The new X-Men: First Class, which recounts how good-guy mutant Professor X and bad-guy mutant Magneto came to be on opposite sides of a war over mankind, is yet another demonstration that when it comes to superhero origin stories, less is more. While a certain amount of backstory is both useful and necessary – born on the planet Krypton, bitten by a radioactive spider, etc, etc. – we don’t want to know bloody everything that made the characters who they are. If you’re a kid, it robs you of the opportunity to fill in the blanks with your imagination. If you’re an adult, it forces you to spend too long contemplating the utter implausibility of anyone donning a cape and tights to fight crime. Better to just throw the hero into the thick of some plot, rather than painstakingly detail how Bruce Wayne came to build the Bat Cave.
The original X-Men, directed by Bryan Singer, was practically alone amongst superhero movies in that it dispensed with origin stories almost entirely, save for one perfectly chosen fragment that opened the film: in the Warsaw Ghetto, a young boy who will grow up to be Magneto sees his parents dragged behind an iron fence by Nazi soldiers, presumably to the gas chambers. Held back by another set of soldiers, the boy reaches toward the fence, and the force of his anguish is enough to make the bars bend. In X-Men: First Class, directed by Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake, Kick-Ass), we get this exact scene all over again, as well as a lengthy add-on in which a Nazi officer (a bit too campily played by Kevin Bacon) interrogates the boy about his metal-manipulating powers, then brings his emaciated mom back and threatens to shoot her if he doesn’t repeat the trick. Not only is the scene largely redundant, it’s unearned, taking the movie too far in the direction of glibness regarding the Holocaust. While Singer knew enough not to attempt more than a fleeting reference, Vaughn milks it for all it’s worth.
Meanwhile, we also get childhood versions of Professor Xavier and, lord help us, Mystique – Magneto’s deadly, blue-skinned second-in-command – who’s depicted here as a sweet, shy young girl whom Li’l Xavier befriends. Having been a fan of Mystique in the prior pictures – of all the mutant villains, she was the most mysterious – I could hardly bring myself to look at this completely defanged version. It’s like seeing a sickeningly cute kitten take the place of a ferocious jungle cat.
Fortunately, we soon jump ahead approximately 20 years to 1962, and for a while the movie improves. Magneto, now played by Irish actor Michael Fassbender, is out to get the men who killed his mother, embarking on a globe-hopping, one-man mission of vengeance that’s actually pretty entertaining. There’s a witty sequence of orthodontic terror (think silver fillings) in Sweden; a well-staged barroom brawl in Argentina; then a big nighttime showdown involving an ocean liner, a submarine, and a wayward anchor. Throughout, Fassbender adopts a dapper, ram-rod straight profile, like a gleefully murderous walking stick. He’s great fun to watch, as is the work of production designer Chris Seagers, who comes up with sets that are like your most colourful daydreams of the swinging ’60s.
But when Magneto’s mission becomes stymied, he teams up with Professor X, now played by James McAvoy, and Mystique, now played by Jennifer Lawrence, and they go about assembling a team of like-minded mutants to help the CIA avert the impending Cuban Missile Crisis (which turns out to have been masterminded entirely by Kevin Bacon). This is where the movie goes into origin story overdrive, and it never recovers. Not only are we introduced to too many bland, junior mutants, we spend too much time watching them learn to harness their powers in drawn-out training montages.Meanwhile, the scriptwriters (Ashley Miller, Zack Stentz, Jane Goldman, and Vaughn) go overboard filling in all the blanks between this movie and the other ones – how Magneto goes rogue, how Mystique goes bad, how Professor X ends up in a wheelchair, etc. – and it all grows rather dutiful and lumbering, not to mention humourless.
Granted, the best films in the series, the two helmed by Singer, got a little top-heavy with exposition at times. But Singer always maintained such a light, glancing touch perfectly in tune with pop, comic-strip material. Vaughn doesn’t do anything to match the visual highlights of X2: Magneto’s floating prison break; a razor-clawed henchman bleeding Adamantium tears; mutant children escaping a nighttime attack on a school. Instead, we get more obvious attempts to wow us with CGI gigantism, as in the finale when a naval vessel is lifted whole out of the water and sent crashing into a beach. The best that can be said about X-Men: First Class is that, despite its flaws, it’s an honest attempt to tell a story involving characters and incident and all those other old-fashioned things. Compared with much of what passes for summer movie entertainment these days, it’s a legitimate step up.
