Review: X-Men: First Class (2011)
You are living under a rock if you don't know the X-Men, the super-powered mutants hated by ordinary humans they have sworn to protect. But when X-Men:First Class hit the big screen last year, a lot of fans threw most of what they knew about the mutants outside the window.
Picture this: the shapeshifting Mystique is Professor X's foster sister, Cyclops's younger brother Havok appears in the 1960s, years before a young Cyclops is recruited in the first Wolverine film. Same goes to the diamond-skinned telepath Emma Frost. Frost appeared as a teenager in the Wolverine film but popped as a voluptuous grown-up White Queen in X-Men:First Class decades earlier.
Apparently, X-Men: First Class is not just a prequel but a reboot of the X-Men film franchise. Not only did the film deviate from the comicbook source material, it showed inconsistencies between its plot and the other X-Men films---A risk that was worth taking.Sure, it may have taken some liberties but the core of what X-men is about remains. It talks of the “other” as a hero, people who we avoid because they are different from us.
The film aptly opens in a German concentration camp in World War II at a time when Jews were being murdered by the Nazis. Here, the young Magneto witnessed what humans can do to people who are different. The film eventually takes the viewers to the historic Cuban Missile Crisis, dramatizing the tension between the Soviet Union and the United States. A twist that I really enjoyed was when the Soviets and the Americans learned of the existence of the strange mutants, the two warring fleets sent missiles to the mutants. It still showed how humans blindly attack people different from them because of irrational fear..
We know that in the end, Professor X gets crippled and starts a school while Magneto will choose the path of a mutant messiah with an iron fist. But the script is so coherent, events are not forced and the change of the status quo makes sense.
Another reason that this is not a kid's movie: Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) cameos and profanely refuses to join the original X-Men. Now that's a treat.
I loved how close the movie paid attention to establishing the characters' motivations clearly. This is truly one fine example of a superhero movie done right :)
ReplyDeleteYeah, Magneto was portrayed as a victim here, a sympathetic would-be villain. :)
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