The story takes place in an alternate reality in which the human race has begun to evolve via “mutants,” people who carry a special X-gene that gives them unique powers (and sometimes unique appearances). As Singer’s original film did, X-Men: First Class begins in a Nazi concentration camp in 1944 with a Jewish preteen named Erik Lehnsherr learning that he has the power to bend metal with his mind when he is angry enough. The screenplay by Ashley Edward Miller, Zack Stentz, Jane Goldman, and Matthew Vaughn from a story by Sheldon Turner and Bryan Singer expands on Erik’s Holocaust experiences by introducing the character of Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), a scientist working for the Nazis who takes a special interest in Erik’s abilities. Meanwhile, we are introduced to a young Charles Xavier, a British telepath who opens his home to a shape-shifting girl named Raven who naturally appears with blue, scaly skin and cat-like yellow eyes.

The film then moves forward two decades to the early 1960s where we find Charles (James McAvoy), a brash and charming intellectual, finishing his doctorate in genetics at Oxford and living with Raven (Jennifer Lawrence), who is now his adopted sister. Erik (Michael Fassbender), meanwhile, is determinedly scouring the globe for Shaw in order to avenge both his torment in the concentration camp and the death of his mother at Shaw’s hand. Charles and Erik’s paths eventually cross when they join forces with a CIA operative named Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne) to stop Shaw, who appears to be helping the Soviets in the nuclear arms race. Shaw, as it turns out, is a powerful mutant who can absorb and control energy, and his real plan is to play the United States and the Soviet Union against each other until they unleash their nuclear arsenals and decimate the world, thus cleansing the planet of the human race and allowing mutants, with him as their leader, to rule. Shaw is aided by a trio of mutants who share his plans: Emma Frost (January Jones), a telepath whose skin can morph into diamond-like armor; Azazel (Jason Flemyng), a red-skinned teleporter; and Riptide (Alex Gonzalez), who can control wind. Charles, Erik, and Raven reach and eventually bring into their fold a motley assortment of young mutants, all of whom have been hiding their abilities out of fear. These include Angel Salvadore (Zoe Kravitz), a stripper with hidden wings; Alex Summers (Lucas Till), a surly teen criminal who can send out powerful waves of energy; and Cassidy (Caleb Landry Jones), who can make supersonic sounds with his vocal chords that allow him to fly at the speed of sound.

The core of X-Men: First Class is not so much the Cold War action plot, which culminates in Shaw’s behind-the-scenes engineering of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but rather the relationship between Charles and Erik, who represent diametrically opposed views of the world. Both are realistic enough to realize that mutants and humans will not be able to co-exist easily, but while Charles views humans as essentially decent and in need of education to bring out their better selves, Erik sees them as inherently violent, fearful, and given to persecution of anyone who is different. Charles insists that they be the “better men” by forsaking humanity’s violent tendencies; Erik, on the other hand, insists that they already are, by which he means they should assert their physical and mental superiority before humankind tries to round them up and kill them as the Nazis did the Jews. Erik’s entire worldview is shaped by his experiences in the Holocaust, which is what has always made his character so compelling. Even when he becomes the arch-nemesis Magneto, a moment toward which the entire film is building, his villainy is based in a rational understanding of humanity’s worst tendencies (disturbingly visualized early in the movie when we get a 180-degree cut that reveals the other half of Shaw’s otherwise unremarkable oak office to be a glistening mad-scientist dungeon of metal tables and bladed instruments). Even if you don’t agree with it, you understand Erik’s philosophy.

That sociopolitical dynamic had been largely lacking from the last two X-Men films, which included Brett Ratner’s X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), and its re-emergence in First Class helps bolster its character arcs and the action sequences, which Vaughn orchestrates with a sense of both grandeur and coherence. The screenplay teeters on overload at times, as the film is jam-packed with multiple subplots involving important characters, particularly Raven, whose desire to be “normal” draws her to Hank (Nicholas Hoult), a nerdish young scientist who has been hiding his own mutation: a pair of apelike feet that give him super speed. Raven and Hank’s converging and eventually diverging desires to blend in with that which they are not provides a compacted summation of the entire series’ fundamental tension: integration versus separation. It is not surprising that racial and ethnic allegory has been read into the series throughout its history, and while First Class doesn’t push the subtext too far, it is still powerfully present, even when submarines are being telepathically lifted out of the ocean and multi-colored mutants are battling it out aboard an aircraft carrier. Both McAvoy and Fassbender bring new dimensions to the characters played by Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan in the previous films. McAvoy (Atonement) ably charts Charles’s arc from privileged, rich-boy smugness to controlled benefactor of future mutant generations, while Fassbender (Inglorious Basterds) channels Erik’s intense sense of rage, thus imbuing both characters with matching intensities of conviction that will inevitably lead to the demise of their friendship and the genesis of their rivalry.

Copyright ©2011 James Kendrick

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