Rifling through the script of X-Men: First Class after a series of sturdy, semi-successful Oscar-bait dramas, James McAvoy must have felt that this was his shot at superstardom, the key to worldwide fame, being mobbed on streets and felt up by screaming fans. Why else would he have accepted the part of the not-yet-Professor Charles Xavier, when every working brain cell must have advised otherwise? There is, first, the imminent possibility of being smothered by the shadow of Patrick Stewart, who played Xavier in the earlier X-Men movies with orotund intonations that made the tritest dialogue resonate like Shakespeare. But a more immediate danger lurks in the person of co-star Michael Fassbender, who is handsome in the dashing manner of a 1940s Hollywood hero and beside whom McAvoy looks like a prim boy scout. Fassbender, playing Erik Lehnsherr (aka not-yet-Magneto) and stepping effortlessly into the super-sized shoes of Ian McKellen, gets the bracing backstory, the opportunity to seethe and simmer and activate every ounce of actorly muscle, and in contrast, McAvoy, perpetually rubbing his temples in order to tap into other people’s thoughts, comes off like a milquetoast with a migraine.
As the story of the would-be Magneto, X-Men: First Class is, well, first class, possibly the best attempt at birthing a brooding man of action since Casino Royale stripped away the frills and fancies and dialled James Bond back to the feral Ian Fleming creation, less punster than predator. Unlike the typical summer superhero saga, which is merely heroic, Magneto’s story feels mythic. Erik is first glimpsed as a boy in a concentration camp, separated from his mother, and this instantly marks him with our sympathies, especially since the corresponding childhood installment of Charles plays out in a New York mansion right out of Edith Wharton. Erik’s powers are first understood and later unleashed by Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), an act that not only turns the boy against the man but also taints this man as a father figure, and when an adult Erik embarks on a mission to finish Shaw, he growls, “Let’s just say I’m Frankenstein’s monster and I’m looking for my creator.” This is a great character, with just the right blend of pop-culture frivolity and patricidal fury, and Fassbender, fittingly, is the actor who looms largest in the film’s final frame.
Erik and Charles meet mid-sea and become thick friends, and the director, Matthew Vaughn, anchors these early scenes with this bond of brotherhood. These stretches are vastly entertaining, especially when the twosome sets about recognising and recruiting other mutants, like two people from the personnel department scouring the country for the best talent, except that the company they work for is the CIA. The film, in these sections and in a split-screen training montage that occurs later, has its tongue firmly in cheek and hops across the globe like a Cold War-era Bond adventure (and Bacon plays the villain, very accurately, like a Blofeld-like megalomaniac). And then the Cold War actually happens, with America and Russia coming to a head over missiles in Cuba. (Among the many amusing homages to the period is the casting of January Jones, the icy mother from television’s 1960s-set Mad Men, as the appropriately named Emma Frost.) The real conflict, unsurprisingly, is between the good mutants (Erik, Charles, and company) and the evil ones led by Shaw.
And the film begins to lose its footing, steadying itself only during the final battle. Fassbender is so magnetic that his appeal to fellow-mutants to unite against humankind is more potent than McAvoy’s call for temperance. Their face-off is dramatically lopsided, which is a problem in a climactic conflict that’s not just between two nations and two species but these two men. (The end, inevitably, hints at the rivals we know from the earlier films – Xavier gets a wheelchair and jokes about losing his hair, Magneto gets a helmet and loses his sense of humour.) And like the other X-Men films, First Class traffics in messages that it doesn’t quite know how to develop, messages that may carry more sincerity in the panels of a comic book or graphic novel, scored to the silence of one’s solitude while reading, than in a blockbuster motion picture whose insistent soundtrack thrums with the urgency of zipping to the next scene. “You didn’t ask, so I didn’t tell,” says the mutant Hank (Nicholas Hoult), when quizzed about an aspect of himself he kept hidden from his employers, and this is but the stance of gay men and women everywhere. From Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) comes the lesson that we should be proud of who we are, no matter how we look, though I was more intrigued by a scene that showed her rinsing out a mouth full of toothpaste. What use are superpowers if they cannot do away with morning ablutions?
An edited version of this piece can be found here.
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Harish S Ram
June 12, 2011
a tongue in check take on d mouthpiece 🙂 expecting a full article taking on the superhero genre.
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Shalini
June 13, 2011
I had a jolly good time watching X Men: First Class in general and Michael Fassbender in particular. On the downside, I left the theater feeling so damn normal.:-)
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Akshay Ahuja
June 13, 2011
It was certainly not an exhilarating ride, but overall its a good fun. It does however raised a question in my mind, when it was shown in 3rd part of the series that Magneto and Xavier both went to recruit/take Jean from her home. How come they could have united again? Hope that too gets answered in forthcoming parts.
However, read something interesting on box office mojo, First Class is the lowest grossing XMen movie till date in its first week, after adjusting inflation. Weird, seeing that it was indeed better than the last three parts.
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rameshram
June 14, 2011
My Midnight in Paris review (new woody allen film)
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bran1gan
June 15, 2011
A general question: I keep getting requests from small filmmakers to write about their films on this blog. I usually never have the time. Also, sometimes it sounds like a plug, and I try to stay away from that. But I think an option would be to create something like a “First Look,” where the filmmaker can send me a poster and a write-up (or whatever) and I could just put that up as a post. (Just as a service, with no contribution from me.) Does anyone have opinions about this — good idea, terrible idea, whatever?
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rameshram
June 15, 2011
what’s the value add if you (or someone) is not reviewing them?
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bran1gan
June 15, 2011
rameshram: No value add, really. Maybe just a warm gooey feeling that I’ve done my bit for a budding filmmaker? 🙂
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rameshram
June 15, 2011
Do a three line emergent filmmaker profile with the poster. That way some unfortunate can put on his resume ‘ illamvizzuthi, whom the noted critic baradhwaj rangan once called a bright talent of the Chennai scene…’ Or something…
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Rahul
June 15, 2011
My $0.02. I don’t think its a good idea.You are diluting your brand equity 🙂 ; and, the filmmakers would not benefit much since most of us would probably not give those posting more importance than we would to a Google generated Ad, since there is no “value add”.
OTOH, if you can put a rider that someone from the film team has to interact with us\answer our queries on that board, then it might be of value to everyone concerned.
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rameshram
June 15, 2011
Now that brannigan is with hindupaper no brand equity. Only fronntline critic.
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Gradwolf
June 15, 2011
@Rahul: err something posted here(ok something tht is not a review or column) is equivalent to Google generated ad?! Sorry, strongly disagree!
BR: I think it’s a pretty good idea. But what kinda “small” filmmakers are you talking about? As in Madras based filmmakers/short films/indie stuff or something?
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bran1gan
June 16, 2011
Gradwolf/Rahul: These are filmmakers making offbeat/indie films, which I imagine are going to be difficult to market. I think they figure I have a specific kind of readership, which may be more intrigued by this sort of offbeat product. So all I’ll be doing really is providing a bit of exposure, and as Rahul says, a chance for interaction in the comments space.
I don’t see why this is a bad idea… (and of course I’ll make it clear that I have nothing to do with this film)…
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bran1gan
June 17, 2011
This totally made my morning. Ingmar Bergman’s soap commercial 🙂
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desdem0na
June 17, 2011
McAvoy irritated me to no end. And seriously, a telepath who can only read minds if he puts his two fingers to his temple? So kitschy – and he kept at it even while he was bouncing around the inside of the crashed plane in enormous pain 😛
Great review!
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Mambazha Manidhan
June 28, 2011
http://news.in.msn.com/international/article.aspx?cp-documentid=5232931
NoooooooOOOOOOO ! Anyways, Danny Boyle is sure to set the screen on fire, with a such a trippy storyline at his mercy.
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Karthick RM
July 14, 2011
My ‘review’ of the movie.
http://karthikrm.wordpress.com/2011/07/13/liberalism-vs-identity-politics-in-x-men-first-class/
“Xavier wants Lensherr to understand that though the grievances of the persecuted may be legitimate, there are boundaries they cannot cross. Of course, who devises the frames of these boundaries is a question that Xavier does not deeply consider.”
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