X-Men: First Class (2011)

X-Men: First Class (2011), X-Men: First Class Movie Poster, X-Men: First Class Trailer, X-Men: First Class Photos, X-Men: First Class Pictures

Two years ago, JJ Abrams imagined the meeting of young Kirk and young Spock in his rebooted Star Trek; a brilliant piece of movie pre-history. Now producer Bryan Singer and director Matthew Vaughn make their attempt to revitalise the X-Men movie series by doing the same thing with the mutants' warring, schismatic leaders Professor Xavier and Magneto.

We see how they first met in the cold war 1960s as flashy, headstrong mutant-youngsters. The result is baggy and chaotic and over-long, but watchable, often enjoyably bizarre, and with the occasional flash of cold steel. These flashes come from the formidable Michael Fassbender, as the young Magneto. The film sets out to explain the origin of the X-Men, and even has a slightly strained rationale for Magneto's famous pointy mask/helmet, which turns out to have been invented by the Russians for the purposes of preventing telepathic mind-reading. How is it that Magneto came to rely on something invented by Muggle non-mutants? And why don't all the X-Persons get one? Well, I'm not sure: but it can't really be worn with a lounge suit. Only once Magneto gets a proper costume does the helmet cease to look ridiculous.

The first X-Men movie famously began with a scene outside the Nazi death camps, an image which was variously found to be offensive and absurd, but which in my view was just barmy enough to work. This new film reprises the image. Young Erik Lehnsherr is a Polish boy who is separated from his parents by Nazi guards in 1944, and dragged towards the camp entrance. Unleashing an agonised psycho-telekinetic shockwave from his outstretched hand, he twists the metal gates from afar. A sinister Nazi functionary who is interested in harnessing these powers for the Reich – and who is later to evade the allies and resurface after the war with the new name Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) and speaking flawless American-accented English – takes the boy under his wing.

Fassbender plays the adult Erik in the 1960s, not yet called Magneto, fanatically set on tracking down Shaw for revenge. Vaughn interestingly shows how rage-filled grownup Erik is seething, not merely at how this Nazi had murdered his parents, but also with self-hate at having failed to use his mutant powers to kill him at the time, and also, perhaps, at the way the Nazi has schooled him in the ways of ruthlessness. Bacon is an interesting casting choice as a Nazi, though it's fair to say he is better at American-English than he is at German. Fassbender, however, unleashes some triple-A German sentences quite as crashingly aggressive as those he deployed in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.

Meanwhile, chubby young Professor Xavier is played by James McAvoy as a nerdy, slightly CS Lewis-ish Oxford academic specialising in genetics, who lives with Raven (Jennifer Lawrence), a mutant whom he has been brought up with like a sister. Later, we are to learn that her remarkable genetic profile means that she won't age much – unlike the guys, who will wind up looking like Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. Xavier and Lehnsherr are both recruited by CIA agents played by Rose Byrne and Demetri Goritsas, to track down the evil Shaw, who has himself engineered the Cuban missile crisis to enforce his own global domination. These two very different X-Men must team up, and recruit a new generation of mutants to bring Shaw to justice. 

The best parts of the movie, by far, are those which show Fassbender's Erik on the Nazi's trail. Vaughn creates an atmosphere with weird but pleasing touches of Ian Fleming and Frederick Forsyth. There is a terrific scene in which Erik turns up in the head office of a sinister Swiss banker, asking for somewhere to stash his Nazi gold: Goldfinger meets The Odessa File, and there's also a touch of Marathon Man when, with much righteous sadism, Erik extracts a metal filling from the banker's mouth.

As for the rest of the film, well, it loses a bit of its narrative drive and impetus once the two heroes have joined forces and burdened themselves with its matriculating class of mutants. The question of why some of them side with the consensual Xavier, and some with the angry, radical outsider Magneto is not, frankly, explained by the small amount of character backstory we get for each in the preceding action. But this is an effective showcase for Fassbender, who restores the movie's voltage-level in his final confrontation with Shaw. If there is to be yet another X-Men movie in the future – though I have to say that now might be the time to call it quits – then a solo effort with Fassbender's super-nasty Magneto would be the way to go.

Production year: 2011
Country: USA
Cert (UK): 12A
Runtime: 131 mins
Directors: Matthew Vaughn
Cast: James McAvoy, January Jones, Jason Flemyng, Jennifer Lawrence, Kevin Bacon, Michael Fassbender, Nicholas Hoult, Rose Byrne