X-Men: First Class (2011) 7/10
A “reboot” prequel of the X-Men franchise: It is 1962, and mutants are gathering together, some to end their isolation, and some to avenge themselves on mankind.
Holocaust survivor Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender), who will become Magneto, seeks the man who tortured and experimented on him in 1944. That man, 18 years later, will be known as Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon). Shaw is controlling major government figures with his three mutant accomplices, including Emma Frost (January Jones).
Meanwhile, Charles Xavier (James McAvoy), PhD in genetic mutations, is working with the CIA to gather mutants to help save the U.S. and the world from Shaw’s threat.
If all this sounds a little top-heavy, it is, and the movie threatens to topple over with the weight of front-loaded back-story. It just maintains its balance on the back-story issue, even though I haven’t even mentioned Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne), Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), or CIA agent Oliver Platt. This movie is so busy that Platt isn’t even given a name in the script.
It’s very hard to review a movie that earns a “B-” grade. “A” and “F” are what make writing reviews fun and easy! This movie does a lot right, and a lot wrong. Great movies can have flaws, but you don’t think of them until after you leave the theater. In that sense, X-Men: First Class is surely not a great movie.
The good parts: It’s fun, visually rich, with a few very strong scenes. Every time Fassbender is on the screen, it’s absolutely riveting. He got the lucky part of the script, since Magneto has the most complex back-story of any character, and he brings it home with a powerful performance that always speaks to the tensions underneath. Kevin Bacon as Sebastian Shaw is also outstanding. Some of his scenes are kind of stiff, but he has so much presence and he has that magical ability to make you watch him. One of Shaw’s sidekicks, Azazel, is genuinely scary.
There is one fight scene that is a classic of the comic genre, and something that the X-Men comics always used to do remarkably well: A team of villains and heroes face off, and each pairing is well-matched, so that we’re watching four or five interesting fight scenes, intercut. Well done! As well, we see the use of genuine teamwork, so that a pair of characters combine their abilities to make a third ability. Even in a film without Wolverine or Colossus, it’s the “Fastball Special” principle.
Also, there are two very brief cameos that made me very happy.
So, what’s wrong with this movie? Well, a lot of the acting doesn’t come up to Fassbender’s standards. January Jones is as bad as they say, but I don’t see why she gets singled out. Rose Byrne is awful. Abysmal. Borderline unwatchable.
Here’s the thing about Jones: I think there’s an innate ice queen quality to her. In Mad Men, she plays away from that, always giving us the chance to see the depths of feeling beneath the icy exterior. But when she’s directed to play “ice queen,” she has nothing to do, and it shows.
The messaging is heavy-handed. Yes, we know this is a metaphor for being outsiders in your culture, and yes, messages are welcome, but don’t slap them across the audience’s face. Just don’t. The movie both succeeds and fails here, sometimes the meaning is beautiful, sometimes it’s a slap.
I hereby confess that I am an X-Men geek from way back. That was a comic I read when I first learned to read. I am not one of those movie-goers who demands that an adaptation: Whether comic book, novel, or “true life;” adhere to the original. It’s an unreasonable demand to place on a movie. If you know the characters, it’s confusing: Alex Summers, Cyclops’s kid brother in the comics, is here introduced when it’s implied Cyke is still a child; a dragonfly-like character is called “Angel,” and so on. I don’t object to that so much as I object to a reboot that feels unnecessary. A good, interesting assemblage of characters was put together over the course of four movies, two of them good, and they’re now thrown away because…why?
The movie suffers from major race fail. It’s almost silly to single out any Hollywood production for that, but this one is egregious. I won’t give away the plot points, you’ll notice them yourselves. It’s always a problem when the bad guys have more diversity than the good guys, especially when the good guys diversity can generously be called “token.”
In 1962, when the X-Men comic began, the original team was lily-white and WASPy. Scott Summers, Jean Grey, Hank McCoy, Bobby Drake, Warren Worthington, III: These were the cream of whiteness in white white America. When the new team was formed in 1975, they were a model for ethnic diversity, not just in race but in national original: These X-Men were African, Russian, Irish, Native American, Japanese, and German: The only members of the new team who didn’t speak with an accent were holdovers from the original team.
Again, I don’t feel like movies should be forced to be accurate to their source material, but I do feel they should live up to its standards. The new X-Men are not only whitewashed, two characters from the comics who were foreign are now accentless Americans. That ain’t right.
Finally, the whole notion that this movie is a period piece is a major pile of fail, and no one will be more sensitive to that than Mad Men fans. In 1962 characters are wearing micro-miniskirts and turtlenecks (that’s 1967). They’re saying “whatever” and “pretty badass” (that’s 21st century). If you don’t want to do a period piece, then don’t. If you do want to do a period piece, and you want to intercut real footage of President Kennedy into your film, then make the tiniest effort towards accuracy.
