X-Men: First Class: Many More Sentences
My brother learned to read from Dr. Seuss (he would come out of his room where he'd been reading, yell, "Hop on pop!", and jump on my dad), but Spiderman taught him to really enjoy it. Then, when I was about fifteen or so, he got me into the animated X-Men cartoon. Because we were already a comics-friendly house, I started reading the comic books. While X-Men wasn't the first thing I felt fannish about, it was my first fandom in terms of fannish participation. (I'm sure my few newsgroups posts are still out there somewhere.) I started out loving it for the Rogue/Gambit relationship, but Mystique quickly became my favorite character. (I had the first ever Mystique fan page on the internet when I was about seventeen or so.) Then I started reading Generation X, and Emma Frost became my second favorite character. (If you've seen X-Men: First Class, that is probably enough of an explanation for why I didn't like the movie, although there's a lot more detail below.) I tell you all this so you know that I come to the X-Men movies from a place of history.
Even though I spent the movie wanting to hurl things at the screen, I will start out with the two things I liked: First, I liked the way Erik stands in Schmidt's office, head down and forward, pants pulled up high on his body. It reminded me of my grandfather, who came to the US from Poland as a child. (They came in the 20s; there was family who stayed and died in the camps.)
Secondly, I loved all the parts with Charles and Erik, from the point Charles tells him he's going to die all the way to the end where they each want the other by their side. stevie_roch said that the only thing she took away from the movie was that Erik was in love with Charles. Even James McAvoy knows they're in love:For the record, McAvoy would have preferred it if Xavier and Magneto stayed together. Like, really together. "It is a little bit of a mini-tragedy that him and Magneto don’t, you know, have sex and become married and become best friends."
(source, and thanks to norwich36 for the quote and the link.)
And then there was the rest of the movie. The more I've been thinking about this, and about how to organize a post about it that's more than just, "I HATED IT," the more I think I've identified the structural flaw behind the movie. It's purportedly an X-Men origin story, but it's actually the Magneto origin story. Erik is the one character they actually spent time developing and the only one who experiences actual growth. It reads almost as if the first draft of the script was a Magneto origin story, and then someone said, "No, wait, the X-Men are the good guys. The story has to be about them," and they hastily added Charles and the rest of the X-Men in without bothering to flesh them out much.
Charles doesn't work. He starts out as an arrogant if charming guy, and by the end, he's willing to talk about protecting humanity, but we don't see him get there. Erik, on the other hand, starts out consumed with anger and ends up in a place where he wants what's best for his people, and we get to see him get there. Charles saves his life, offers to be his friend, helps him refine his abilities, and all of that shapes his perspective, but it doesn't do anything to Charles. That, I think, is the biggest problem with the structure of the movie. Charles should change. Charles should be influenced by Erik. The beach scene should be absolutely gut-wrenching in a way it's not: they should both see each other's perspectives and be absolutely tortured about taking different paths. But they don't and they aren't - or rather, Charles doesn't see Erik's perspective and he lets go (of both Erik and Raven) way too easily.
There's another issue to the structure that is deeply entwined with both the racefail/genderfail aspects and the way they've ruined my favorite characters. I haven't gone looking for it (because I don't really want to go looking for much of anything about this movie), but there had damn well better be some good conversation out there about the race and gender aspects of this movie. By the end of the movie, the people of color (including blue and red) and the mutant women have either died or joined the side of evil. (It should be ambiguously evil, but, well, see above regarding how they didn't manage to overcome the part where we all know Charles is the good guy.) The white men (I'm including Hank in this because he doesn't become blue until the very end of the movie) stay on the side of good. Surely I'm not the only one who thinks this is a problem. It's even more of a problem in the context of the story they could have told. By setting this in the 1960s with the spectre of the Holocaust hanging over the whole thing, they had an amazing opportunity to include women and people of color as full, interesting members of the team, which would have underscored how Erik and Charles' visions for the future of mutantkind were different from the human governments' policies. Unfortunately, the movie doesn't go there.
Let's talk for a moment about the women. We're going to start with Mystique. I will admit that I am not entirely rational about the movie portrayal of her. I've ranted before about how changing Rogue's backstory ruins Mystique, so I didn't go into this with very high hopes for her character, but I was even more disappointed. In the comics, Mystique is badass. She runs a crew of evil mutants. At one point, she engineers a plot to assassinate her own son because he's the head of an anti-mutant hate group. She is also human. She's devastated when her (female - Mystique in the comics is canonically bi) lover dies. She lets Rogue go to Xavier even though she doesn't agree with his methods because it's what's best for Rogue. This is the woman who was my favorite character, and nothing of her remains in the movies. This movie, I think, does her the greatest disservice. In this movie, she is a teenager whose only wish is for someone to think she's beautiful as is. Now, okay: teenager. I get that this is the kind of thing that consumes the lives of teenagers. But there is nothing else there, no concern for others, no hint of the woman Mystique could become. There is also a problem with her look, most of which is the fault of the previous movies that this one has to match. Mystique is supposed to be blue and smooth and wear a dress. (A very revealing dress, but a dress nonetheless.) The only reason to give her scales is so that they can get away with the titillation factor of showing her naked. And even beyond the artistic decisions, there's an uncanny valley issue that makes her hard to look at.
Let's move on to Emma Frost, since she was my second favorite character. January Jones' Emma Frost is too soft - both in looks and temperament. Emma Frost is powerful and knows it. She's not the type to put up with someone ordering her to get ice. Like Mystique, she is also human. She deeply grieves the death of her students, and agrees to - with Banshee - run the school that becomes the heart of Generation X. She in no way becomes warm and fuzzy, but she does care about her students. I didn't see that woman at all in this Emma Frost. This Emma Frost was a Bond girl who only did what Shaw told her, and the end of the movie implies she's only moving from that to doing whatever Magneto tells her to.
The only other women we meet are Angel the poc stripper, who never develops any personality at all, and Moira the good CIA girl. I wanted to like Moira more than I did - her stripping to her underwear to infiltrate the Hellfire Club was great - but I was annoyed that the only thing she shares with the Moira of the comics is the name. They couldn't have invented someone to fill that role?
The only small consolation for the poor character development of the women is that the men don't fare much better. Havok has an excellent story that could have made him much more interesting to us. Banshee should have had some kind of interaction with a girl that would have hinted that she was his daughter's mother - or they could have recruited him as the older cop he was in the comics. Hank gets a little more development, but mostly because we can extrapolate from what we know about geeks in movies. Darwin is nothing but a walking, talking stereotype who, of course, is the first one to die. Imagine if each of the recruits had been allowed to have their own, real story. Think about how much more powerful the choice they have to make at the end would be if we knew something about them. Think, too, how much better a movie it would have been if they had shown us the potential for who each character would become without unsubtly cramming the last few minutes of the movie with the characters as they appear in chronologically later movies.
Now that we've covered the characters, let's talk for a moment about the way the movie incorporates real history into its narrative. I will tell you up front that I can no longer handle Holocaust/World War II books/movies. I read a lot of them when I was about twelve and loved them, but I can't do it anymore. This is part of what made me cringe back in my seat, arms crossed, from the very beginning. But, I thought, it wasn't going to be the whole movie. It's just the set up. That doesn't really make it any easier to watch. That's probably why it took me half the scene to wonder why Erik and his mother were speaking German when they were in Poland. Wikipedia tells me that the Lehnsherrs escaped Germany for Poland, but that detail didn't make it into the movie.
The key to the scene that sets everything in motion is that Schmidt has a Nazi coin that he wants Erik to move. When he can't, Schmidt shoots his mother. Erik, in his rage, then moves and bends every bit of metal in the room, from the soldiers' helmets to the tables and implements in the torture chamber on the other side of the glass wall of Schmidt's office. The last thing to move is the coin, which flips around to become the X-Men logo for the credits. I had such a negative visceral reaction to that. This goes back to my first point: if they'd let it be a movie about Magneto, it might have worked. But it's not about Magneto. It's an X-Men movie, and we know the X-Men are the good guys. You can't equate the good guys to the Nazis.
I liked Erik showing the Germans in the bar in Argentina his tattoo. That was a powerful moment. But I hated Erik saying, "Never again," on the beach at the end. If they'd done the movie right, that would have been so incredibly powerful, and it would have made Charles waver. But they didn't do the movie right, and it felt like they were exploiting my people's history for cheap theater.
I was even annoyed by the inclusion of news footage of JFK. I don't have any real attachment to JFK, and it still felt like they were shoehorning him into the movie to play on the common goodwill toward him and make us sympathetic to the movie. It also didn't fit the look of the rest of the movie.
That look is the last thing I'll complain about. I'm not sure I know enough about artistic design to articulate what I didn't like about it. Somehow, it just looked wrong and badly composed. It seems like making it look good is one of the basic tasks of a movie, and they couldn't even do that.
Even though I spent the movie wanting to hurl things at the screen, I will start out with the two things I liked: First, I liked the way Erik stands in Schmidt's office, head down and forward, pants pulled up high on his body. It reminded me of my grandfather, who came to the US from Poland as a child. (They came in the 20s; there was family who stayed and died in the camps.)
Secondly, I loved all the parts with Charles and Erik, from the point Charles tells him he's going to die all the way to the end where they each want the other by their side. stevie_roch said that the only thing she took away from the movie was that Erik was in love with Charles. Even James McAvoy knows they're in love:For the record, McAvoy would have preferred it if Xavier and Magneto stayed together. Like, really together. "It is a little bit of a mini-tragedy that him and Magneto don’t, you know, have sex and become married and become best friends."
(source, and thanks to norwich36 for the quote and the link.)
And then there was the rest of the movie. The more I've been thinking about this, and about how to organize a post about it that's more than just, "I HATED IT," the more I think I've identified the structural flaw behind the movie. It's purportedly an X-Men origin story, but it's actually the Magneto origin story. Erik is the one character they actually spent time developing and the only one who experiences actual growth. It reads almost as if the first draft of the script was a Magneto origin story, and then someone said, "No, wait, the X-Men are the good guys. The story has to be about them," and they hastily added Charles and the rest of the X-Men in without bothering to flesh them out much.
Charles doesn't work. He starts out as an arrogant if charming guy, and by the end, he's willing to talk about protecting humanity, but we don't see him get there. Erik, on the other hand, starts out consumed with anger and ends up in a place where he wants what's best for his people, and we get to see him get there. Charles saves his life, offers to be his friend, helps him refine his abilities, and all of that shapes his perspective, but it doesn't do anything to Charles. That, I think, is the biggest problem with the structure of the movie. Charles should change. Charles should be influenced by Erik. The beach scene should be absolutely gut-wrenching in a way it's not: they should both see each other's perspectives and be absolutely tortured about taking different paths. But they don't and they aren't - or rather, Charles doesn't see Erik's perspective and he lets go (of both Erik and Raven) way too easily.
There's another issue to the structure that is deeply entwined with both the racefail/genderfail aspects and the way they've ruined my favorite characters. I haven't gone looking for it (because I don't really want to go looking for much of anything about this movie), but there had damn well better be some good conversation out there about the race and gender aspects of this movie. By the end of the movie, the people of color (including blue and red) and the mutant women have either died or joined the side of evil. (It should be ambiguously evil, but, well, see above regarding how they didn't manage to overcome the part where we all know Charles is the good guy.) The white men (I'm including Hank in this because he doesn't become blue until the very end of the movie) stay on the side of good. Surely I'm not the only one who thinks this is a problem. It's even more of a problem in the context of the story they could have told. By setting this in the 1960s with the spectre of the Holocaust hanging over the whole thing, they had an amazing opportunity to include women and people of color as full, interesting members of the team, which would have underscored how Erik and Charles' visions for the future of mutantkind were different from the human governments' policies. Unfortunately, the movie doesn't go there.
Let's talk for a moment about the women. We're going to start with Mystique. I will admit that I am not entirely rational about the movie portrayal of her. I've ranted before about how changing Rogue's backstory ruins Mystique, so I didn't go into this with very high hopes for her character, but I was even more disappointed. In the comics, Mystique is badass. She runs a crew of evil mutants. At one point, she engineers a plot to assassinate her own son because he's the head of an anti-mutant hate group. She is also human. She's devastated when her (female - Mystique in the comics is canonically bi) lover dies. She lets Rogue go to Xavier even though she doesn't agree with his methods because it's what's best for Rogue. This is the woman who was my favorite character, and nothing of her remains in the movies. This movie, I think, does her the greatest disservice. In this movie, she is a teenager whose only wish is for someone to think she's beautiful as is. Now, okay: teenager. I get that this is the kind of thing that consumes the lives of teenagers. But there is nothing else there, no concern for others, no hint of the woman Mystique could become. There is also a problem with her look, most of which is the fault of the previous movies that this one has to match. Mystique is supposed to be blue and smooth and wear a dress. (A very revealing dress, but a dress nonetheless.) The only reason to give her scales is so that they can get away with the titillation factor of showing her naked. And even beyond the artistic decisions, there's an uncanny valley issue that makes her hard to look at.
Let's move on to Emma Frost, since she was my second favorite character. January Jones' Emma Frost is too soft - both in looks and temperament. Emma Frost is powerful and knows it. She's not the type to put up with someone ordering her to get ice. Like Mystique, she is also human. She deeply grieves the death of her students, and agrees to - with Banshee - run the school that becomes the heart of Generation X. She in no way becomes warm and fuzzy, but she does care about her students. I didn't see that woman at all in this Emma Frost. This Emma Frost was a Bond girl who only did what Shaw told her, and the end of the movie implies she's only moving from that to doing whatever Magneto tells her to.
The only other women we meet are Angel the poc stripper, who never develops any personality at all, and Moira the good CIA girl. I wanted to like Moira more than I did - her stripping to her underwear to infiltrate the Hellfire Club was great - but I was annoyed that the only thing she shares with the Moira of the comics is the name. They couldn't have invented someone to fill that role?
The only small consolation for the poor character development of the women is that the men don't fare much better. Havok has an excellent story that could have made him much more interesting to us. Banshee should have had some kind of interaction with a girl that would have hinted that she was his daughter's mother - or they could have recruited him as the older cop he was in the comics. Hank gets a little more development, but mostly because we can extrapolate from what we know about geeks in movies. Darwin is nothing but a walking, talking stereotype who, of course, is the first one to die. Imagine if each of the recruits had been allowed to have their own, real story. Think about how much more powerful the choice they have to make at the end would be if we knew something about them. Think, too, how much better a movie it would have been if they had shown us the potential for who each character would become without unsubtly cramming the last few minutes of the movie with the characters as they appear in chronologically later movies.
Now that we've covered the characters, let's talk for a moment about the way the movie incorporates real history into its narrative. I will tell you up front that I can no longer handle Holocaust/World War II books/movies. I read a lot of them when I was about twelve and loved them, but I can't do it anymore. This is part of what made me cringe back in my seat, arms crossed, from the very beginning. But, I thought, it wasn't going to be the whole movie. It's just the set up. That doesn't really make it any easier to watch. That's probably why it took me half the scene to wonder why Erik and his mother were speaking German when they were in Poland. Wikipedia tells me that the Lehnsherrs escaped Germany for Poland, but that detail didn't make it into the movie.
The key to the scene that sets everything in motion is that Schmidt has a Nazi coin that he wants Erik to move. When he can't, Schmidt shoots his mother. Erik, in his rage, then moves and bends every bit of metal in the room, from the soldiers' helmets to the tables and implements in the torture chamber on the other side of the glass wall of Schmidt's office. The last thing to move is the coin, which flips around to become the X-Men logo for the credits. I had such a negative visceral reaction to that. This goes back to my first point: if they'd let it be a movie about Magneto, it might have worked. But it's not about Magneto. It's an X-Men movie, and we know the X-Men are the good guys. You can't equate the good guys to the Nazis.
I liked Erik showing the Germans in the bar in Argentina his tattoo. That was a powerful moment. But I hated Erik saying, "Never again," on the beach at the end. If they'd done the movie right, that would have been so incredibly powerful, and it would have made Charles waver. But they didn't do the movie right, and it felt like they were exploiting my people's history for cheap theater.
I was even annoyed by the inclusion of news footage of JFK. I don't have any real attachment to JFK, and it still felt like they were shoehorning him into the movie to play on the common goodwill toward him and make us sympathetic to the movie. It also didn't fit the look of the rest of the movie.
That look is the last thing I'll complain about. I'm not sure I know enough about artistic design to articulate what I didn't like about it. Somehow, it just looked wrong and badly composed. It seems like making it look good is one of the basic tasks of a movie, and they couldn't even do that.