X-Men: First Class

[prodigy]

Loved it, going to own it on DVD. Of Marvel movies I would maybe rank it a #3 or #4, but in terms of sentimental favoritism value to myself I suspect it'll boost itself several places higher than that. The thing is, how do you ensure I am pretty much going to love a movie? Answer: make it about my longtime favorite Marvel character, Magneto, and his tragic backstory, and also my incidental Marvel OTP he has with his boyfriend Professor X. Big gay depressing movie about Magneto/Xavier. Unless you entirely fuck this up, you already have my vote.

Well, they didn't entirely fuck this up, so it was good. In brief rundown -- and because I don't feel like doing a review of the length that would require a spoilercut -- my main problems with it were 1. shoehorned romance scenes put in, as far as I can tell, to make it less gay (it didn't work) (at all), and 2. nasty demonizing/fridging treatment of PoC characters. The first was minor. The second was not so minor. It was the sourest note in the movie for me, very pathetically racist-tropey, and I'll be disappointed if more people don't point it out.

Aside from that: aaaaaagh big gay romantical movie. The entire thing was a goddamn tragic romance, anyway, but it's not often I get to see big-budget tragic romances made of my fandom OTPs so aaaaaaaaaagh. I don't even know how to do an objective review of this film. How does one divorce one's pubescent desire to wear magenta and have a virtuous and overpowerful boyfriend who understands one's manpain? I'm not sure one does, so one will just up and admit it. But I think it was an enjoyable Marvel film altogether, and entertaining, if you can be warned about the PoC-fridging crap (as well as some awkward visual choices with Emma Frost scenes), and generally I agree with Sir Ian McKellen on the matter of scenes that should have been included.

Otherwise, my main regrets are probably that:

1. they didn't explicitly admit that these characters were doing it
2. I will never have mutant powers
3. I will never be as hot as Michael Fassbender

Comments

[relia]

You mean you didn't like that the POC characters were a stripper and a taxi driver and they went evil or were fridged and those were their entire contributions to the plot of this movie? Magneto's backstory is conanical and his character was like ragingly sympathetic, so I didn't have issues with that like I did with Inglorious Basterds, but yeah.

Poor Darwin, if only your evolution powers had allowed you to adapt to survive in this movie (by making you white, apparently). :(

I'm still wondering if that menorah was setting-accurate -- those candles were like, really big, but maybe that's what they had in pre-WWII Germany, I dunno.

[relia]

Edit, because I forgot: I'm not sure if Riptide was a POC in Marvel canon, where he had pastel purple hair and eyes, but he was portrayed by Álex González in the film, so yeah. Add that one too.

[relia]

Also, something that bothered me in the film:

Spoilers.

[thez]

So they kept Magneto's back story just the same, or did they alter it after all?

[metonymy]

I counted him too, and his total lack of lines.

[prodigy]

It's really sad when a movie like The Dark Knight, by having a magical Negro sidekick and some evil foreigner gangsters, is still less racefaily than your fucking X-Men movie. And by racefaily, I mean racist and backwards. 'Racefaily' is such a toothless, cutesy term that implies someone stepping on a rake and getting smacked or something. Killing off PoC characters completely needlessly/making them the only evil ones is more than "faily."

Ugh, it just filled me with dread and I actually could not believe they had the nerve to fridge Darwin and turn the Latina stripper into a dressed-to-look-skanky toothless villain girl. She wasn't even the cool villain chick. No, no, that was the white girl. The whitest white white white girl. What the fuck, movie? Is this some kind of made-for-TV 1999 bullshit?

[prodigy]

They altered it somewhat from the canon, but not really more (in fact, less) than the other characters in the X-Men movie franchise. He hasn't stopped being a Holocaust Jew or anything, if that's the question.

[prodigy]

Everything I said to Nomie. Also, I was living in slight fear that Erik's backstory would get fucked in an Inglourious Basterds sense and it would manage to fuck up its only Jew (in this film, anyway) -- and it is a little awkward that without Kitty Pryde he sort of was the only Jewish character and also evil and also into cats (also into cats) in the first place, but that's neither here nor there, even if he technically is more of an antivillain-bordering-on-antihero -- but at least they managed that. Leaving every goddamn PoC high and fucking dry. What the shit. If I am ever at a convention where the director of this is, I will have to go up to the mic and be like "so why did you kill or vilify all your non-white characters again?"

[thez]

KIND OF. I was wondering how they'd handle that just based on the whole age/timeframe of the current movies issue, since he'd have to be about 80 at this point according to canon, I think? It's a bit of a squeeze but I guess it still works and I have no idea why I'm getting so wrapped up in the timeline of a movie I will probably not see anyway but there ya go.

[prodigy]

A lot of stuff from the X-Men/X2/Last Stand was kind of retconned to all hell anyway, timeline-wise and otherwise, and I think that was probably a good thing. It's a prequel/soft-reboot, I think, and by soft-reboot I think they're waiting to see if this does brilliantly well enough to save the X-Men line to see if they want to go on with this timeline rather than the first one. I mean, Hank McCoy isn't even in the first three, nor are Banshee or Havoc or Moira MacTaggert, and they've definitely changed stuff up with Raven.

[metonymy]

As a review I read somewhere put it: the movie was set in 1962, not FILMED IN 1962. It was straight up racist. UGH, WHY WAS IT NOT BETTER.

(Also, as my friend pointed out: the racial status of Jews at that time was still very... I just woke up so I'm gonna go with "complicated", which in one way makes Magneto's fledgling Brotherhood all the minorities and women, except for mindraped Moira. And they're evil. WAY TO GO, MOVIE.)

[prodigy]

To a 1962 audience (and at Magneto's original inception, I think) his being Jewish would've been HIGHLY marked. To a 2011 one I think it's less so, but still not entirely unmarked either -- he's definitely a cultural/ethnic minority, anyway, if not a racial one. The Holocaust angle gives him an extra fifty sympathy points in that regard, which makes Charles even more privileged and presumptuous to tell him not to be so angry and vengeful, reall -- something that would've bothered me more had Charles not turned out to be naive and totally wrong in the end, I think. The X-Men franchise in general validates Professor X's worldview over Magneto's, but I'm not sure this movie did.