In one year, the Uncanny X-Men creative team of Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum managed two retcons of the character of Magneto that changed everything we knew about the character—the year in question being 1982, two decades after the character was introduced in Uncanny X-Men #1 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.
The first was to establish in issue #150 that Magneto was a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Eleven issues later, a flashback issue showed that Magneto and Professor Charles Xavier actually met for the first time before Xavier founded the X-Men, and were dear friends before becoming arch-enemies. When the X-Men were adapted to the screen in 2000, that backstory was the spine of the film, and the plan after X-Men Origins: Wolverine was to do a similar movie for Magneto.
That didn’t quite happen, and we got X-Men: First Class instead…
Fox had been considering doing a “young X-Men” movie going all the way back to the production of X2. When it was decided to do “origins” movies, in addition to one for Wolverine, Sheldon Turner wrote up a Magneto film that would focus on his time in Auschwitz. However, the lukewarm response to Wolverine’s film, as well as producer Simon Kinberg’s desire to do something along the lines of Marvel’s X-Men: First Class comics series, led to doing an origin story instead. But where the comic provided untold adventures of the original team of X-Men from the 1960s, Kinberg wanted to do something different with the movie, utilizing new characters. However, the movie was to take place in the 1960s, in the shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Bryan Singer, having crashed and burned with Superman Returns, returned to the X-franchise and did a treatment of his own for a First Class movie, but he wound up going off to direct Jack the Giant Killer instead, though he remained as a producer of this film. Genre veterans Ashley Edward Miller and Zack Stentz (who are, full disclosure, friends of your humble rewatcher) were brought in to create a script from both Turner’s and Singer’s treatments, one that also in essence adapted the above-referenced first meeting of Xavier and Magneto in Uncanny X-Men #161.
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Matthew Vaughn, who’d been approached to direct X-Men: The Last Stand, but backed out, was approached to direct based on his work on Kick-Ass, and he accepted, doing a new draft of the script with his regular collaborator Jane Goldman.
The film combines younger versions of established characters with ones that hadn’t yet been seen on screen. James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender headline as the younger Xavier and Magneto, respectively, while Jennifer Lawrence, Rose Byrne, and Nicholas Hoult play younger versions of Mystique, Moira MacTaggart, and Hank McCoy, respectively. In addition, this film introduces the film version of longtime X-foe, the Hellfire Club. We get Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), Emma Frost (January Jones), and Riptide (Álex González), as well as Azazel (Jason Flemyng), who in the comics is Nightcrawler’s father, but here is a member of the Club as well. Other comics characters include Cyclops’s brother Alex Summers, a.k.a. Havok, played by MacGyver himself, Lucas Till; Caleb Landry Jones as Sean Cassidy, a.k.a. Banshee; Armando Muñoz, a.k.a. Darwin, played by Edi Gathegi; and Zoë Kravitz as Angel Salvadore, a.k.a. Tempest. In addition, there are cameos by Rebecca Romijn as one of Mystique’s disguises (an amusing in-joke) and Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, the only two actors from the previous set of X-films to appear. We also get Ray Wise, Rade Sherbedgia, Matt Craven, and Michael Ironside in small roles.
Just as Stewart and McKellen anchored the first three films, McAvoy and Fassbender will anchor the series moving forward, starring alongside the former two in the next film: the time-travel adventure Days of Future Past, which takes place primarily in the 1970s. After that, the series jumps to the 1980s for Apocalypse, and the upcoming Dark Phoenix is to be set in the 1990s.
“We can start something incredible, Erik—we can help them!”
X-Men: First Class
Written by Sheldon Turner and Bryan Singer and Ashley Edward Miller & Zack Stentz and Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn
Directed by Matthew Vaughn
Produced by Lauren Shuler Donner and Bryan Singer and Simon Kinberg and Gregory Goodman
Original release date: June 3, 2011
We open with a re-do of the opening of X-Men, with young Erik Lehnsherr in Auschwitz in 1944, but this time we see that his bending of the gate after being separated from his mother is observed by Klaus Schmidt, who wishes to use Lehnsherr’s abilities for himself. He tries to get the boy to use his magnetic powers, but he can only do it when angry. So he shoots Lehnsherr’s mother in front of him, which does the trick.
Also in 1944, young Charles Xavier detects an intruder in the kitchen with his telepathy. It looks like his mother, but acts nothing like her, nor do her thoughts match those of his mother. She reveals herself to be a blue-skinned girl named Raven who can change her appearance. She broke into the mansion to steal food, but Xavier offers her a place to stay.
In 1962, Lehnsherr is trying to locate Schmidt. He intimidates the head of the illegal bank where Schmidt has been keeping the gold bars he pressed from the fillings of his prisoners into giving up Schmidt’s location.
In Las Vegas, we find out that Schmidt is now calling himself Sebastian Shaw, and he runs the Hellfire Club, which is under surveillance by a CIA team that includes Moira MacTaggart. She infiltrates the club to find that Shaw has suborned U.S. Army Colonel Hendry, and also has three people working for him, one of whom can read thoughts and change herself into a diamond form (Emma Frost), another of whom has red skin and can teleport (Azazel), and the third of whom can create mini-tornadoes (Janos Quested). But when MacTaggart reports this to her CIA superiors, they assume she imagined it, as she’s a woman, and women aren’t suited for field work. (Ah, 1962…)
Shaw mentioned that Frost, Quested, and Azazel are genetic mutations, so MacTaggart goes to an expert on genetic mutation: Xavier, who just received his doctorate from Oxford. Raven is with him there, working as a waitress. Xavier sees the images of Frost and Azazel in MacTaggart’s mind and agrees that something needs to be done.
Hendry has, on Shaw’s order, recommended that the U.S. put missiles in Turkey, even though that is provocative to the Soviet Union. When he returns to get paid by Shaw, he holds up a grenade, as he doesn’t trust Shaw’s people not to use their powers on him. But it turns out that Shaw is also a mutant—he can absorb energy and redirect it, and he absorbs the power of the grenade explosion and turns it back on Hendry, killing him.
MacTaggart brings Xavier and Raven to the CIA. They don’t believe a word Xavier says, nor do they believe he’s really a telepath, assuming his inside knowledge to be a parlor trick or the work of a spy, but then Raven changes shape right in front of them and they start to believe.
One agent agrees to take them to his facility, called Division X. But first they go after Shaw on his yacht. Unfortunately, Frost is able to block Xavier’s telepathic probes. However, Lehnsherr has also tracked Shaw to the yacht and uses his magnetic powers to attack the boat. Lehnsherr is almost killed, and Shaw and company get away, but Xavier saves Lehnsherr’s life and brings him back to Division X.
At Division X, they meet Hank McCoy, a scientist who also turns out to be a mutant, with enhanced agility and prehensile feet. McCoy has built a telepathic amplifier that Xavier could use to detect mutants. Xavier uses Cerebro to track down mutants and he and Lehnsherr go to recruit them for Division X. Their recruits include Raven; McCoy; Armando Muñoz, who can physically adapt to any situation; Alex Summers, who can shoot uncontrolled beams of force; Sean Cassidy, whose voice can achieve supersonic tones; and Angel Salvadore, whose dragon-wing tattoos on her back can become actual wings that enable her to fly, plus she can spit fire. (They try to recruit a Canadian mutant named Logan, who tells them to go fuck themselves.)
At Raven’s urging, they all take on codenames, since they’re CIA operatives now: Raven becomes Mystique, Muñoz becomes Darwin, Cassidy becomes Banshee, Summers becomes Havok. Neither Salvadore nor McCoy pick codenames, though everyone takes their turn showing off their powers. Mystique refers to Xavier as “Professor X” and Lehnsherr as “Magneto.”
Xavier and Lehnsherr head to a meeting that Shaw is having with a Soviet general—but Frost is the one who takes the meeting. Xavier and Lehnsherr are able to capture her. However, while that was happening, Shaw attacks Division X, killing everyone there except the mutants, to whom he offers a place in the Hellfire Club. Only Salvadore accepts; Darwin is killed trying to stop him.
The CIA discontinues Division X for obvious reasons. Xavier instead takes the remaining mutants to his Westchester mansion and begins training them in how to use their powers. According to what they’ve learned from Frost, Shaw is trying to start World War III by manipulating both the Soviets and Americans toward a tipping point, encouraging the Soviets to store missiles in Cuba. The resultant nuclear war will wipe out most of humanity and leave mutants to become ascendant as they’re destined to be.
As the Cuban Missile Crisis escalates, Xavier helps Lehnsherr learn to find a balance between serenity and anger (since his powers tend to work better when he’s angry), and McCoy develops a chestplate that focuses Havok’s powers. Xavier and Lehnsherr also teach Banshee how to fly.
McCoy has developed a serum that will enable mutants to keep their powers but normalize their appearance. Mystique is interested at first, but Lehnsherr convinces her that she should take pride in her true appearance. McCoy injects himself, but the serum instead gives him blue fur and a leonine appearance. Havok gives him the nickname of “the Beast” at that point.
The “X-Men,” as MacTaggart later dubs them, fly to the blockade line in Cuba. Xavier uses his telepathy to get a Soviet submarine to fire on the ship carrying the missiles, destroying it. (Azazel had teleported on board and killed the crew, so they didn’t obey the orders to not cross the blockade.)
Lehnsherr raises Shaw’s submarine from undersea, after Banshee finds it with his own version of sonar. Havok and Banshee fight Salvadore and Quested. Shaw is wearing a specially designed helmet that renders him psychically invisible to Xavier. Lehnsherr finds him in his submarine’s engine room, and gets the helmet off him, at which point Xavier can take control of Shaw’s body.
Lehnsherr admits to agreeing with most of what Shaw says. But Shaw also killed Lehnsherr’s mother in front of him, which he cannot forgive. He kills Shaw by magnetically driving a coin through his head—which Xavier also feels through his telepathic contact with Shaw.
Taking Shaw’s helmet, Lehnsherr returns to the X-Men only to find that both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. forces are firing their missiles on the mutants. Lehnsherr takes possession of the missiles, though Xavier and the others are able to stop him from destroying the ships that fired them. (Xavier’s plea is that they’re just following orders, which is, like, the worst argument to use on someone who survived Nazi Germany…)
Lehnsherr declares that he will no longer follow Xavier, and invites any of the mutants present to come with him. MacTaggart tries shooting him, but he deflects the bullets, one of which goes into Xavier’s spine, paralyzing him. Mystique goes with Lehnsherr, with Xavier’s blessing, because he knows it’s what she wants. So do the three Hellfire Club members. Azazel teleports the newfound Brotherhood away.
Xavier, now wheelchair-bound, converts his family mansion to a School for Gifted Youngsters. He also erases MacTaggart’s memories of everything since Las Vegas (it’s unclear whether or not this is done with her consent) in order to protect the school’s secrecy, particularly from the CIA. Sadly, this makes MacTaggart’s position in the CIA even more tenuous.
Lehnsherr breaks Frost out of prison and recruits her for his new Brotherhood. He identifies himself for the first time as Magneto.
“We are children of the atom”
One of the things I liked about the X-movies is that they didn’t start from scratch. While X-Men was the first movie featuring Xavier and his students, it was also clear that they were pretty well established at that point, that Xavier has been rescuing and training and helping mutants for years. Given how many superhero movies of the 21st century have felt the need to start with the character’s origin (sometimes twice, viz. the Spider–movies), this is something of a relief. Over the course of that and several other movies, we saw that the X-Men have a history, from the recruitment of Jean Grey as a girl in the past and meeting former students like Hank McCoy in the present in The Last Stand to Xavier showing up at the end of X-Men Origins: Wolverine to take Scott Summers and the other victims of Stryker away to his school.
It is rare that comic book heroes actually have a history in real time in conjunction with their publication history. Even though Fantastic Four #1 came out in 1961, the FF weren’t actually formed fifty-seven years ago in-story. Comics have existed on a kind of sliding timescale, where the origin story was seven-to-ten years ago no matter when the current story comes out in relation to the first.
So it’s fascinating to watch First Class firmly establish that the X-Men in the Fox movies were actually formed around the time the comic book started. The movie primarily takes place in 1962 so it can be tied into the Cuban Missile Crisis, but that’s only one year prior to Uncanny X-Men #1’s publication. And it gives us the X-Men’s origin, not in their first film, but in their fifth.
The script and set design both do a decent job of setting things in the early 1960s. (The costuming and hairstyles, less so. Everybody’s wearing clothes and has hair that is more 2000s than 1960s.) In particular, the graphics are all 1960s era, the period sexism (particularly as seen in Matt Craven’s CIA boss’s attitude toward MacTaggart), and the tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union are all part of the tapestry of the story. But it’s also very much a spy thriller of the era, with super-powers added in, from the globe-hopping to the international intrigue. I particularly love that the war room is patterned, not so much after the actual war room in Washington, D.C. in 1962, but rather the one in Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Having said that, it’s indicative of a lack of deep-dive research into the time period—it feels like they watched a few contemporary thrillers and left it at that. The dialogue never feels quite right (Xavier’s occasional use of “groovy” notwithstanding) for the era.
Matthew Vaughn and his fellow screenwriters didn’t concern themselves overmuch with perfect consistency with the prior films, prioritizing what makes this movie work over how the big pieces fit together. This can be frustrating, but to do otherwise would spoil the narrative of Xavier and Magneto’s split at the very end, as well as Magneto being the one responsible for Xavier’s paralysis (never mind that it contradicts the ambulatory Xavier seen in X-Men Origins: Wolverine and the opening of The Last Stand, and the latter with Magneto and Xavier still friends and allies at that point).
They do concern themselves with showing the evolution of its three main characters, however. This Xavier is young and rakish and still figuring out his place in the world. This Magneto is young and angry and completely focused on revenge against the person who killed his mother in front of him and tormented him and experimented on him as a child. And this Mystique is one who hides who she really is from the world, and we see the process that leads her to the poignant words she spoke to Nightcrawler in X2 about how they shouldn’t have to hide who they are.
It helps that there’s not a bad performance in the bunch. McAvoy, Fassbender, and Lawrence anchor a superlative cast that sells the characters beautifully. You believe that they’re going to age into Stewart, McKellen, and Romijn, but the performances aren’t imitative, either. Each actor makes the character his or her own.
Having said that, the movie is a bit overcrowded. Pyro changing loyalties in X2 was beautifully played and perfectly constructed. Salvadore’s similar change was not, and it’s mostly because the movie didn’t give us enough time to get to know her—or, really, anyone else beyond Xavier, Magneto, and Mystique. Darwin’s death is robbed of its poignancy by the character not having enough screen time. (Though Edi Gathegi, as usual, imbues him with tremendous charm.) Hoult doesn’t quite sell McCoy’s desire to normalize his feet in order to assimilate, especially since he’d already assimilated just fine before Xavier showed up. And none of Shaw’s Hellfire Club minions have any personality at all. Azazel is just a plot device in a devil suit, Frost—a fascinating and complex character in the comics—is just a plot device in white lingerie, and Riptide isn’t even really a plot device, he’s just kinda there.
Also the melding of the Sebastian Shaw of the comics with a Nazi officer who tormented Magneto as a boy is not nearly as smooth as the filmmakers want it to be. The transition from Schmidt to Shaw is awkward and unconvincing. Having said that, Kevin Bacon does a fantastic job creating a calm, charming sociopath, though as with his minions, we really don’t get much sense of who he is beyond “bad guy.”
As we saw in the Kick-Ass movies and will see again in the Kingsman movies, Vaughn directs action supremely well, and that skill is very much on display here. The characters all use their powers sensibly and intelligently, and do so both in everyday and battle scenes.
This isn’t a great movie—it’s too overcrowded, commits more to a memory of the time period than it does the time period itself, and the lack of continuity with previous films sometimes throws you out of the story—but it’s a very good one. After the disaster that was The Last Stand, the franchise needed a kick in the ass, and this origin story does that quite well.
Next week, a crossover between the McAvoy/Fassbender X-Men and the Stewart/McKellen X-Men, as one of the all-time great comics stories is adapted: Days of Future Past.
Keith R.A. DeCandido has three new novels coming out in 2019: Alien: Isolation, based on the hit videogame from 2014 that also will feature lots of Ripley family backstory; Mermaid Precinct, the fifth novel in his series of fantasy police procedurals; and A Furnace Sealed, first in a new urban fantasy series about a nice Jewish boy from the Bronx who hunts monsters.
The one thing I remember from watching it in the theater, was me cringing in my seat when they killed off the only black guy in the movie. Other than that, I thought it was a solid entry in the X-franchise.
Keith,
“And it gives us the X-Men’s origin, not in their first film, but in their sixth.”
Even assuming that you include X-Men Origins: Wolverine, that would make First Class the fifth film in the series, would it not?
I wanted to seriously dislike this movie from the moment I heard about it. After X-Men 3, I figured it for a “fool me twice” situation. It had nothing to do with the First Class comic, which I thought was brilliant. And the characters: Darwin? Angel Salvadore? Flippin’ Azazel, for pete’s sake? I was convinced the creators had no idea of what was special about the X-Men.
So I refused to see it when it came out, and then watched, puzzled, as it got good reviews. A few weeks later, I found myself with a free ticket to the movie of my choice, and since it was August, I figured I’d see First Class before it passed out of theaters. I remain conflicted, because so many changed details bug my fanboy-sense (Alex being the elder Summers brother, for example), but the relationship between Charles and Eric is so well-done that I can’t completely dislike it. It’s nowhere near as good as the MCU movies, but it’s also much better than I anticipated. With the X-Men movies as a whole varying so widely, I have to rank First Class as one of the better ones.
I really enjoyed this one. As you mentioned, the acting of the main cast supports it completely.
I think it was a good idea to not force this film to be coherent with every X-men film before, I am not sure that would have been possible. It didn’t bother me because I prefer that this particular story is coherent and well told.
The key scene with Erik and Charles after the paralyzing was excellent. I liked that they played it in a controlled tone, it made much more significant that going for the dramatic route.
I quite enjoyed this one, although if you start thinking too closely about the timeline of the rest of the films, you’ll give yourself a splitting headache.
I admit I was also a bit confused about Tempest because I wasn’t familiar with her from the comics, and in the film I only remember them referring to her as Angel?
Wasn’t the ambulatory Xavier from Wolverine Origins a mental projection? Charles just photoshopped himself some mental legs there.
I loved this movie, my only real complaints are the way Oliver Platt’s character was summarily killed in such an offhand way. That didn’t feel right, and I would have thought it would have been more fitting for him to be working with Charles all the way to Cuba because only having Moira on the team at that point really didn’t do much to support Charles’ Humans and Mutants can work together philosophy. Especially after he Supermanned 2 Moira’s memories at the end. This is why nobody likes telepaths, Chuck.
Oh, and while Magneto’s grooming of Mystique did feel realistic; and her alienation from Charles was touched on a little at the Oxford scenes, I felt her defection was a little too easy, and maybe they ought to have held that back until the sequel.
In fact my biggest gripe with this movie is the sequel’s fault. They barely carried any of the character’s we’d seen set up here carried over to the next movie. That is not this movies fault though and I expect we’ll get into that then?
Overall, this is a movie I’m happy to sit down and watch when I come across it during channel surfing.
Absolutely loved this movie when I saw it in theaters, and it remains my favorite X-film. Fassbender is electric, and every time Magneto uses his powers is a highlight of the movie. (That scene in Argentina…WOW.)
My only real complaint is how they tried cramming Xavier and Magneto’s friendship and schism into 2 hours; it’s just not enough time to buy into it, though the actors sell it as best they can. My thought at the time was that they should have gone the trilogy route, with X/Mags forming the X-Men in the first movie, do a full team flick for the second, and then save their falling-out for the third film. And then the sequels tried (and failed) to fix that by doing the same friends-then-enemies shtick over and over each time…
I must be in the minority here, but I never liked this one. I know he’s supposed to be younger, but McAvoy just never pulled off the sheer presence on-screen that Stewart had, and I just couldn’t resolve the two interpretations being the same character. Perhaps that’s just bias on my part, but it pulled me out of the movie so hard that I couldn’t get back in. It’s too bad, because there is some genuinely good action. I just wish I had enjoyed it more.
While it beats the ever-livin’ tar out of X-Men:Apocalypse, I do not agree that this was well directed. The whole action set piece once the *sigh* plane crashes (with nary a character turned to raspberry jam) has too many characters standing around staring at each other and — really — writhing, rather than acting. From the first Avengers movie to Incredibles 2 we have seen wonderful ways to focus on teams of heroes participating together, but instead Vaughan decided to replicate comic book covers:
I liked this film pretty well, although I’ve never found James McAvoy convincing as a young version of Patrick Stewart. It does make some weird decisions, like turning Moira into a CIA agent and making her a generation or so older than the version from The Last Stand, and making Havok decades older than Cyclops. I’m not so bothered by the inconsistency in terms of Xavier walking, since he’s regained and re-lost the use of his legs multiple times in the comics. Ditto for the falling out between Xavier and Magneto, since the sequels to follow show that their relationship would be on-and-off over the decades.
Darwin’s death is perhaps the weakest point, not only because of the “black guy dies first” issue, but because it doesn’t even make sense. Darwin’s power lets him adapt to anything that would normally kill him… until it arbitrarily doesn’t.
Another major weak point is the casting of Emma Frost. She’s supposed to be a complex and charismatic character as well as a blatantly sexy one, but January Jones only fits the latter qualification. Really disappointing.
By the way, it’s amusing to realize that both X-Men: First Class and The Incredibles are set in 1962 (according to a newspaper in the latter film). As is The Shape of Water.
Yeah, Magneto is a bad guy. I get it. But Xavier is a villain. He wipes people’s memories, controls them, etc. all in the name of humans and mutants getting along. Magneto at least is open about his evil. Xavier hides it behind platitudes.
This was easily my favorite X-men movie. Does it make a huge hash of both the comic books’ backstories and the previous movies’? Oh, absolutely yes it does. Does it include a bunch of stuff I’d have told you ahead of time I never wanted to see in an X-men origin story? Yup.
But it does it all in service of nailing the thematic origins of Xavier, Magneto, Mystique, and (to a lesser extent) the Beast, and it does that perfectly, and makes the ensuing tragedy loads of fun, too. It might well be my favorite non-Incredibles superhero movie.
I think the lack of continuity with previous films can be hand-waved away after the events of Days of Future Past. The older movies are no longer in the same timeline as these newer ones. I know even that doesn’t make complete sense, but its more of a “who cares?” matter at this point.
I know it’s the next one that is the time-travel movie, but this is really the one that starts total disregard for continuity in the X-Men movies, isn’t it? I feel like there is a certain lack of trust in the material running through the X-Films. They are purposely letting this film and its sequels rest on Fassbender, McAvoy, and Lawrence, and maybe if they just let the movie be about them it would work. But they have to overstuff it with all these other characters that they have no interest in exploring. And I’m not just saying that because I would be way more interested in Magneto: Nazi Hunter than in X-Men: First Class!
I compare it to Iron Man from 2008; the special effects were great, yeah, but the core was centered on Robert Downey Jr.’s performance, and his interplay with Bridges and Paltrow. Relatively little time was spent blowing things up or introducing a score of unnecessary characters.
@11:
That particular issue is coming home to roost in Dark Phoenix.
ragnarredbeard: You’re not the first to say that, and it’s something that has at least sometimes been dealt with in the comics.
In the original ending for Uncanny X-Men #137, Phoenix wasn’t supposed to die, but Jim Shooter made Chris Claremont and John Byrne redo the ending so she died. It remains one of the stupidest decisions ever made by an editor-in-chief, especially given the insanity that resulted from Jean’s death and resurrection and death and resurrection and on and on and on and ARRRGH. But originally, Jean was going to be de-powered, and then Scott and Jean were going to leave the team and get married, and eventually have a daughter named Rachel. (In fact, the future in the “Days of Future Past” two-parter was the alternate reality where that happened; that it was an alternate timeline was indicated in the text itself, not just from Rachel’s presence, but also that Colossus had a different patronymic.)
Anyhow, the reason I bring this up is because there’s a line that Claremont wrote for the original comic when Cyclops announced that he was quitting the team, and Xavier is shocked and appalled and tries to inveigle him to stay. (This was rewritten because nobody could really complain about Scott quitting after Jean’s funeral.) After Scott and Xavier argue, Wolverine looks at Xavier, says, “Hey Charley, you know the difference between you and Magneto? He can walk.”
The two are more alike than either — especially Xavier — is willing to admit.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
As Kitty Pryde pointed out, “Professor Xavier is a jerk!”
grenadier: You’re right, I was misremembering the timeline of release dates, thinking that this came out after The Wolverine. Derp.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, who loves the edit function.
I liked this movie a lot when it came out, especially Fassbender and Lawrence. But three things in it bugged me a LOT.
First, the time and place thing Keith already mentions. It feels very much like a Doctor Who vision of period America – unsurprising, because Vaughn and Goldman are both British, you can see that the setting isn’t even secondhand as it might be for a director like Singer (who didn’t grow up in that era). but third hand. It’s not just the 60s but the language feels wrong in weird places. Everything slightly distorted.
Second, the death of Darwin made me furious. Killing off the noble but underdeveloped black guy in the team to establish stakes is so tired and regressive a trope that it felt in conflict with the ethos of the whole series – hell, of the whole franchise going back to issue 1.
Third, and I think most fundamentally, having Lehnsherr’s revenge arc be focused on a fellow mutant starts to break the underlying premise of the series for me. “I get it, and I’m with you but you killed my mom” (plus that sequence with the coin and Xavier in his mind) is fantastic, BUT, I really feel like Eric’s originating demons have to be ordinary humans committing ordinary human atrocities. If he comes from a place of rage against the worst of humanity, that’s potentially sympathetic. But to have known from origin that mutants were monsters too, and to make the face of his torture a mutant takes that away, and leaves him as just a mutant supremacist – a believer in his racial superiority to put a point on it.
That last one broke the movie for me, and I found myself liking it in spite of itself.
I enjoyed this movie mainly because I quickly shifted my perspective to see Magneto as the hero. Xavier here is, at best, kind of a dick, and at worst a full villain as others have said. When you pair that guy up with a stone cold Nazi hunter, it’s not hard to pick a side.
“Let’s just say I’m Frankenstein’s Monster…”
What a great scene! Besides Fassbender doing his usual excellent performance, Henry Jackman’s score does a fine job building the tension. I really dig his Magneto theme. A pity, though, I don’t remember hearing it used in the sequels.
I had not liked the first two X-Men movies, and had given up on the franchise. But my son told me this one felt more like the X-Men from my era (in other words, the 60s version). So I went and saw it, and thought it was pretty enjoyable. There was perhaps too much going on, and some of the balls the plot put in the air got dropped along the way, but it was the best movie treatment of the team I had ever seen.
Regarding performances, though, I don’t agree that all of them were good. The actress who played Emma Frost didn’t hit the mark, not by a long shot.
@19 Your third point was by far my biggest gripe of the film for me, I at least liked most of the rest. But after brilliantly establishing Magneto’s motives as being a result of what the Nazis did to him then suddenly it turns out his nemesis from that situation was a mutant…it punches his entire characterization in the face and throws it from a moving car into an endless abyss.
The whole ‘only following orders’ line loses its poignancy when the cruelties were performed by a mutant mad scientist instead of the oppressive Nazi system.
I really enjoyed this movie, and it gave us what I think is the greatest cameo in movie history. “Go fuck yourselves”, indeed sir!
January Jones was indeed an awful choice, Frost should have been a much more interesting and dynamic character, and she was just boringly bland.
While First Class is fun it has major problems for me. By the end of the movie all the good guys are white men (probably straight as well) while the bad guys are women, people of colour etc.
On top of this, the treatment of both MacTaggert and Emma Frost is incredibly sexiest as they keep find ways to put them back in their underwear for little to no reason. I know Frost is drawn like that but January Jones’ performance doesn’t have the required power to get round that problem.
Finally we have the already mentioned death of Darwin.
The fact that similar complaints have been made against Kingsmen suggests the issue maybe the director!
@25: Your first paragraph is one of the rasons I like the movie. I don’t think Vaughan intended it, but there’s a thread throughout the movie of Xavier being good at connecting with and teaching Hank, Banshee, and Havok (i.e. all white guys), but clueless when it comes to understanding people who have the experience of being minorities. Particularly strong examples of cluelessness are the “Would you date me?” conversation with Raven, calling her appearance a “cosmetic problem”, and of course the “just following orders” line, but it’s there in all his scenes. Charles is white, male, rich, and has an invisible and immensely powerful mutation; he takes being detained by the CIA as a fun adventure because he doesn’t find them a threat. Eric, on the other hand, is well aware that this government agency treating them like tools and weapons is not their friend.
So of course Charles ends up with a team consisting of other white guys with invisible mutations, as well as Hank who wishes his mutation was invisible. He’s the first example I’ve seen of an action movie hero whose fatal flaw is privilege. Meanwhile, everyone who has experience of discrimination and oppression realizes that “fight for the people who just tried to murder us, and maybe they’ll eventually accept us” is a bad call, and joins Magneto.
I disagree, I think it is a great movie. A shot on the arm that the franchise desperately needed after two back to back disasters.
I’d dub this one as “okay”. It doesn’t even come close to working as a prequel, in which sense it has all the flaws of X-Men Origins:Wolverine but more so. They’ve already used all the famous X-Men in the earlier-but-later movies, so we get a bunch of also-rans like Havok and Banshee. I’ve still not really got any idea who this “Angel” that isn’t Warren Worthington is meant to be. And for a prequel, it seems to make no real attempt to match up with established continuity. The idea that Professor X and Mystique, two characters that were never in the same room and never gave any indication of knowing each other, actually grew up together and were like brother and sister isn’t really believable. (The next two movies also have the problem of the Jennifer Lawrence Factor, but that’s not a problem here, where she’s still being treated as part of the ensemble rather than the major selling point.) Is it now definite that Havok is somehow still Cyclops’ brother in film continuity despite being about thirty years older than him? At the time, I seem to remember the producers handwaved it with “They’re related but not brothers.”
Leaving aside the fact that I’m one of the few people that actually likes The Last Stand and remain disappointed that we’ve never had a proper follow-up to those events and characters, I think this film only really succeeds in terms of seeing the start of the characters we know from later films. Which basically amounts to Professor X and Magneto, since all the others are new characters or bear no relation to the characters from the earlier movies except the names. (Indeed, we’re required to quietly ignore that Emma Frost and Sebastian Shaw have already been in movies.) We get to see Professor X evolve into the mentor to noble mutants and Magneto complete his path of darkness, only helping the X-Men because he hates Shaw and stepping into his place at the climax. The actual plot is a bit by-the-numbers.
At least one misleading part of the plot summary: Moira shoots at Magneto while he’s trying to use the missiles to destroy the ships that fired them (in fact that’s pretty much what stops him, by distracting him and causing him to lose control of them), rather than randomly taking a few potshots after the crisis is over as implied here.
I just have to say no one mentioned the music in this review.
I happen to love the Theme music of this movie. I think it moves well between being a spy movie theme, a monster movie theme, and a super hero theme.
cap-mjb: Angel is Angel Salvadore, whose codename in the comics is Tempest. She’s called “Angel” because it’s her first name .
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I always thought that this was a reboot of the franchise not a prequel or a interlude. The movie was good I guess, fell into the pattern of combining too many scripts into one movie but all superhero movies tend to do that now. Kevin Bacon never struck me as a good Sebastian Shaw though and it does seem a bit pointless introducing a whole lot of characters that you never hear of again due to the pointless decade jump device between movies.
Also, the way I saw it the future of Days of Future Past is the future of this movie not the first 3 movies, I mean, the timeline is a royal mess, but I always saw FC, DoFP and Apocalypse as being one timeline and The first three X-Men movies and The Wolverine/Logan as another. Maybe one day they will make a perfect X-Men movie, I guess it just goes to show how spoiled we have become with superheroes when we can moan about bits in them that aren’t right.
P.S. X-Men Origins Wolverine is a sorely misunderstood masterpiece, ha.
@26 The other way of looking at that is that all the people with experience of discrimination and oppression, decide that the problem with discrimination and oppression was that until now the people doing the discriminating and oppressing have been people other than them.
cap-mjb: Apocalypse very firmly establishes Cyclops as Havok’s younger brother.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
krad: Angel: Yeah but…who is she? Havok: Ah, thanks, I did wonder but I haven’t seen that one. I guess they changed their minds!
cap-mjb: Tempest/Angel Salvadore was first seen in New X-Men #118 in 2001. She was a member of the team with basically the same powers we saw in the movie. She also was in the New Warriors for a while.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
krad: Ah, thank you!
Is Havoc a Care Bear in the comics? Because he’s a Care Bear in this movie and I never understood why they visualized his power that way.
I will admit that I am a stickler for continuity… or, rather, consistency. I don’t mind the occasional retcon, necessarily — for example, it’s absolutely obvious that Black Widow and Hawkeye are set up as a romantic couple in the first Avengers film, for example, and then they make a very conscious decision to go in a different direction with that, with some half-hearted “oh, they’re just besties” mumbling. It irks me a little bit, but I can understand a deliberate creative choice, particularly when it’s more of a tweak than a warping or nullification of something relevant. If you make it clear you really just don’t care about what has been established before, though, it’s hard for me to care — I mean, if you don’t give a shit about your story, why would I?
So, given all that… I found this particular film hard to watch. There’s a lot in in it I like, but setting it in the same continuity as the previous films just feels like a slap on the face. I mean… if you watch the first X-Men film, are you going to tell me that the Mystique of that film is a close childhood friend of Charles Xavier’s, for example?
It’s this “eh, whatever” mindset that has plagued the X-Men films from the start, a kind of old-fashioned way of thinking that feels like it could be summed up as “it doesn’t matter, it’s just a comic book movie,” something that you can also see in the way superheroes were traditionally treated in Hollywood — the 90s Batman films were another example of that, where it didn’t matter what had happened before or what these characters were actually like, anything went as long as you could turn it into a spectacle.
It’s the exact opposite of the approach the MCU films have taken — sure, there’s the occasional tweak to continuity, but on the whole, they take their consistency extremely seriously, which means that even though the whole thing is a complex sprawl of characters and plotlines, it’s still a pretty smooth ride for the viewer. And the payoff is that you get something like Avengers: Infinity War, because you took the time to build it and made an effort to do it right. Which is not to say the MCU films are flawless, obviously. But I think it’s undeniable that they take the whole thing very seriously.
I feel like they really dropped the ball with Day of Future Past, because what with all the time travel and changing history and whatnot, that was an opportunity to just sweep the mess under the carpet and actually pay attention to what they’re doing from now on. But that’s just not how they like to do things, I guess.
It’s a shame, because there really is a lot to like here. On the whole, the casting is spot on, I like the 60s stuff, a lot of the individual scenes are great. But if I watch something like this, I do it in part because I care about the thing as a whole. A certain minimum technical quality of storytelling isn’t really optional.
@38/Mikki: Continuity is a tool in the storyteller’s box, not the end-all and be-all of the whole exercise. Some storytellers use it more than others. And that flexibility is a good thing. A series can benefit from continuity, certainly, but sometimes the baggage of continuity can get in the way, especially in a series like X-Men where previous installments were flawed and unpopular and too much fidelity to them would hamper future films — or where significant comics characters like Beast or Emma Frost or Bolivar Trask were wasted in throwaway cameos that most viewers wouldn’t even remember anyway, so fidelity to them would pointlessly prevent you from making better use of those characters.
Any ongoing series is a work in progress and subject to unpredictable changes. So the creators of an ongoing series need to be adaptable. Yes, ideally, it’s good if you can create the illusion of a seamless continuity, but the bottom line is, continuity is not the end in itself, it’s just a tool used in service of telling a story. And sometimes you serve the story best by being flexible about the details.
And really, most long-running film series over the decades have had continuity at least as flexible as X-Men‘s, sometimes far more so. In the Universal Frankenstein films, Dr. Frankenstein’s lab was a remote tower in the hills in the first two films, an outbuilding on the Frankenstein estate in the third, and actually inside the castle in the fourth, and the discontinuities only got worse from there. The Universal Mummy films were spread out over more than 40 years of story time yet all somehow managed to take place in the 1920s-30s. And what to make of James Bond, ever changing down through the decades yet supposedly being the same man throughout? Or the Pink Panther/Inspector Clouseau films, where Herbert Lom was vaporized on-camera at the end of one film but alive and well without explanation in the next?
The key difference is that all of James Bond, for instance, doesn’t purport to be in the exact same continuity.
You don’t have to care about consistency at all, of course. You can just do whatever because it works for you in that particular context and not worry about it. This is allowed. Done right, it’s not even a problem — looking at X-Men in the comics, for example, obviously plenty of things have changed between the X-Men’s debut and their current incarnation, and not every single story in the team’s history is given equal weight, and not all of them are still in continuity. These are stories that have been created in different contexts, for different eras, by different people. All of this is fine. Obviously, with decades of material out there, you’re going to have to make some choices.
Still, though, First Class isn’t to the previous X-Men films what The Amazing Spider-Man was to Raimi’s Spider-Man films, or Casino Royale was to Die Another Day. It’s expressly presented as a part of the same continuity, a prequel. If they had said, “hey, this is a reboot, we’re using the same characters but it’s a brand new story and we’re really distancing ourselves from the other stuff,” there’d be no problem. Or if they had addressed a few specific story elements and said, “okay, we’re retconning these specific things because it works better this way, but the rest of the continuity is intact,” that could be fine. But that’s not what they’re doing. There’s an obvious disregard to the continuity. It just isn’t a concern for them.
I don’t feel like “they positioned this as part of their continuity but didn’t really seem to care about consistency” is a particularly unreasonable criticism. Whether that criticism is something that is significant probably depends on your perspective and personal preferences. It’s not some kind of a crime against humanity; the film did okay financially and it got good reviews, and people generally enjoyed it, which is not nothing. Not every movie needs to be made to my specifications for it to be a worthwhile exercise, obviously. Still, speaking as somebody who’s very familiar with the source material and the genre in general (and these films in particular), and a professional writer, I don’t think it’s great storytelling, and I don’t think it’s particularly good for the IP.
I knew I was getting a great film when I saw the Auschwitz teaser being recreated frame-by-frame. That’s how dedicated Matthew Vaughn was. Even Bryan Singer thought he’d appropriated shots from the original film.
It’s not a perfect film, but it does manage to get the X-Men back to their basic premise after five films: focusing on a team of green, untested youngsters. Much like Spider-Man Homecoming, this harkens back to the premise as established by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in focusing the story on the plight of adolescence.
Sure there are continuity issues in the long run, but making Mystique a central character with a direct relationship to Xavier gives a whole new plethora of dramatic possibilities. Even though I miss Rebecca Romijn, I can’t fault them for casting Jennifer Lawrence. She nails Mystique and her desire to be herself rather than try and hide in a world that hates and fears her kind.
At the same time, it’s a delight seeing Magneto as more of a tragic anti-hero rather than a pure villain, and Fassbender sells the part beautifully. And Kevin Bacon knocked it out of the park as Sebastian Shaw. Rarely have I seen a villain cause shivers with his presence alone (and in a way the Dark Phoenix comic was never quite able to achieve).
Also, it seems this had a bigger budget than previous X-entries. I think First Class is a direct result of Fox wanting to keep themselves competitive against the rising tide of Marvel Studios (which had five films by then). The Cuba action set pieces certainly feel bigger in scale. Granted, X3 had the Golden Gate bridge set piece, not to mention the Dark Phoenix leveling a house, but overall these no longer feel like the low budget entries back in the early 2000s.
Overall, a very effective entry in the series, with a director and co-writer* who respect what came before, but still manages to inject some of his own touches.
*Off-topic, I’ve only seen Jane Goldman written films in collaboration with Vaughn, which is why I’m very eager to see what she can bring to the Game of Thrones prequel.
@40/Miki: “The key difference is that all of James Bond, for instance, doesn’t purport to be in the exact same continuity.”
Prior to Daniel Craig, it did, at least superficially. Roger Moore’s Bond went to the grave of the George Lazenby Bond’s late wife. M, Q, and Moneypenny remained while Bond changed over and over. Like many long-running comic book or comic strip series, it pretended to be continuous while advancing in real time and ignoring the question of character aging.
“I don’t feel like “they positioned this as part of their continuity but didn’t really seem to care about consistency” is a particularly unreasonable criticism.”
But as I said, the prior films had created problems specific to this series. The last couple of movies had been bad and made problematical choices, and had squandered important characters in trivial roles. A strict adherence to those bad decisions would’ve hurt future movies. If the X-Men films had been that slavish to the past, then Bill Duke’s portrayal of a character named Bolivar Trask in the script (but not explicitly onscreen, I think) would’ve made it impossible for us to have Peter Dinklage as Trask in Days of Future Past. And that would’ve been bad. Continuity is not more important than quality.
Look at it from the creators’ perspective. Imagine how you’d feel if you had a good idea but were forbidden to do it because some continuity-obsessed executive forced you to stay consistent with the bad decisions made by your predecessors. Imagine how you’d feel if you were forever trapped by past mistakes and never allowed to fix them or rise above them. That would be terrible. Heck, I’m a continuity junkie myself. I prefer it when things are consistent. But as a writer, I’ve found there are times when I have to change things in order to fix mistakes I didn’t catch the first time, or to take advantage of an opportunity I didn’t see the first time. Yes, consistency is an ideal, but no ideal is perfectly achievable. Absolutism does not work in the real world. Success requires adaptability.
I missed this one in the theaters and only picked up the blu-Ray on the cheap when my local Blockbuster Video store was going under. Man oh man, do I wish I’d seen this one on the big screen. To me, this is the “Casino Royale” of the X-Men films. It puts character first and shows us just how we got to where we were at the beginning of the series.
Fassbender’s Magneto is definitely the highlight, but Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique is also fantastic. James McAvoy’s Xavier has the farthest to go to get to where he is in the first film, which accounts for a lot of the character choices that don’t feel like they’re going to end up with Patrick Stewart.
I loved the Romijn and Jackman cameos.
One of the things that irked me about this movie was it’s over emphasis on being “more adult.” Is there a female character in this film that doesn’t wind up either naked or in her underwear at some point? I get that they’re sorta playing around with a James Bond vibe, but still … the moment where Rose Byrne strips down to infiltrate the party just makes me cringe.
Eduardo: Spider-Man was co-created with Stan Lee by Steve Ditko, not Jack Kirby.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@45: Minor mistake (or major, depending on how you look at it). I was thinking of Kirby because of the X-Men, and completely overlooked Dikto.
@38 First Class was designed as a reboot of the X-Men not a continuation. The idea that it was the early days of the Stewart/Berry X-Men only came about because they got Bryan Singer to do Days of Future Past and because it used a little bit of the aborted Magneto origins story.
We know this because Michael Fassbender has said that when he took the role he was told to do his own thing with it, he later studied lots of Ian McKellen footage for DoFP in order to get his inflection of speech when it was decided to merge the two; sorta, although I always state that the future of Days of Future Past isn’t the Future of X-Men to Last Stand
@43. I just assumed the lingerie thing was because it was the Hellfire Club, plus Emma Frosts costume has always been a basque as she was supposed to be a sexy character who men underestimated to their detriment (Claremont always wrote great female characters) and a reference to the Avengers tv show where Diana Rigg wears a basque and fights Peter Wyngarde. Who let us no forget was the basis for Claremont and Byrne’s version of Mastermind.
@46: If it was designed as a reboot, they wouldn’t have had Hugh Jackman pop up to say “This is still the same continuity, somehow.” Michael Fassbender trying to be more like Ian McKellen has nothing to do with multiverse decisions, it’s because Ian McKellen was now in the same film.
Fans today expect there to be a bright, impassable line between “continuation” and “reboot,” but that’s never been the way it’s actually worked. There are countless instances in film history of sequels that pretended to be in-continuity followups while freely altering the continuity — the Universal Monsters films, the James Bond films, the Planet of the Apes films, countless horror franchises, you name it. All fiction is just pretending, so there’s nothing to prevent a storyteller from pretending that an earlier story actually went differently.
@48, Not to mention ret-cons, especially in comics.
@49/BonHed: The problem is that people tend to misuse the word “retcon.” It’s short for “retroactive continuity,” not discontinuity, so it’s supposed to mean new information that recontextualizes past information while still being consistent with prior continuity: e.g. it turns out Obi-Wan was lying about Vader killing Luke’s father, or it turns out Captain Kirk had an estranged son this whole time, or whatever. But people tend to use the word to refer to things that actually change or contradict past continuity, something that’s happened multiple times in the X-Men series (though generally with minor, incidental bits of continuity that could be easily overlooked, e.g. the first versions of Trask, Emma, Psylocke, etc. who were never actually named onscreen).
Oh, that’s one other thing I found a bit surprising about this film — establishing that Mystique is approximately the same age as Xavier and Magneto; or is it that way in the comics as well, and I just missed it?
@47.It was a reboot. The director has said so, so have most of the cast at conventions. A reboot doesn’t mean that none of the actors from the previous films can be in it (which is more a really excessive recast). More that it is a new start and a way to tell a different story without being tied down to years of continuity. This is why Bolivar Trask is played by Bill Duke in The Last Stand, which is supposedly sometime in the future after 2006 as if he is in his 50s and yet Peter Dinklage plays the same character some 33 years earlier at about the same age. If you want a continuation of the X-Men timeline from 2000-2006 watch the Wolverine and Logan as they make more sense thematically I feel. The Alternate version of The Last Stand has Wolverine in the bar from the 2000 X-Men movie travelling North after Killing Jean for example instead of him becoming the leader of the school as in the Theatrical release, which is where you can connect the end of Last Stand to the beginning of the Wolverine.
@48. What he said.
@51. As to the age of Mystique it depends on the writer. Chris Claremont wrote in an issue that she is closer to Wolverine’s age (as well as being basically genderless) so that puts her at about 160 years old. But as to the films, again, it’s another instance where they decided to do their own thing with the character in that, when Mystique gets hit by the Mutant cure in the Last Stand she is portrayed as being in her early 30’s as opposed to the 70 years or so she would have been in the First Class timeline.
@52/supermansmoustache: Another problem with usage is that fans interpret the definition of “reboot” far more strictly and inflexibly than industry professionals do. The term was frequently used in the industry to refer to any revival of a dormant media franchise, regardless of whether it was the same continuity or a new one. But the term was more widely popularized in reference to the Battlestar Galactica reboot of the 2000s, which was a complete reinvention of the continuity, and so that led to the perception in fandom that the word could apply only to a totally separate continuity. That’s now become pretty much the standard usage among the general public, but industry professionals can still use the term in a looser sense. Like I said, the modern perception that continuation and reinvention are absolutely separate and incompatible just doesn’t track with reality; the creators of fiction have a long history of blurring the line between the two.
Just in general, it’s best not to get too fixated on labels. Labels tend to oversimplify and overgeneralize things, and should be seen as just rough approximations, the first crude step in understanding things rather than the ultimate end goal.
@53. I have no serious issues with the term reboot, I just feel it helps people understand the timelines of the movies more if they realise that X4 to 6 are seen as their own timeline. I mean you can try and piece them all together and make them fit but it doesn’t quite work due to various glaring problems with their only being one continuity (as in regards to say, Wolverine making the future a happy ever after where everyone lives in DoFP which is destroyed about 10 years later in order to fit the storyline of Logan). Seeing the movies as one long 7 movie series isn’t wrong, it’s just not how I see them, I suppose (olive branch offered before the moderator steps in and wipes us out like a Sentinel on a rampage).
Edit. 7 movies due to the Dark Phoenix movie due to be released next year, obviously.
@54/supermansmoustache: My view is different. Aside from the minor continuity glitches that are endemic to the entire X-Men franchise, the McAvoy/Fassbinder movies do work as part of a continuous shared reality with the previous films. Indeed, what surprised me about Days of Future Past was that, even though it basically existed in order to wipe The Last Stand and Origins: Wolverine from continuity, it nonetheless remained surprisingly consistent with them up to the point when the timeline was changed.
As I’ve been saying, it’s rare to find a long-running movie or TV series that doesn’t have significant continuity holes in it. Fans today have gotten too zero-tolerance about such things, insisting that any discontinuity at all requires treating things as totally separate realities. But most long-running franchises that pretend to be consistent realities do have major inconsistencies within them. It’s just a matter of willing suspension of disbelief, choosing to play along with the pretense that the reality is continuous despite the inconsistencies.
@52: The director said it was a prequel to the original trilogy. At most, it’s a soft reboot that sets itself up as “the bit that happened before those other films” but doesn’t feel the need to be 100% faithful to them if it serves the story to do something else. If they’d been doing a true reboot, then I imagine they’d have used the more familiar characters rather than feeling obliged to stick with ones that hadn’t been established as too young to be around in the 1960s.
@50: My feeling is that it’s both. I’d define a retcon as anything that deliberately contradicts either the letter or the spirit of an existing work. It can mean “That still happened but there’s this other stuff which changes the meaning of it” or it can mean “That stuff didn’t happen anymore, this happened instead.” The Wikipedia article on retcons says there’s four different types: Addition, alteration, subtraction and temporal compression.
@56 I am sensing we are going to disagree on this, ha. The problem with using the more established characters by which I assume you mean Jean Grey, Cyclops, Storm, Rogue and Angel is that, seeing as how The Last Stand was only 4 years previously, people would have been confused over what was happening if the story suddenly reset them back to the beginning (Look at the whole Amazing Spider-Man fiasco for an example). There was also the fact that even after the negative reaction of Wolverine Origins, they were still planning on doing a solo Wolverine movie set after the events of the last X-Men movie so you would have had Hugh Jackman playing the same role in two different timelines at around the same time (which is sorta what happened but that’s another post).
Ultimately I think the movie studio went for the easy option and tried to make a new story that stood apart from the originals while still sorta hinting that they were a part of the same timeline, but really you are quite free to see them as being one long star wars esque saga without getting a giant M tattoo on your eye and being forced to wear a collar. I just happen to watch them as two separate timelines much along the same lines as you had the Uncanny and New x-Men being published at the same time as the Ultimate Title.
@56/cap-mjb: “I’d define a retcon as anything that deliberately contradicts either the letter or the spirit of an existing work.”
That’s exactly what a retcon isn’t supposed to do. The full, unabbreviated phrase is retroactive continuity. That literally means making things fit together after the fact. Continuity is the opposite of contradiction. A retcon is supposed to be new information that fits with old information as if it had been part of the continuity all along. The whole point is not to contradict prior canon. It might contradict past assumptions, but in a way that’s consistent with the pre-existing reality. What we saw before still happened the way we saw it, but maybe something a character said or believed turns out to have been a lie, or there was someone acting behind the scenes that we didn’t know was there, or there was a relationship between characters that neither we nor they knew about.
So, yeah, people also use the phrase to refer to changes that do alter past continuity, but I consider that a misuse because it contradicts the literal meaning of the word. That’s not retroactive continuity, it’s discontinuity. It’s the exact opposite. Okay, there are cases where a single word is used to mean two opposite things (e.g. ravel or cleave), but I don’t like it. I think it confuses the issue if “retcon” is used to mean two entirely different types of continuity adjustment, and fan discussions of fiction get confused enough as it is. If people can’t agree on what a word is referring to, it just makes things messier.
@55: Ah, but did DOFP actually wipe the events out? Or did Scott and Jean return in some other fashion? It’s been forever since I’ve seen the first Wolverine flick, so I’m not sure about that continuity. Of course, Apocalypse makes a major break by the early intro to Nightcrawlef, but … eh, who really cares? They’re fun movies and even the worst of them was worth seeing at least once.
@57: Well, that’s exactly what you’re saying they did do: Reset it all back to the beginning! I don’t think you can easily smooth it all away with an “old timeline/continuity, new timeline/continuity” split because there’s plenty of discontinuity within the pair and plenty of crossover as well: The end of The Wolverine, which is following on from The Last Stand, is clearly setting up Days of Future Past, while Apocalypse has Wolverine a subject of Weapon X even though DOFP established that the Stryker that found him was a disguised Mystique.
@58: Well, yeah, that’s a part of it. If you’re contradicting past assumptions, whether that’s the assumption of the audience or the characters or even the author (eg that what they had a character say was true when a later story reveals it to be a lie), then that’s contradicting the spirit of the previous work even if you’re technically staying true to the letter. There are plenty of examples of that in comics. Take the ever-changing parentage of Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, for example: Every new version acknowledges the previous explanations and takes time to explain why characters believed that to be true and why they were wrong.
@60. I guess I am going to have to be really precise seeing as how you seem intent on nit-picking everything I say here.
As to the case of using the established characters to form a new beginning, this would mean that they would have probably used the same actors from the previous movies, seeing as how I took your reference to established characters as being characters established in the movies up to the point when this movie got made. Now let us take an example of where a studio tried this and it didn’t work in terms of telling a story that had already been told, which is the Amazing Spider-Man. That told the same origin story as Raimi’s Spider-man set in roughly the same time period as the first with new actors and everyone’s response to it was “Why are they doing another origin story just like the first one?”
So, if you had a situation where the studio just said “Damn we screwed up the whole franchise with the last stand so let’s just reset to the beginning while having it occur in the present time with the same actors playing their roles” then the general non-comic buying audience (which are who these movies are aimed at) would have been totally confused and lost interest in the franchise. I can state this because it’s what happened when they introduced the original cast in DoFP (which I have been trying not to discuss on this movie due to it having it’s own rewatch soon), where the audience I saw it with in the theatre were actually confused that Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy were playing the same character.
This is not even touching on the recast issue when Sophie Turner was brought in to replace Famke Janssen which happened with Apocalypse. The one reason why people who cared about the series let that pass was because Sophie Turner Jean Grey was introduced 17-18 years previously to Famke Janssen’s Jean Grey and having FJ play a 20 year old Jean Grey at the age of 51 would have just seemed weird (Plus like Hollywood is sexist to aging actreses btw). Now if they had set it so the new beginning was in 2011 you could have had Famke Janssen as a new Jean Grey but seeing as how to the studio’s eyes they had just wrapped up that version of the team why would they bother restarting it again with the same person playing the role when ultimately you really would have ended up with the same storyline (this is also seen with the general apathy people demonstrated when it was announced they were doing another Phoenix story about 10 years after the last one btw). In that case, unless they would have used the same Jean Grey in a coccoon at the bottom of the Lake storyline they used in the comics to explain why Jean Grey wasn’t dead, but then there’s no way they could do that which would fit with the films they had made before,
Oh yeah, this is all a scenario where they use the established characters from the first three movies in the film btw.
Now, if they used a whole new cast and set the film in the present timeline, people also would have been confused as they would have asked what happened to the original characters/actors which would have distracted from establishing a new cast as the X-Men (which is kinda what happened in DoFP where Wolverine is the major focus of the storyline instead of say Shadowcat – and yeah, I’m waiting to get into that whole Shadowcat can send you back into the past by phasing thing when the rewatch of that movie comes out). Seeing as how it seems the studio had the laughable intention of actually sorta caring what the fans of the comics/movies felt about the characters they didn’t really want to rub peoples noses in the dirt this way by recasting the actors of the established characters who could have played the roles just because they wanted something new so they went for the option of choosing a new cast set in a earlier period.
An imaginary scenario for you of a development meeting where they discuss making the movie from the scripts they had: “Well, we have this really cool script where Magneto is a Nazi Hunter we were going to film but Wolverine Origins got such a bad reception that we’re not doing separate origin stories anymore, but damn this script is cool so can we use it some way in a x-men movie?” “Problem is, it’s set 50 years ago and we’ve already established that Phoenix, Cyclops, Storm and Iceman would have been babies or not even born at the point so we can’t really use them, Angel is too expensive to do properly unless we give him cardboard wings, but hey, we already sorta said he was 20 in that last stand movie we did about 4 years ago, so he’s out. We could use The Beast though because like, he’s old in the Last Stand so that’s cool, oh yeah and that Mystique character supposedly never ages so she can be in it as well seeing as how we never really said how old she was anyway.” “Oh hell, why don’t we just wipe the whole board clean, do an origin story and sorta say that the whole thing is like before the first three films while not actually having them be tied into the first three films because that’s a lot of work and then we we don’t have to worry about all this crap and just go to lunch.” “Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.”*
*I imagine it going something like that.
Now your whole point of The Wolverine post credit scene, which funnily enough I knew you were going to use. Fact one, It’s a post credit scene so it’s more a trailer for the next movie in the series, this being Days of Future Past (This is also shown when you have Mr Sinister collecting Wolverine’s blood at the end of Apocalypse so they can have X-23 in Logan as well btw, even though Mr Sinister isn’t in that film). Fact two, there’s no reason that the DoFP timeline in the DoFP movie is actually the same Mutant Genocide as we may have had in the Wolverine timeline. Why? Well, Wolverine has his bone claws at the end of the Wolverine due to them being sliced off right, yet Wolverine in DoFP has adamantium claws, so I guess you could say that Magneto tracked down his old sliced claws covered in adamantium and sorta melded them onto Wolverine after he and Professor X recruited him, but we don’t see that on screen, so it’s open to interpretation how he got the adamantium back. There’s also the fact that Professor X in that post credit scene has his original motorised wheelchair and not the Shiar technology floating wheelchair he has in Days of Future Past. Somehow I can’t see Professor X being too concerned with inventing a new wheelchair when a entire species of humanity is being eradicated, but then again, I always believe that Professor X is an idealist and embodies hope in the future of mankind.
Oh yeah, this is not even dealing with the whole messed up timeline thing in the movies where like, if you follow the point that the X-Men timeline is continuous then Logan happens after the end of the events of Days of Future Past. Which seeing as how DoFp came out in 2013 and was set about 10 years in the future, means that when Wolverine wakes up at the end of that movie it’s 2023. Logan is set in 2029 and basically all the mutants have been killed 3 years previously and Logan states that there have been no new mutants for over 25 years (he also ages amazingly badly and quickly in those six years btw). Yet we see 13 year old mutants at the end of DoFP which means that there must have been new mutants born after the year 2004 at least otherwise the whole claim of Logans makes no sense.
As to the whole Mystique being Stryker thing, this is the same movie that also had Rogue in the future with powers keeping Wolverine in the past even though The Last Stand had the scene where she said she took the cure and no longer had powers right? (and this happens before the timeline is altered by Wolverine). I haven’t watched the Rogue cut of that in a while but I’m pretty sure Stryker is Mystique in that one and Stryker is Stryker in the Theatrical Version (but I could be wrong), but basically seeing as how Apocalypse is set 10 years after DoFp there’s no reason there isn’t a story where Stryker escapes from wherever Mystique is holding him (It is stated in the first X-Men that Gyrich is killed by Sabretooth for instance while Mystique seems more subtle than just killing someone and stuffing them in a car trunk) and retakes control of the project. But it’s like one of those things we don’t see so It’s up to you as to whether that happens.
Oh final nit pick thing. When the Director of First Class was asked if he would be willing to reboot the Justice League movie after the poor showing of that last year, he stated that he would have no problem Rebooting the franchise if they paid him, because Fox already got him to do the same with the X-Men. This was in a interview from earlier this year and was commented on screen junkies I believe where they quote him word for word from whatever article they took the story from, so he has actually said the First Class was a reboot, I mean whether he means reboot as in wiping out what happened before or just starting a series that was seemingly over is open to interpretation but yes, he has said that X-Men First Class was a reboot.
To wrap up this rambling monologue, I will just say that I personally prefer to see X4 to 6 as a new timeline because it solves a lot of the minor issues that exist when you try and put the original trilogy with the new films. As I said you can view it all as one long saga but I just choose to view it as two separate timelines where maybe the events of X-Men and X2 do happen as shown before the reboot in DoFP (and BTW THAT WAS A BLOODY REBOOT!) with the events of the Last Stand being different, but hey that’s not what the movies said happen so it doesn’t count.
And here was I all ready to talk about how Professor X is being recast as a manipulative villain in these movies and the comics which goes against the nature of the character. Oh well, guess that’ll have to be another ten thousand character post.
@60/cap-mjb: “If you’re contradicting past assumptions, […] then that’s contradicting the spirit of the previous work even if you’re technically staying true to the letter.”
I agree. That’s why I dislike retcons for the most part. They’re disrespectful. Dishonest, too: They pull the rug out from under people’s feet while pretending to respect continuity.
There are exceptions – if the previous work is implausible or problematic, I see the retcon as a repair effort. Examples from Star Trek novels (I know those best) include Diane Duane’s explanation for the galactic barrier in “Where No Man Has Gone Before” as a passing phenomenon and Christopher Bennett’s explanation for the duplicate Earth in “Miri” as an Earth from a different universe. And sometimes, very rarely, the new version of the fictional world is so good that I just don’t mind; my favourite example for this is Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing.
@62/Jana: “That’s why I dislike retcons for the most part. They’re disrespectful.”
I doubt most creators would see it that way. That implies that an earlier work is an ideal, perfect thing that should never be touched, but that’s not how creativity works. Authors are only human. The things we publish or release rarely represent our perfect intent; they’re just the best approximation or compromise we could manage under the time or budget or logistical restrictions we were working under. Most creators look back on our older works and wish we could change them, because we see the mistakes we made or the crudeness of our earlier work created when we were less experienced, or we’ve had new ideas since then that would’ve made the original work better if we’d only thought of them in time. The idea of being forced to remain slavishly faithful to everything we did in the past, good or bad alike — of being forbidden to improve or fix our mistakes — is rather horrific from a creator’s point of view. Everyone deserves the right to fix past mistakes or strive to do better than they did before.
Maybe you’re saying you think it’s disrespectful for one creator to alter another creator’s work, but that’s just the nature of a collaborative process. Input from other people can often improve a creator’s work, and if it’s a collaboration, like any screen production, then it doesn’t really belong to any one person to begin with.
Besides, any ongoing series is a work in progress by its very nature. It’s impossible for new installments not to add new ideas that alter the overall reality. Was it disrespectful in Star Trek for Gene L. Coon to introduce the idea of the Federation after most of a season in which the Enterprise was strictly an Earth ship? That was a pretty major retcon, a radical change to a core assumption of the series. But it was definitely a change for the better. That’s what people should want an ongoing series to do — to keep improving and growing over time, not be perpetually shackled by its old ideas, bad ones included.
@61: Well, I did a quick google search of “First Class reboot” and I came up with a Matthew Vaughn quote too where he said that First Class was a prequel telling the story of how Xavier and Magneto first met. So, at the very least, he’s being inconsistent about it.
If you find Rogue having her powers back in The Rogue Cut inconsistent with the continuity of the original trilogy, then just go with the theatrical cut where she’s only seen in the new timeline and it’s not clear if she’s got power or not. Or alternately, notice that Magneto has his powers back in Days of Future Past and at the end of The Wolverine, despite the fact that he was also given the cure in The Last Stand, and then see the scene at the end of The Last Stand where Magneto seems to be getting his powers back, and assume the same thing happened to Rogue. And no, an alternate timeline is not a reboot, it’s suggesting it’s all part of a wider multiverse continuity.
But as you say, I think we’ll have to agree to disagree!
@50/CLB, My bad, I wasn’t saying this was a retcon, only that it’s a tool used a lot in comics to change backstory & plug up plot holes.
@64/cap-mjb: As I’ve suggested before, fans draw a stricter line between a reboot and a continuation than creators do. Fans see fictional works as fixed, complete things and thus see any change to them as a big deal; but the people who create them in the first place see that they’re the end result of an extensive process of invention, change, revision, trial, and error. So those of us on the creative side don’t really see our creations as immutable to begin with. So it’s hard for creators to be as purist and inflexible about continuity as viewers are, since we’re looking at it from backstage and can see how invented it all is. As the saying goes, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” As long as the creative process is still ongoing, there will be adjustments and changes made, because that’s how things are created in the first place. It’s just that sometimes those changes happen while the audience watches and sometimes they don’t.
Flay-Flames! Flames! On the side of my face! Breathing!
How I feel whenever I start discussing the X-Men movies.
Regarding the argument about continuity:between stories continuity is nice but non-essential, but within a single story it is quite essential. The difficulty is that can be hard for the audience/fans to tell the difference between one big story divided into segments, and a collection of related but distinct stories.
I currently see the X-Men movies series as falling into the “collection of related stories” category; in this case the inconsistencies between them aren’t mistakes, they’re just a natural result of each movie being a separate story. However, this is a relatively recent point of view for me; the “continuity errors” (as I saw them) between the movies used to really bug me.
Actually ironic thing about this movie is that is probably the second to last on the list in terms of the movies I have liked. I appreciated the actual film itself but as was said in the article, it’s overcrowded with characters who have no real relevance to the overall story outside the main 4. I mean when you watch DoFP and Apocalypse Havok is relegated to a mere cameo status, Azazel, Riptide, Banshee and I assume Emma Frost are killed off before DoFP. The movie strikes me as a false start in a lot of ways but at least it’s not The Last Stand, which I only watch when I really want to torture myself.
It may seem weird, but can someone both like and dislike something at the same time, because I tend to get that feeling a lot with X-Men movies.
@69: “… can someone both like and dislike something at the same time …?” Well yeah, I’d say that’s definitely possible. I’m a huge fan of the James Bond movies, but I’d say that my reasons for watching a masterpiece like “From Russia With Love” or “The Spy Who Loved Me” differ from my reasons for watching turkeys like “Moonraker” or “Diamonds Are Forever.” As noted above, I still get a kick out of every single X-Men film, even if I do think the first solo Wolverine flick is as dumb as a bag of hammers.
This was a good installment of the franchise, I loved that it made Magneto a more vital character (Ian McKellen is wonderful, but he was never a good choice for Magneto), that we got some great superhero action, and the yellow and blue costumes to boot. The only thing that struck me as unnecessary was to make Xavier and Mystique sort-of-siblings, but ah well…
Speaking of Magneto, the stuff McKellen is given to do in previous film never satisfied me as spectacular enough (not even when he manipulated a bridge, or hundreds of bullets). When Magneto attacked the yatch in this movie, I squeed like a little child.
I do agree with you, krad, on the blandness of Shaw’s minions and other characters.
@5 – hoopmanj: Her codename was the same as her first name originally (because Warren was going by Archangel at the time), but later she lost her powers and she and other mutants who’d been depowered formed a team (called New Warriors, but with little relation to the original NW) using tech to simulate powers, and she took the codename Tempest.
@19 – Erik: You have a great point there with Magneto’s motivation.
@26 – Katherine: Nice perspective, though you’re right it was probably not intentional on Vaughn’s part.
Another insightful review and great read, Keith! Your observation that Charles feels Shaw’s death through Shaw’s point of view makes Xavier’s reaction – memorable, enjoyable, but seemingly over-the-top – now make a lot more sense to me.
@25/Stephen Shires – True story: the last time I watched this movie led me to google “Is Matthew Vaughn a sexist [something]?”
One point on which we all seem to agree is that the film fails in its presentation of Emma Frost. I don’t really blame Jones, as she was given very little to work with. The original Marvel Comics version of Emma Frost was the White Queen of the Hellfire Club and headmistress of a mutant academy, a true equal to both Sebastian Shaw’s Black King and to Professor X; here, she’s at best a flunky, if not a Bunny in Shaw’s wannabe Playboy Club.
Excuse me? Intelligence agencies have been using female agents in the field for, well forever. Her superiors might well choose not to believe McTaggart but not for that reason. A personal problem between her and the superiors is a lot more probable, but 1962, there’s got to be lots of irrational sexism .
Ah, I didn’t get a chance to comment on this one when it came out. Anyway, not a ton more to add. It’s fun to watch as a kind of period piece, and I find in general the best way to enjoy the X-Men movies is to enjoy each one on its own and not worry too much about how they fit in which each other – the general shape of the story fits. I can see both sides of the continunity debate and depending on the franchise, have fallen on different sides of it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t mind it in the X-Men movies as much.
Overall I think you are right in that the strength of this movie is the Professor X/Magneto/Mystique relationship, at times to the detriment of many of the other characters who, while fun to watch, aren’t developed much. I also think – although this is more of a critique for future movies – they get a bit too much mileage out of sympathy for Magneto’s ‘man-pain’.
@19 – Hm. Well, I’ve always mainly seen Magneto as a mutant supremacist, regardless of his motivations. The irony being that he’s really not that different from the Nazis he so hated. Or are you saying that in some way this is undercut by the specific Nazi he hated also being a mutant?
@26 – I was thinking something similar. I don’t view Professor X as a villain, per se, since his intentions are good, even though he definitely does some morally shady things, and also tends to have a pretty patronizing attitude. But even in his interactions with Mystique early on, it’s clear he doesn’t really “get” what other mutants – those that can’t ‘pass’ as normal humans – really go through. So it’s kind of easy for him to take a benevolent, ‘we should all work together and use our powers for good’ stance. Don’t get me wrong – I think that’s right – but I think he totally misses why other mutants just aren’t going to go for that, as well as underestimates how cruel humans can be.