Weekly Comic Book Review

One of the most fundamental sticking points of the X-Men is their outsider status.  It’s what defines a lot of how we view the team and mutants in the Marvel U in general, but it’s also the very thing that limits real progress for their fictional civil and social rights.  To preserve the X-Men as unappreciated outcasts, most writers have maintained the human intolerance of them for decades, offering them few truly human, non-heroic allies in their quest for peace.

Ultimately, First Class largely overlooks this human element, and that’s what prevents the film from being better than it is.  Nearly all the human characters in the film get portrayed as either easily manipulated buffoons (Emma Frost making the Russian general grope thin air) or overly rash decision-makers (the entire higher US military).  This almost forces you to sympathize with the mutants in the film, even the obviously twisted ambitions of Shaw.

Part of the problem lies in using the Cuban Missile Crisis as a premise, or at least inspiration, for the plot.  Anyone who’s put some effort in studying that volatile period knows how many complicated political/intelligence factors were involved.  The film depicts the event by making it pretty much the results of Sebastian Shaw’s manipulations, making the ugliest, most dire nuclear confrontation in history the outcome of mutant meddling.

This really undermines the climactic finale of the film, which serves to dramatically play Xavier and Magneto’s conflicting ideologies.  Humanity gets brought to the brink of global apocalypse by mutant whims, and they’re saved by mutants more personally motivated by vengeance (the deaths of Mag’s mother and one of the X-Men’s own) than by justice.  Any way you look at it, humans became pawns and near victims in this deadly game, fairly just cause (in addition to the atrocities committed against US soldiers in the second act) for the resentment, which encourages their hasty actions at the end.

What the film really should have done was give Moira MacTaggert, the sole non-mutant with a significant role in the film, more interaction with the X-Men than mere tagalong.  She is the character driven most to do what’s right (her actions are basically responsible for saving everyone, human and mutant alike), and her sensitivity and even love for the mutants gets grossly unappreciated and unacknowledged by them, even by Xavier to a certain extent.

The film’s plot also gets hampered by several major logistical gaps.  Given Shaw is obviously a psychotic megalomaniac, maybe we should be unsurprised that his plan to simultaneously destroy humans and uplift mutants is so incredibly ill-conceived (it would’ve likely doomed both races).  His logic is simply bad; if atomic energy caused mutation, then wouldn’t all mutants be largely Japanese, Pacific Islander, or American Southwesterners?
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Filed under: Marvel Comics, Reviews | Tagged: Alex Summers, Banshee, Beast, Charles Xavier, Cuban Missile Crisis, Darwin, Emma Frost, Hank McCoy, Havoc, Magneto, Marvel, Marvel Comics, Moira MacTaggert, Moira McTaggert, Mystique, Professor Xavier, Sebastian Shaw, White Queen, X-Men, X-Men First Class film, X-Men First Class film review, X-Men: First Class | 12 Comments »