X-Men: First Class

(Movie Review)

Whatever else you may say about these X-Men movies, there’s no denying they’re ambitious.

It’s not enough for them to simply do the standard action-fest, choreographed fighting, and special effects extravaganza we’ve come to expect from superhero movies. They have to add pathos as well. They want us to care emotionally about their characters, and to care about the relationships these characters have with each other.
And they even attempt to address social issues like discrimination and alienation from society.

The success with which the X-Men movies accomplish their aims is debatable. (Whenever a comic book movie attempts to explore social issues, there’s a temptation for it to get overly heavy-handed or patronizing. And at various points I think the X-Men franchise has been in danger of crossing over into this territory, at least with the issue of discrimination. The theme of young people feeling alienated from society I think they pull off a bit better.)

The complex relationships in the X-Men are also ambitious as the line between enemy and ally are often blurred. You have enemies who are friends (Charles Xavier and Magneto) and allies who are often in danger of becoming enemies (the rivalry between Wolverine and Cyclops, the confrontations between Pyro and Iceman, and of course the Jean Gray saga.)

Again, how well the film makers actually handle all of these dramatic possibilities is debatable. But I don’t think it’s possible to walk out of the theater and not have a bit of admiration for the ambition of what the filmmakers were trying to pull off.

The first 3 films in the X-Men series I saw before I stared up my Movie Review Project, so I’ll start out by doing a brief recap of my impressions here, before I get into the newest film.

X-Men 1: Didn’t do much for me to be honest. Okay but not great.
X-Men 2: They absolutely nailed it with this movie. Possibly the best comic book movie ever. From this point on, I considered myself a fan of the series.
X-Men 3: You know, I actually liked this movie. I know a lot of other people didn’t like it, and I’ll probably have to re-watch it someday to give it a more intelligent review. But at the time I remember thinking it was pretty cool.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Haven’t seen this yet. Someday, maybe. But I’ve always thought Wolverine was the least interesting character in the X-Men series anyway.

Alright, so with that recap out of the way, how does this new movie fare?

Really well I thought.

Maybe I was a bit biased, because I considered myself a fan of the series, and I went in wanting it to work. But I thought they did a really good job.

The plot was a bit convoluted at first, as 3 separate story lines had to be converged into one. But actually I like plots that keep me on my toes a bit, so no problem for me here.

I thought the movie did a good job of creating dramatic suspense, particularly in the beginning. There’s one or two scenes near the opening of the movie where the scene does a good job of milking the suspense to build up to the dramatic climax, with the appropriate crescendo in the music letting you know something is about to happen.

The characters are engaging—or at least the main characters (some of the later additions to the X-Men team are just blatantly there for no other purpose than to fill the team out.)
This film continues the theme, established in the early X-Men movies, that a character’s inner demons are just as much of a threat as their outside enemies. And so we see a number of characters struggling with, and sometimes giving into, their inner demons.

The acting is quite good as well. Admittedly the two lead actors have some big shoes to fill. (In retrospect, that was quite a coup the first X-Men movies had landing such talented actors as Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen). But both actors pull it off well.

So, all in all a good movie. Below are a few more observations on various issues.

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On Continuity

I know that to even broach this topic is to open ones self up to accusations of geekdom. And to the extent that any time spent contemplating a fictional universe is time not spent on chasing girls, drinking beer, or building muscles, I suppose the accusation is fair enough. (I probably should be in a bar right now winking at some cute girl instead of writing this.)

But if a viewer is to spend his time and money watching this series, I don’t think it’s too much to ask for it to be consistent. Otherwise you can’t take it seriously. And if nothing else, these X-Men movies want to be taken seriously. They want us to care about the transformations these characters undergo.

Many people on the internet are already way ahead of me on this. For a run down of many of the continuity errors introduced in X-Men, see for example this list {LINK HERE}. And for a way to explain away many of the same continuity errors, see for example this list here {LINK HERE}.

Most of the minor points don’t bother me so much. I’m more concerned with how this film fits into the overall story the filmmakers have been telling.

The previous X-Men films have already established that Professor Xavier, and Magneto, despite being enemies also have a continuing friendship, and it’s implied that they have a long history. Exactly what this history was is mostly left up to the imagination of the viewer, and perhaps it was more interesting when it was vaguely defined. From what was said in the previous movies, I had always imagined this friendship had carried on over a period of several years. In this movie we get only a period of several months before they have their split.

I’m not sure this brief friendship lasting only a few months would be quite enough to sustain the admiration and mutual respect they seem to have for each other 40 years later in the original X-Men movies. But this is somewhat open to interpretation.

Actually, according to this movie, the person Charles Xavier really does have a long history with, and deep affection for, is not Magneto, but Mystique, who we find out is his adopted sister, and who he is obviously very fond of (and she of him). Therefore this movie does a better job of setting up a complicated relationship between Xavier and Mystique than it does between Xavier and Magneto. And yet this relationship is totally absent from the first 3 movies.

I’m somewhat torn about this, because on the one hand the Mystique we get in this movie is much more interesting and developed. But it will, I fear, ruin the series for anyone trying to watch them chronologically.  If you were to watch this prequel movie right before watching the rest of the X-Men series, the relationship between professor Xavier and Mystique would make no sense.

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On the 60s setting

For a summer block-buster superhero movie, the choice of a retro setting is pretty unique. The normal trend is for Hollywood to take old comic book superheroes, and try to modernize them as much as possible. This movie takes characters established in the public mind by recent movies, and takes them back to the 1960s. It’s unusual, but anything different is good, and this is a pleasant change of pace from the usual superhero movie.

Unfortunately the film makers don’t take full advantage of the retro-setting. If they had made a bit of an effort, they could totally have gone the route of “Mad Men” and worked really hard to recreate the period with the clothing, the hair styles and the music of the early 60s.
What we get instead is a partial effort. Every now and again a character will say “daddy-O” or “groovy”. Some of the clothing looks a bit retro-ish, but even here the filmmakers at times seem to be confusing the Kennedy years with the 1970s.
Many of the hair styles look much more modern than retro, particularly with the new young X-men recruits. (I suspect because somewhere in the studio hierarchy, marketability won out against period authenticity, and the studio wanted good-looking young stars sporting fashionable modern haircuts on all their advertisements.)
It’s a minor quibble, admittedly. It didn’t spoil the movie for me, but I thought it would have been a lot cooler if they had gone to more effort to create more of an atmosphere.

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On the Cuban Missile Crisis:

The Cuban Missile Crisis, like many events in American history, has developed a sort of mythology that bears almost no relationship to the actual facts of what happened. The version I learned at school was that the Soviet Union unilaterally breaking the peace by putting missiles in Cuba. Kennedy was forced against his will into a situation where he had to bring the world to the brink of nuclear war, and fortunately his great leadership caused the Soviets to back down.

What was never told to me in school was that the US had missiles stationed in Turkey, aimed at the Soviet Union, which were actually closer to the Soviet Union than their missiles in Cuba were to us. And so when the US complained about missiles in Cuba, the Soviet Union (rightly) pointed out that this was completely hypocritical. They then offered to remove their missiles from Cuba if the US would agree to remove their missiles from Turkey.

Privately, the US government acknowledged that the Soviets had a legitimate point. But it was felt that if the US was the first to remove their missiles, it would look like Kennedy was caving in to Soviet pressure, and would endanger his re-election prospects. And so for this our government brought us to the edge of a nuclear holocaust.

It is very rare that this side of the story is ever acknowledged by the US media. You might recall that Kevin Costner movie that came out about 10 years ago “13 Days” (W) in which they spent the whole movie on the Cuban Missile Crisis, and never once acknowledged that we had missiles in Turkey, or that Kennedy could have ended the whole crisis at any time by simply pulling our own missiles out of Turkey.

I fully expected this movie to take to the same view.
Imagine my surprise, then, when X-Men: First Class goes out of its way to set up that the US government first created the crisis by placing missiles in Turkey. (Granted in the world of X-Men, it is evil mutants who are blackmailing the US army to do it, but still an acknowledgment nonetheless.)

So, the movie gets an extra point from me for this little piece of historical accuracy.
(Sad though that we have to go to X-Men movies for historical accuracy.)

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One last, final thought before I finally lay this review to rest:

I read another review of this movie I want to respond to briefly.

Yeah, I know. It’s a losing battle to try and respond to everything on the Internet. But just indulge me in this.

The review is from Slate.com
I don't necessarily want to be the guy who tries to hang a discount-store T.S. Eliot essay about the Death of Culture on yet another mediocre Hollywood sequel, but there's something a little depressing about all the hype and excitement surrounding "X-Men: First Class," the new Marvel-Fox product that's expected to be among the summer's biggest hits. Are zillions of people genuinely psyched about an Anakin Skywalker-style back story prequel to a comics-based movie franchise that almost everyone agrees had run out of juice after four installments? (Just from inspecting cast lists and plot synopses, I can't even tell you for sure whether I've seen all of them.) And if so, why?
Oh, OK, I know why. I'm just playing Socratic idiot. It's summertime in spirit if not in fact, and people are covered in beer and bug-juice and have collectively lowered their expectations. They've convinced themselves that they want to see a big, exciting adventure with cool guys and pretty girls and maybe the faintest hint of moral significance but not much resemblance to real life. I suppose a ridiculous yarn about how a group of superhuman genetic mutants in silly costumes intervene to resolve the 1963 Cuban missile crisis (after starting it in the first place) fits the bill, somewhat. But I'm pretty sure that those who are claiming that "X-Men: First Class" is actually good are engaged in the kind of brainwashed magical thinking that goes along with a culture where the entire media and most of the public have to behave like savvy insiders all the time. This is a movie that definitely could have been worse. (Put that on your poster!) It looks good and has some nice acting moments; as a friend of mine used to say about poetry readings, it's better than some TV. If it makes a butt-load of money, all of us parasites on the sweaty underbelly of the film industry are hypothetically better off, so we might as well like it.

And it continues on in that same patronizing tone for several more paragraphs.

This writer’s argument would be helped somewhat if he could point to what heights our culture has fallen from. Was it in the 90s, when the Batman franchise and the Matrix movies were top box office draws? Or in the 80s with Return of the Jedi and Tron? Or the 70s with the Superman movie and the Planet of the Apes franchise? Or the 60s with the Adam West Batman movie? Or the 50s, with “The Beginning of the End” and the Tarzan movies? Or the 40s, with the Flash Gordon movie serials?

You get the idea, and can probably add your own examples as well as I can. The point is that every generation has their high brow art, and their low brow entertainment, and there’s nothing wrong with that. We’ve had movies based on comic book characters since the 1940s, and will likely continue to have them for many years to come.

The way to effectively critique these movies is not to get into a snobbish fit about the fact that comic book movies are once again dominating the box office, but to compare these movies against their genre. In that respect, I think you could make the argument that these X-Men movies have shown that the comic book movie genre is expanding the range of themes it is willing to take on, and thus represents a sign that the culture is getting more intelligent, not less.

In the same vein, Allen Ginsburg once claimed that The Beatles song “Eleanor Rigby” represented a cultural high point. He didn’t argue it was a cultural high point because The Beatles handled themes of alienation better than any poet ever before them, but because these themes were being attempted by a bubble gum pop band at the height of their fame.

In the same way, “X-Men: First Class” may not be high art, but I don’t think its popularity is any indication that our culture has gone down the tubes.

Link of the Day
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X-Men: First Class: Movie Review (Scripted)