X-Men, one of the more sophisticated of Marvel Comics’ stable, have already fuelled a film trilogy — the first two, at least, were very good. Their basic themes had more resonance than the usual superhero-comics sketch of good versus evil, getting the girl and saving the world.
First, the founding trilogy incorporated the idea of mutants living among ordinary humans and having to deal with their minority status; second, they built on the tension among the mutants between assimilationists and separatists.
Many interesting identity issues arise here and are usefully worked over by the movies, as are the basic political questions of social integration, marginality and resistance. Of course, it’s a great help to the X-Men that they have superpowers of varying stripes: I’m sure many a minority group in places across the world, whether that minority is ethnic, religious or sexual, wishes it had such abilities. They might help to resolve the questions of minority rights and identity politics that much more quickly.
Like all mythologies, the X-Men narrative has a concern with origins. “How did we get here?” is the question that religions usually try to answer: “How did the world come into being?” For mythologies such as X-Men, though, the question can be refined: “How did we get to be who and what we are?” And perhaps that’s a question many people, in the real world, ask themselves all the time.
Some comic-book tales spend an inordinate amount of time explaining how the superhero got his or her powers. Think of all those secret military experiments gone wrong, or recall Spider-Man and the radioactive arachnid. In the latter case, the moment of origin comes with a subsequent narrative of bodily change and so forth, which surely taps into adolescent consciousness and self-awareness — with the added bonus, unlikely in the real world, of such physical transformation inaugurating special powers.
One of the advantages of the X-Men narrative was that it simply assumed that mutants existed among ordinary humans and went on from there — no radioactive arachnids necessary. Even so, the series has exhibited an interest in how individual characters among the plethora of special-skills mutants came to be who they are. Thus the X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie of 2009, in which we had a sort of add-on story about (yes, again) secret military or CIA experiments contributing to what Hugh Jackman’s Logan/Wolverine becomes.
That movie was a relative failure, in commercial terms at least, although we can still hope that there is some mileage in the subsidiary narratives of two of the characters introduced there — the rather scary Deadpool and the rather charming Gambit. In fact, the Deadpool movie is under way and due in 2014, and perhaps the honchos at Marvel and 20th Century Fox will get to Gambit. In the meantime, we have another origins story with which to be going on.
That would be X-Men: First Class (though I do wonder about the “men” in that title; I suppose “X-People” hasn’t the same ring). This takes us back to the mutant story before the events related in the first trilogy, in which Dr Charles Xavier’s school for young mutants was already in existence, and his rivalry or enmity with Magneto, the other mutant leader, a fait accompli.
In the new movie, we get to find out how it all came to pass, how Xavier became Professor X, how Erik Lansherr became Magneto and, of course, how they got to save the world from Armageddon the first time round.
And it’s all very thrillingly done, with some actors of genuine skill playing the key roles: James McAvoy is Xavier and Michael Fassbender is Magneto, which means that they will mature into Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen respectively. McAvoy is a fair way from The Last King of Scotland and Fassbender perhaps a somewhat lesser distance from Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre (still on our screens — get there), but the presence of such performers gives First Class a great deal of its depth and, er, class.
In terms of timelines, this origins story has to take us back, first, to World War II, when the protagonist and antagonist are children, and then the main narrative takes place in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Conveniently, 1962 was the year of the Cuban missile crisis, and — wouldn’t you know it? — it turns out that the superpowered mutants had a key role to play in preventing global nuclear war at that point, although it seems some of them might, in fact, have rather liked to see a fiery apocalypse.
I found this aspect of the plot a little silly, as though the Marvel universe of superherodom had a desperate need to insert itself into real history and thus give itself a spurious relevance, but I suppose that’s the nature of this kind of storytelling. Either way, it doesn’t mar the basic plot or detract from the exciting adventures and dangers experienced by Xavier, Magneto and the young mutants they discover and whose powers they nurture.
There’s easily enough action to keep the fight fans happy, and sufficient use of special effects to beguile the sensation-seeking eye, but X-Men: First Class also has proper character development to provide the narrative with what you might call spiritual meat. I don’t understand why Xavier pronounces his name “Egg-zavier”, but perhaps that will be explained in future episodes — another curious origin worth exploring in a fresh mutant saga that is off to a very good start.