto himself. It’s a common problem in villain-centric prequels where they get an antagonist exactly like themselves that they overcome and replace. One gets the impression that if Shaw hadn’t killed Magneto’s mother, they’d be bestest buddies. They have the same beliefs, the same methods, the same kinds of friends, even the same helmet for Christ’s sake.

And, God, that’s boring. It undervalues both characters. Magneto isn’t the big badass king of Mutant rebels anymore; he’s just Shaw 2.0. And Shaw is denied the ability to become a villain in his own right; he’s just a stand-in for his eventual replacement. And since Shaw is played by Kevin Bacon (who has turned villaindom into an artform) and Magneto is played by Michael Fassbender (who is okay), one kind of wishes the stand-in had become the star.

The X-Men themselves don’t fare much better, mainly because they suffer from the same trend of random namedrops that have plagued the last few movies. It’s the same thing that gave us Blob and Gambit in Origins or Colossus in The Last Stand: it’s not about picking characters that can serve some practical role in the plot, but about picking a decent selection of recognizable faces to fill out the action scenes. You’re not going to see Cyclops falling for Jean Grey; you’re not going to learn how Storm managed to quell her powers. Instead, you get Havok and Banshee trading quips. The only member of the team with any connection to the original trilogy is Beast. And the only successful character is Xavier, who actually benefits from youthfulness as his increased role in this movie relative to the others necessitates the more dynamic and optimistic performance that he gets.

I get the impression however that X-Men: First Class is designed more as a reboot than straight prequel, something of a halfway house between the two. It borrows certain aspects from the trilogy (character designs, set designs and even a couple actors), but ultimately is striving to push on in its own direction. And that would be great, but it’s got be confusing to people only familiar with the movies to not see the original X-Men team that was established before the events of the first film as part of the group’s beginnings.

But more important is the haphazardness of the team’s development. We’re introduced to them through a montage sequence where Xavier and Magneto use Cerebro to track them down. But with all the Mutants in the world to choose from, why pick this group? What is so special about their histories or abilities that they should be selected for covert military ops? Hell, for a mission that apparently required some subtlety – at least at first – it seems if nothing else picking the guy with the super scream power would perhaps be a bad idea.

What’s more is there’s no character history or development. Havok, for example, is introduced to us in prison. Why is he there? I don’t know. Wish I did. I wish actually that the movie did something with these characters to remind us of their newfound limited social status, especially in a story where one of the real strengths is remembering that ideally X-Men is supposed to be about something.

This team is after all supposed to be the great civil rights group of the comic book world, but that hardly ever becomes apparent. Born as they were in the sixties – that famed decade where America woke up and became just a wee less dickey – the X-Men were positioned strongly to make the young readers aware of the changing world around them and to take a hand in shaping it. But the original team was all white people and the only woman was subject to Marvel’s gender discrimination policy which dictated that female superheroes could not engage in direct fisticuffs. Later iterations of the team – in any medium – haven’t been much more successful, often paying lip service to the alleged meaning before gathering everyone up to go kick the crap out of Apocalypse or something.

The original movies made a lot of talk about the Holocaust, but didn’t really have anything to say about it and, again, the large majority of the cast was white and male. Hell, often fierce and undaunting Rogue was reduced to a damsel in distress. Sadly, it was Last Stand that had the best premise, asking the question: that in a society full of so much conflict and intolerance, what would happen if difference could be cured? It’s a good question, a very good question. Too bad the movie didn’t care enough to answer it, being as it was too wrapped up in recycling the Buffy version of Dark Phoenix.

First Class however has numerous little connections to various forms of oppression. Magneto makes explicit reference to the Holocaust. Beast tokens “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The heads of the CIA make casually sexist remarks about Moira. And in a surprising touch, otherwise noble Xavier is shown to have a slightly petty side by encouraging Mystique to look into Beast’s cure for her natural state. There’s actually a really great scene early on where a human-form Mystique asks Xavier if under different circumstances, he would date her; and he proudly declares he would, citing her undeniable grace and beauty. But then she returns to her natural state and he panics, claims that she’s like a sister to him and that he couldn’t think of her like that; but given that he clearly just was, the suggestion is more that he’s actually put off by the thought of the blue lady lovin’.

Of course, this is all just as superficial as any other movie, but there is a good range to it, successfully connecting Mutants to a wide array of human bigotry. But it would have been so much better if the characters who act as identification figures could reflect these hatreds, rather than parrot them. Sadly, though, it’s kind of telling that in a movie about intolerance and oppression that takes place in the decade of Civil Rights that the only black member of the team is killed five minutes after his introduction.

And there’s the other thing. This movie is set in the sixties and connects itself to the Cuban Missile Crisis, which would have afforded it a sense of scale for the public revelation that Mutants exist. But that doesn’t happen either! We never see the public in this movie. We see combatants and nothing else. The connection to the Cuban Missile Crisis seems borne only of a Dan Brown faux-Watchmen conspiracy theory fad that thinks attaching paranormal rationale to historical events is the same thing as being clever. Ultimately, the only success to the final battle is its aftermath where the movie remembers the story it was created to tell and the two feuding world powers who nearly destroyed each other become united in hatred to wipe out the gathered Mutants. That is a beautifully bittersweet moment right there. But it stands apart in a movie that does nothing to support it.

To sum up, though, let me present a counterexample of a good prequel in Metal Gear Solid 3 (because I think it’s safe to assume anyone reading a review this long of an X-Men movie has played it). What this game did though was to give us the backstory behind recurring series villain and looming bogeyman, Big Boss. The ultimate premise of the game could reasonably be reduced to: “Why did Big Boss turn against America?” And it answers all those pesky, unimportant little questions like: “Where did Big Boss get his title?” “Where did he get his eyepatch?” “Why does Revolver Ocelot use revolvers?” You know, the tedious little things that don’t actually need answers, but make the less discerning fans go “Ooh.”

But Metal Gear Solid 3 also managed to expand on the series’ narrative and continue the developing Patriots plot. In Volgin, it gave Big Boss a villain wholly distinct from himself and in The Boss, it gave him a proper mirror: an antagonist who wasn’t an enemy, a friend who’s fate would decide his own. And, most importantly, you cared about what happened. The game’s magnificent ending did such a remarkable job of making you feel for the guy, of aligning your perspective with his, that ultimately you felt like giving America a swift kick in the nuts too.

But the point is that Metal Gear Solid 3 broke the mold. It told its own story, while expanding on the series as a whole. Your perception of Big Boss in the previous games shifts dramatically as a result of playing the third because that game made the surprisingly daring decision to not just fill a gap in the series’ mythos, but to redefine it.

But X-Men: First Class is quintessential gap-filling that frankly does nothing to my perception of the rest of the series. I understood and even appreciated Magneto’s motives better in the first movie. I felt more empathy for Mystique when she was abandoned in the third. Beast’s distaste for his appearance was more gracefully portrayed in that same movie. And the death of a student and a friend resonated a lot louder with Jean Grey than it did with Darwin. In the end, I don’t think I understand the X-Men or the Brotherhood better than I did before; I don’t feel enlightened about their origins or their plight. I just feel like my life is now two hours shorter.

I mean it’s a decent little action movie, with some okay fight scenes and while that’s acceptable – but only acceptable – in Thor, this required more effort. After all, there’s only one Thormovie in existence and superhero franchises hardly ever get it right on the first go, so a little leniency can be afforded. But First Class is the fifth X-Men movie and the series is still suffering from all the same weaknesses (thin plots, limited characterizations, overcrowded and arbitrary casts) with the inclusion of timely and thrifty modernisms (leeching off established brands and skewing everything younger). And sadly, perhaps the most revealing scene in this movie isn’t the moment where Magneto first dons his helmet, nor the scene where Beast takes his fur formula or the bit at the end where Xavier sees just how much work is cut out for him. No, the scene in question comes during the recruitment montage where the film goes out of its way and defies continuity to squeeze in a pointless Hugh Jackman cameo. Because God forbid we have an X-Men movie without Wolverine.