X-Men First Class

Despite spending almost 20 hours in planes over the last month I only managed to watch a single film. Partly due to a delay in the BA entertainment system coming on, partly due to me taking full advantage of the nearly empty flight back to sleep, but mainly due to there being a very poor selection of films available.

6 months ago I would never have watched an X-Men film. To my uneducated brain the X-Men was a rather silly fantasy cartoon in which a bunch of super heroes fly around trying to save / enslave (delete as appropriate) the world. I never really understood what's so interesting about watching people with 'powers' hit each other. Maybe it's nothing more than an escapist fantasy. I want more substance to my fantasy.

Turns out that X-Men actually has quite a lot of substance. I am indebted to my housemate Andy who explained to me that the X-Men comics were created as an allegory for the changing nature of society during the upheavals of the civil rights movement in the US in the 1960s. The mutants who make up the X-Men represent an emergent social force that the world has to recognise and deal with. Andy encouraged me to think of the two factions of the mutant X-men as representing the groups led by Martin Luther King (Professor X) and Malcolm X (Magneto). Both want the same thing, but where Professor X sees an opportunity to create a better world, Magneto sees only inevitable conflict.

'X-Men First Class' tells a re-imagined (from the original comics) story of the origins of these two characters. Professor X (aka Charles Xavier played by James McAvoy) is raised in an upper class American East coast family, Magneto (aka Erik Lehnsherr played by Michael Fassbender) survives the horrors of the Holocaust. These wildly different childhoods give each character a worldview that will define the rest of their lives. When former Nazi camp commander Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) tries to foment war between the US and Soviets by causing the Cuban missile crisis, Professor X's fledgling X-Men intervene. But where Professor X wants to foster peace between the warring parties, Magneto wants only revenge for Shaw's crimes.

It's a classic science fiction film, complete with metaphors for society and a neat reworking of history. There are some exceptional action sequences, nods to the existing X-Men films (a brief cameo by Hugh Jackman as Wolverine in particular) and a rousing finale. It's a story that could have become cheesy in the wrong hands, but Michael Fassbender injects enough pain and realism into his character that when he makes his choice to go down a path to the dark side it's hard not to sympathise. I felt like cheering when he pulls on his cape and announces to the world that he is now Magneto. More proof that Fassbender is the next big thing in acting.

Since I only saw my first X-Men film 3 months ago I was surprised by my own reaction to 'First Class'. I utterly bought into the story of how events can dramatically change people's lives, and how everyone has a choice to react positively or negatively to those events. Amazing how wrong I was about this series.

Oh, and another role for January Jones, another ice queen character (this time literally). Can someone please give her a movie role that lets her shine a-la Mad Men?