X-Men: First Class, Mutant Pride and Power

I saw X-Men: First Class yesterday. While I enjoyed the sixties setting and the use of the Cuban Missile Crisis as a historical backdrop to the founding of the X-Men, there were some errors there that I thought marred what might otherwise have been a very good film. For instance, the film tried to adapt famous sayings from the sixties like “Black and Proud” with one of their own, “Mutant and Proud” but it just didn’t add up. Another was Professor Xavier’s use of the term “groovy” when trying to pick up young women. We have to remember that this film was taking place in October of 1962, not 1967 or ’68. These are terms more geared toward the sixties counterculture, which took place in the latter half of the decade, which was in part a response to events like the Kennedy assassination. While he was alive, they simply didn’t exist, there was no reason for them to exist because the events that made them imperative hadn’t happened yet. This is a huge error in my judgment and calls into question the writers and directors’ grasp of history. Enormous changes had to take place in America over the course of the ‘60s for the nation’s youth culture to reach the point where they could get to expressions of gay or black (or genus) pride. Instead the filmmakers seem to assume that as long as they placed it in the sixties, or any year in that turbulent yet pivotal decade, that it would be OK.

As far as the plot is concerned, I found the film to be on firmer footing, though even there it ran into serious problems. I thought the film’s version of Darwin was well-meaning but ultimately unsatisfying. Angel (Zoe Kravitz) had a nice action scene against Banshee at the end, though the character was a blond guy in the comic books. Banshee was done pretty well, especially the way they demonstrated how he could use the sound waves from his scream to fly. Nicholas Hoult’s Hank McCoy was the best of the bunch, the way he unintentionally brought out the Beast in himself was one of the film’s high points. The best implementation of the film characters in my opinion was James McAvoy’s Professor X and Michael Fassbender’s Magneto, who were great in their respective roles. Fassbender in particular captured Magneto’s rage and desire for vengeance with great skill.

In many ways the best part of the film was the James Bond-ish, Dr. No-feel of the film, with Sebastian Shaw’s (Kevin Bacon) nuclear-powered submarine and the elegant ascots that he wore. Of course any fan of the comic books knows that the filmmakers took liberties with this character but I still thought that it worked for the purposes of this movie. The production design however, was the real star here, and it showed in Raven’s miniskirts (even though they, like "Mutant and Proud" were historically inaccurate)  and the classic fin-tail cars of the era. January Jones as Emma Frost, the White Queen was great in the role, she brought just the right amount of sex appeal to the film, although I thought she was far too deferential to Sebastian Shaw. They were equal partners in the Hellfire Club as I recall, so they definitely dropped the ball in terms of showing her subservient to Shaw in the film.

Overall, I thought the film rated a B-, good, but not quite as good as it could have been.