How 'X-Men: First Class' Fails as a Film and as an Origin Story

It’s not easy being different.

Well, maybe some have it easier than others.

There are those with Aspergers, others, an ephemeral charisma. Some have permanently blue skin and fur, others, the ability to read minds. And somewhere in the middle are the “forever-aspiring” who write bitter, unsolicited reviews in the dark of their room on the weekend.

But so it is. More than any other comic book franchise, X-Men celebrated that difference and made superheroes out of that shame. It also put “being different” in a larger context: the politics and power of prejudice and mankind’s endless flirtation with fear and oppression. Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1963, the heroes and villains of the X-Men universe have taken up the cause of civil rights, women’s rights, and with the Bryan Singer-era, LGBT rights and the “War on Terror”. The characters’ ability to stand in for the oppressed at any time in history and always have something to say made them the most important comic book property and personally, my favorite.

And so as fan who was let down by the last two flicks (I’d put X-Men Origins: Wolverine just a notch above the worst movie ever made: Garden State), the anticipation and expectation I had for X-Men: First Class were high. So far, the praise has been unanimous from critics and friends alike. I was waiting to love this movie. I was waiting to feel that tingle, a feeling that pinches a nerve in my otherwise despondent self, when I know that there’s a film out there reaching a mass audience that’s both disgusted with what I’m disgusted with and that appeals to our better selves.

But when the credits rolled, I sat in my seat speechless and sad. For two hours I watched them, someone, a lot of someone(s), grossly mishandle my favorite X-Men story: the split between Xavier and Magneto. I came home and saw the RottenTomatoes rating still high—those who didn’t like the film scoffed at the idea that a comic book should take up serious issues. On Facebook, everyone who saw it was ecstatic—even those who I thought felt the same way about X-Men that I did. And I have to tell you, last night I felt really alone.

I felt like a mutant.

It’s often said that Professor Xavier/Erik Lehnsherr (Magneto) relationship is modeled after the philosophies of Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, particularly nonviolence/integration on the one hand and self-defense/and separatism on the other. Now a true student of the civil rights movement knows that the politics of both individuals was much more complex (King championed a “democratic socialist” revolution for all workers and Malcolm embraced a global struggle, black, brown, yellow, and white, against imperialism). But what was great about Charles and Erik was that their differences had nuances too.

Erik Lehnsherr survived the single most monstrous act in human history, the Holocaust. But as horrible as that was, it was not the first barbarous act of the human species and hardly its last. The Magneto persona is a tragic figure, born of the trauma of genocide and the defective and destructive aspect of human nature. I never saw him as a villain motivated by a reactionary “Social Darwinism”. To me, he was a character trying to protect his kind from the next genocide and the ends, inevitably, justified the means.

Charles Xavier was born wealthy, bearing a mutation that made him practically omniscious. His brilliance was only matched by his humanism, dedicating his life to promote peaceful co-existence. He had a different conception of human nature. It was not one hardened and narrowed by experience (Erik), but one nourished by privilege and idealism.

To the film’s credit, X-Men: First Class attempts (though in rather clunky fashion) to establish this in the first twenty minutes. In fact, the film tries to establish a lot things in the right way, but ends up being too afraid to satisfy its own set ups.

The best place to start is with Sebastian Shaw and the odd, revisionist relationship with Magneto. I’m always open to reinvention, and if filmmakers can find ways to make a story fresh and narratively sound, all the better. But by introducing Shaw as a Nazi doctor fishing for mutants to recruit, you are undermining the entire context of Magneto and the philosophical struggle with Xavier. Here, you have a mutant (Shaw) involved (and from his character, we can assume heavily involved) in the human-orchestrated genocide that is supposed to serve as the backbone as to why mutants can’t co-exist with humans. It felt like the screenwriters believed that going through the Holocaust wasn’t enough to motivate Magneto—that they had to connect the individual death of his mother to the main villain in the story. This is derivative action-movie structure at its core, but worse it eliminates any meaning or consistency to Magneto’s worldview.

I wish I had more time to get into the illogic of that scene in general. But quickly, even if we let pass the fact that young Erik couldn’t muster enough anger at the fact that a gun is pointed at his mother, his father is probably dead, and everyone he’s ever known is being murdered—why doesn’t he go at Shaw afterwards? He has no problem killing two guards or leveling an entire room, but he can’t toss a knife (or a coin) at his mother’s killer? Little Erik didn’t know that Shaw could absorb power—the kid didn’t even try. In fact, he let Shaw put a hand on his shoulder. (WHAT)

The entire plot with Shaw is baffling. Initially, I felt placing the film during the Cuban Missile Crisis was smart because it once again demonstrated how close the human race was to destroying itself. But little did we know that behind the scenes a genocidal mutant involved in the Holocaust was manipulating both superpowers into mutual self-destruction! If that wasn’t ridiculous enough, the way Shaw goes about this is by bullying a U.S. Army Colonel and a single Soviet general into advocating aggressive missile sites. That’s it? The idea that intimidating a few men on the inside is enough to change national security policy is a) stupid and b) again undermining the real philosophical conflict between Charles and Erik.

The bastardization of Magneto is summed up toward the end. Erik finally confronts Shaw and gets into the obligatory speech and no, I’m not kidding he says, “Funny thing is, I agree with everything you said. But you killed my mother.” Instead of saying: “Funny thing is, I agree with everything you said (about humans),” takes out the Nazi coin, “but this, this shows you’re just one of them.” Something like that would’ve rounded it all back to the core and perhaps cover the gaping plot hole of a mutant puppeteering the worst of human excesses and absolving them of guilt. Magneto as a character becomes unrecognizable.

Essentially, the studio made another Wolverine-story, where a lone, loose cannon looking to reconcile his past, is taught to re-focus his anger and find balance from a wise Charles Xavier. You really don't get a sense from this film that Charles and Erik were colleagues, that they built the school together, and that it was the escalating demands of the mutant agenda that drove them apart. If you were to lay out his journey in dramatic terms, it would look like this:

1) hell-bent on revenge
2) meets a group of people who could be useful in obtaining that revenge
3) emotional walls are (literally) pried open by Xavier's telepathic invasions
4) he uses the team to get exactly what he wanted: revenge, the only difference: he wants Xavier to join him. (Oh and he can lift submarines now too).

Not much of a character arc, is it? The relationship between Charles and Erik was one built over years, not one built and broken in a few weeks. X-Men: First Class robs us of this.

One element that had promise was the relationship between Charles and Raven/Mystique. I saw where the screenwriters were going with this: dramatically, Charles had to have a flaw (he’s not totally proud of being a mutant) and because of this he had to lose something to Magneto, something close to him. Unfortunately, they butcher this too. Nowhere during the time that there is a tug for Mystique’s allegiance is it ever clear that Charles actually cares about her. He dismisses her as a child, he doesn’t help her out of a crashed plane, and he doesn’t fight for her at the end. He tells her to join Magneto, even though he knows what Erik has planned. Raven just wanted to feel beautiful, but more than that she wanted Charles to think she was. Regardless of how much she may have agreed with Erik’s “mutant and proud” mantra, she would’ve stayed if Charles said so. She would’ve wanted to. And Charles knew that.

If the filmmakers were trying to set up some kind of “love triangle” then combined, they must have had as little experience with love as me. We’re supposed to assume an attraction between Charles and Moira from a drunken flirtation and Erik saying, “I know how you look at her”. It’s lazy and ultimately I felt nothing when Raven left Charles to the care of Ms. MacTaggert, other than “What do you mean ‘take care of him?’ He just got shot in the spine!” and “Why is Charles still talking? He just got shot in the spine!”

Well, I guess the screenwriters wanted to make sure you "got it." The script routinely relies on telling the audience dramatic beats rather than showing. Let's take the scene where Hank offers Raven a "cure" for her looks. Instead of a talky call back scene (mutant and proud..again), she could've morphed into blue form and came on to him. Hank, thrown aback, would reject her--articulating the turning point for both characters through action. The droning use of line "call backs" never have resonance because the characters never really earn them.

This film should never be in the conversation of X2: X-Men United. Anyone who says different knows nothing about X-Men. X2 was true to who the characters were. That’s why Magneto decides to fight with the X-Men, that’s why Mystique (as Senator Kelly) tries to defend Xavier’s school –they are not villains. They will defend their own kind first, even if it’s the X-Men. X2 had something real and timely to say about the politics of fear and militarism. It had a villain whose plot showed how hatred is manufactured by the powerful, while also having a deep personal vendetta against Xavier. It had a truly aching love triangle where you empathized with each of them and felt the loss of Jean Grey at the end.

X-Men: First Class is derivative, not different. It gives lip service to the rhetoric and spirit of the X-Men, but you don’t feel it and you don’t believe it. For a film that was supposed to take us back to the beginning, back to the 60’s, where concurrently the mutant rights movement began, we get a film so tone-deaf that it’s only nod to the civil rights movement is hearing the word “enslaved” and cutting to the one black character who gets killed not soon after.