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.

[thez]

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