After the clusterfucks that X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine turned out to be, it was pretty hard to imagine the film franchise of Marvel Comics' famous mutants regaining any kind of respectability. When Bryan Singer, the director responsible for the first two films, returned to shepherd the franchise, things seemed to be looking up. However, Singer relinquished directorial duties to British director Matthew Vaughn who had made the fun Stardust and the controversial Kick-Ass, but who had no blockbusters to his name.
Also, given the fact that the studio managing all of this, Twentieth Century Fox, was the one that drove Singer away from the franchise to begin with and was responsible for the execrable third and fourth installments of the X-Men film franchise, I simply could not feel optimistic about this film's chances of being any good. I was vaguely encouraged when they cast James McAvoy as a young Professor Charles Xavier and Michael Fassbender as a young Magneto, but not enough to get over my fear of Fox making a hash of the film. I found my attention on Marvel's 2011 film slate focused more on Thor and Captain America, and pretty much wrote this film off as an also-ran a long time ago.
That all changed--all of it--when I saw the first trailer a few months ago. I was quite honestly shocked at how good the film looked. I still had my doubts, though; I worried that this might be a simple case of "best foot forward."
When I finally saw the movie last night, however, I was relieved and delighted to discover that the trailer was no con job; this movie was the real deal. Whether this movie is a prequel or reboot I will leave up to the fans to discuss, although I will say, without spoiling any story details, that this movie seems to completely disregard the events of The Last Stand and Wolverine.
The movie, beat for beat, reprises the beginning of Singer's first X-Men film, complete with the proper excerpt from the late Michael Kamen's music score, in which a 12-year old Polish Jewish boy (Bill Milner) is separated from his parents who are hauled off to a German concentration camp, and in his anguish and despite being restrained by several Nazi guards, he is able to twist the enormous iron gates to the camp until he is knocked out by the guards.
The movie picks up from where that one left off, with young Erik Lensherr lying insensate among the Nazis; here a German scientist named Schmidt (Kevin Bacon) is seen observing it all.
The film then shifts to a sprawling mansion in Westchester, upstate New York, where a young telepath Charles Xavier (Laurence Belcher) sees his mother raiding the refrigerator in the middle of the night, and, knowing this isn't his mother thanks to his knowledge of her habits, convinces her, through a bit of telepathic conversation, to reveal her true form, that of a shapeshifting mutant child named Raven (Morgan Lily). Rather than being upset by Raven's duplicity, Charles expresses joy that there is another mutant like him in the world, and he invites her to stay with him.
The film then returns to Erik, who is sitting in a room with the Nazi scientist Schmidt (with Bacon managing a whole scene of pure German dialogue, though I can only guess how good it was), who then tries to get Erik to replicate his feats of magnetism on a simple coin. When Erik is unable to do so, Schmidt resorts to an extreme method which does the trick of unleashing Erik's powers, while effectively scarring the young man for life.
Years later, in 1962 to be exact, Erik has grown up and is now played by an absolutely feral Fassbender, and is on a globe-spanning quest to find and kill Schmidt, a mission which takes him from Europe to Argentina and eventually to America, leaving a trail of Nazi corpses in his wake.
Elsewhere, grown-up Charles (McAvoy) is finishing up his graduate thesis at Oxford, where he is constantly using his powers and his intellect to pick up girls, much to the disapproval of the equally grown-up Raven (the beguiling Jennifer Lawrence), who harbors her own desire for him even though they are for all intents and purposes brother and sister. His thesis is on genetic mutation, and it is for this reason that he is sought out by CIA agent Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne) who is, herself, on the trail of Schmidt. Schmidt now goes by the same Sebastian Shaw and appears to be working with both the Russians and with a high-ranking officer in the United States Military. MacTaggert has seen that he is flanked by apparently super-powered individuals whose talents are the result of what Shaw himself referred to as mutation.
The Cold War is at its height, so this is a matter of paramount concern to the American government. The CIA sees Charles as a possible ally in their fight against Shaw and the Russians, and Charles is intrigued at the possibility of encountering yet more mutants like himself and Raven, so they agree to work together.
Inevitably, thanks to their common quarry, Charles' and Erik's paths cross, and because Shaw and his men (and woman) prove to be some pretty tough cusses they realize they will need help. Help comes in the form of other mutants they recruit to aid their cause, starting with ape-footed genius Henry McCoy (Nicholas Hoult) who actually already works for the CIA, and whose cleverness is responsible for the creation of Cerebro, a device that enables them to find other mutants like Havok (Lucas Till), Darwin (Edi Gathegi), Angel (Zoe Kravitz) and Banshee (Caleb Landry Jones).
Shaw's grand plan is play Russia and America against each other and wipe humans off the face of the earth in a nuclear holocaust to ensure that mutants will take over as the dominant species on the planet. The fight to stop him will be anything but easy, and before the end Erik and Charles, with their widely differing views on mutant/human relations, will clash, but anyone familiar with this movie series already knew that.
Whether this film is a straight-up prequel or a reboot, I found it absolutely riveting. Casting McAvoy and Fassbender was a true stroke of genius, because their relationship is the glue that holds everything together. Fortunately, they have a pretty good script to work with as well, with writers Vaughn, Jane Goldman, Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz having fleshed out their relationship very nicely, even though such attention to detail may have been at the expense of other aspects of the story. Also, to my mind the decision to set the film in the 1960s was equally brilliant as it enabled the filmmakers to play with a lot of things from the era like the oft-referenced James Bond vibe, as well as the global tension of the Cuban Missile Crisis, with just some hints of the upcoming Civil Rights movement.
Bacon's Shaw, complete with his lingerie-clad henchwoman who can turn into diamond but who, in Jones' hands is more wooden than anything else, looks like he was ripped right out of one of Connery's old Bond movies, which could be a good or a bad thing depending on a viewer's preference. To me, though, it was clear that Bacon was having a ball with this role. The young actors playing the mutants are not given a whole lot to do besides showcase their powers, some of which look cooler than others, but this was always Charles' and Erik's story and it plays out perfectly.
Of the two young actors, McAvoy has gotten less attention for his performance, but I don't think that's entirely fair. Magneto's role was always going to the meatier of the two with the whole Holocaust backstory, and given the fact that this film was, at some point, actually conceived as a Magneto origin story, but McAvoy doesn't give anything away to Fassbender in fleshing out Charles Xavier's origins as a privileged, high-society boy with naively wrong-headed ideas about mutants' place in society at large. It is to McAvoy's and perhaps Vaughn's credit that this incarnation of Charles Xavier is not a simple copy of Patrick Stewart's take on the character but truly a young Charles Xavier, meaning that this one is very much a young man in terms of how he thinks and what motivates him. I love the bit about how uses not only his telepathy but his big talk in trying to pick up chicks. He is bereft of the wisdom he will gain in later years, though the hints of Professor X's personality are still there for viewers to see. I was actually vaguely skeptical of McAvoy's ability to channel Stewart, but as it turns out the story was served much better by him doing almost exactly the opposite. I hope that as time goes on Xavier gets the narrative heft that the founder of the X-Men deserves.
A lot of the reviews I've read have declared quite categorically that with this film, a star is born and his name is Michael Fassbender. Fassbender, a veteran of two other comic-book adaptations, namely Zack Synder's 300 and last year's largely-ignored Jonah Hex, also made quite an impression despite some rather brief screen time in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds as the British spy who can speak German. Apparently a native-German speaker (his father is German), this skill served him well as the young Erik spent several of the film's first few minutes hunting down, conversing with, and killing Nazis. Like McAvoy, Fassbender opts out of channeling Ian McKellen, the actor who first popularized this role, and instead brings a ferocity to Magneto that I have never seen onscreen before. The way he conveys Erik Lensherr's pain and cold-blooded purpose is, pardon the pun, simply magnetic. McKellen, fantastic actor though he is, talked about playing Magneto as more of a champion for those discriminated against with a Machiavellian streak than a straight-up villain, but he still came across as a bad guy. Fassbender's Erik is something different; he's the walking wounded, though it'll be interesting to see how he can go from being a man ready to kill soldiers out to kill him to a man with no compunctions about taking the lives of innocents. I sincerely hope Fassbender gets to revisit this role several times more, especially with all this talk of him being the perfect replacement for Daniel Craig as James Bond. One quibble I have with Fassbender's performance, and I'm surprised it hasn't come up in the reviews, is how Erik Lensherr went from being a Polish Jew with a reasonably nondescript European accent through most of the film to being an Irishman with an unmistakable brogue in the last ten minutes of the film or so. Vaughn and company should have caught that in post-production, and I guess it's one of the film's reported production woes that they didn't.
Against a backdrop of some truly spectacular special effects that easily trump anything from the previous mutant flicks and a rousing music score by Henry Jackman (no apparent relation to Hugh, and the X-Men series' fifth composer in as many movies), this movie is, flaws notwithstanding, easily my favorite in the series and something I would HIGHLY recommend to people looking to restore their faith in the X-Men movies. It's not just a good X-Men movie; it's a great movie, period.
Score: 5/5
Oh yeah, it's worth mentioning that there are no Easter Eggs after the credits, so anyone not inclined to sit through them doesn't have to stick around for any.
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