In an age of prequels, sequels, triads, and epic franchises, X-Men: First Class separates itself from the former list and has become less a prequel, for the most part, and more of a faithfully extended narrative, stemming from the first scene of Bryan Singer’s initial X-Men, where a concentration camp-trapped Erik Lehnsherr’s demonstrates his ability to manipulate metal while being torn from the grip of his mother’s hands. From there, Matthew Vaughn takes over and illustrates the memory-driven fuel that fires the eventual Magneto. Fluidly spliced between this narrative is the introduction of Charles Xavier, similarly a child but with a drastically different upbringing. Thousands of miles away from Germany, Xavier resides with his affluent parents in a house that more closely resembles a castle, and instead of utilizing painful memories of atrocity to spur on his gift, Charles embraces his mutation, meets the visage-changing Raven, who will ultimately be deemed Mystique, and achieves a doctorate and professorship in genetics, all in an attempt to bring mutants and humans together.
Woven within this dual narrative is a revenge tale that pits Lehnsherr against Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), the Nazi who murdered Erik’s mother, and by default, “taught” Erik how to conjure his powers from this memory. Now eighteen years older, Erik wanders the globe searching for the man who murdered his family. It just so happens that this man, who is also a mutant, has escaped persecution and is similarly travelling the world with his own clan of mutants, this time doing his best to provoke nuclear annihilation between the United States and Russia as a prime player in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Shaw’s modus operandi is clear: to eliminate the majority of power-wielding humans and surge the mutants into the hegemony.
There’s nothing wrong with this element of the movie given that there needs to be a clearly defined villain. However, one grating element of this subplot is the blatant paralleling of Shaw’s current motives to those of his previous occupation in the Nazi party. Another is the similarity between Shaw’s ideology and the eventual ideology of Magneto in the first X-Men, where the goal is to transform all humans into mutants, which is a slight variation from Shaw’s plan but one that still falls in line with the eugenic-driven initiatives of the Nazis. Granted, this was part of the irony in X-Men, but it kind of bothered me then as well, particularly because it strikes me as rather cliché, just as much as Shaw’s obligatory: “I created you” during his final confrontation with Lehnsherr.
And, like any movie that begins with a World War II Holocaust narrative and perpetuates the motif throughout, there are inevitable scenes that beg the question of whether or not actions are results of morality or duty. This is clearly illustrated when Lehnsherr’s search brings him to Argentina, where he enters a bar and finds two Nazi evacuees who claim to have been a tailor and butcher in former life. Clearly, “butcher” is laden with duality, but their erasure of their identities as Nazi soldiers brings to light the conflict between nationalism and genocide. They don’t hide their German roots, but when staring down the barrel of Lehnsherr’s gun, they both offer variations of “I was just following orders!”
In turn, and in combination with one of the last scenes of the movie, there is also a narrative about the value of life in an imperialistic equation, and how those who perish are least likely to benefit from the battle. This is seen when Stryker (the eventual villain of X2) denounces an attempt to save Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne), a CIA agent who has been working with Xavier and his band of mutants to take down Shaw’s forces, because she is merely “collateral damage,” and eliminating the mutants would ultimately save humanity. A similar illustration can be seen when the respective US and Soviet soldiers are relegated to automatons declaring (in Russian and English) “it’s been a pleasure serving with you gentlemen” as they watch the myriad missiles raining down on their ships. In this particular seen, everyone is equal as they face death, but prior to this, they are hierarchical widgets in the larger network of governmental intelligence whose members find themselves sheltered safely in rooms with big boards that resemble innocuous Battleship-peg-secured ships and weapons.
Here, the auteur takes a stance of negative culpability (mostly) within the narrative, simultaneously sympathizing with the mutants, the US soldiers, and the Russian soldiers, ultimately echoing an assertion in All Quiet on the Western Front that “the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out among themselves. Whoever survives, his country wins. That would be much simpler and more just than this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting.”
What’s most admirable about First Class is that each of these social, cultural, and political narratives is well-developed. What helps this out immensely is the acting, particularly James McAvoy (Xavier) and Michael Fassbender (Lehnsherr). The interactions between these two transcend line-reading and border on genuine brotherhood, and truthfully, the movie would have only benefited through more exchanges between the two. The downside of the film is the inverse of the former praise. The supporting cast – aside from Jennifer Lawrence who plays Mystique – is okay. They fill their roles, but the second hour of the film transitions their roles from bit pieces the narrative to figures woven into any training montage from the 1980’s. Granted, the training sequences are slightly necessary to illustrate Xavier’s true power: the ability to encourage and teach his students to use their abilities, but there’s often too much predictable camp that run the cliché-gauntlet of things blowing up, people failing to fly, feeling frustration, and finding elation. And granted there’s a similar narrative at work here that teaches each student to embrace who they are and be “mutant proud”; however, this narrative is at work from the beginning and runs through the end of the first hour when Lehnsherr and Xavier travelled the country to recruit mutants and offer the obligatory run in with Wolverine who offers a succinct “fuck off.”
Is First Class flawless? No. But, it certainly atones for X-Men: The Last Stand, which probably shouldn’t have been made, and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, a movie with some fine thematic subplots that fizzled on their way to create the inevitable sequels and spinoffs. It’s also worth a view because Bryan Singer’s imagining of the X-Men story from the first and second installments is brought back to life in the hands of Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass), and it doesn’t hurt that he has coaxed some solid performances out of Fassbender, McAvoy, and Lawrence.
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