Review

Review Date: 5-June-11
Spoiler Rating: Low
Juju Judgment: Just OK

X-Men: First Class (2011)

"X-Men: First Class" is a cutesy name. It suggests the movie's function as an origin story while holding out the hope (or boasting?) of its place at the head of the superhero pack. Yet the fifth flick in the X-Men franchise cannot lay claim to the Number One spot on any list, except, perhaps, a list of blockbusters saved from stinkage by a few exemplary actors.

First Class details how the central luminaries of the X-Men world came together in the 1960s, forged a friendship, and ended up on opposing sides. En route to becoming the militant known as Magneto, concentration camp survivor Erik pursues vengeance against the fellow mutant (Kevin Bacon) who ravaged his childhood and murdered his mother. Star Michael Fassbender bears no resemblance to Ian McKellen, who played Magneto in the previous films, but he wields the most blistering stare in the business and imbues Erik with an almost unsettling intensity. (The scene where he confronts two retired Nazis in Argentina: wow.) During an almost fatal attempt to reach his goal, Erik meets Charles (soon to be Professor Xavier), scion of wealthy but absent parents who started gathering other mutants to his side while still a boy. He is played by James McAvoy, one of few actors who could look moderately cool while power-thinking and dignify a character who is more than a tad self-righteous.

After hooking up with a CIA agent (Rose Byrne), Erik and Charles begin recruiting other mutants to form a unit that might oppose the league of Erik's foe, who is trying to start a nuclear war between Russia and the United States. These secondary characters are silly and distracting. The belching fairy who looks like Prince is absurd, but not nearly as absurd as the guy who looks like the traditional Christian Devil, red skin, pointed tail and all. According to Internet sources he's not a mutant — a human who has made leaps on the evolutionary trail — but a being from another dimension who first visited Earth back in biblical times. That makes some sense, but for viewers who aren't familiar with this history he appears to be a person whose genes just happened to mutate into an exact incarnation of a culture antihero, which makes no sense at all. The best that can be said about the crowd that gathers around the leading men is that it includes up-and-comer Jennifer Lawrence (Winter's Bone) as Charles' long-time protégé.

While Fassbender, McAvoy, and Lawrence are the only assets of the movie, mitigating a muddled story and not-so-special special effects, X-Men: First Class does touch upon an interesting aspect of this Marvel Comics mythology. One could conclude that Erik/Magneto is an enduring casualty of the Holocaust and proof that an evil such as Naziism, once released into the world, continues to do harm after its supposed demise. Erik becomes Magneto, bent on protecting his own kind at any cost, because his experiences have rendered him unable to believe in social acceptance or harmony. In reality I think he's right, not because of Hitler per se, but because of the basic human failing that caused so many people to follow Hitler and causes people every day to rely on exclusionism as a ready-made, temporarily gratifying motivation. This topic is worth consideration, and while First Class doesn't pursue it, the movie benefits slightly from this inherent depth.

Copyright © 2011 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.