At Da Moofies: X-Men: First Class, or THEY'RE GOING TO START WORLD WAR THREE

Between the sparse, abysmal marketing campaign, rushed 10-month production schedule, and general lack of interest from the public, X-Men: First Class was in many ways the underdog in this summer's superhero race. All the better that it was the best-reviewed and, thanks to word-of-mouth, made a $350,000,000 killing at the box office. I saw it with my co-blogger prooker soon after it was released and we both agreed it was a refreshing, exhilarating ride. Director Matthew Vaughn pulls out all the stops with this one, delivering a sleek, stylish, dynamic product filled with a youthful vitality that's been long absent from today's superhero movies. Vaughn imbues the film with a distinct, forward-moving visual chic, setting it apart from the epic scope of Thor, the videogame vapidity of Green Lantern or the retro-nostalgia of Captain America. It's definitely the cool kid of the bunch.

What really seals the deal, however, are the performances of James McAvory and (especially) Michael Fassbender, who costar as younger versions of Professor X and Magneto, respectively. The rest of the ensemble cast ranges from satisfactory (Kevin Bacon impresses as Nazi/would-be world conqueror/evil fop Sebastian Shaw) to clearly-they-fucked-the-director-to-get-in-this-movie bad (January Jones as mutant whore Emma Frost), but it's McAvory and Fassbender who steal the show with their suave magnetism. The chemistry between the two is undeniable; it makes you wish the sequel will be a buddy comedy where they just bro out for two hours. In a perfect world...

Yet despite all this praise I may lavish on First Class, a mere two months after seeing it I find that I can barely remember anything specific about the 132 minute film. The details of Thor, which I saw two weeks before First Class, still remain fresh in my head, as do those of Green Lantern, which I saw only one week after. Its form is certainly laudable - strong and unique enough for the film to shine on these merits alone - but its content is sorely lacking. X-Men: First Class doesn't have anything particularly novel to say, nor does it - with the exception of McAvory and Fassbender's interplay - offer up anything we haven't seen before. Vaughn's brisk, efficient direction makes the movie seem a lot smarter than it actually is.

The film's plot concerns a covert team of mutants (the black guy dies first, natch), recruited by Charles Xavier and Erik Lenhsh...Lehnsh...Magneto on behalf of the CIA, and their efforts to thwart Sebastian Shaw's Hellfire Club - a James Bond-style secret organization with goals of world domination - during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Hellfire Club's plan, lifted straight from You Only Live Twice, is to ignite war between America and the Soviet Union and, after the two superpowers nuke everything to hell, conquering the planet itself. The way this ends up going down is a bit lazy and problematic, especially for a film franchise that prides itself on political allegory. The Soviets, for example, are generally portrayed as bumbling, plucky comic relief helplessly subservient to the Hellfire Club's whims. This characterization cheapens the entire film, deflating the credibility of its driving force - the prospect of total nuclear annihilation. Which, of course, was a very real threat throughout the Cold War. By the time Magneto starts drunkenly lobbing nukes back and forth at the height of the Crisis, the whole situation seems ludicrously funny. Something tells me that the filmmakers weren't going for the Dr. Strangelove angle here.

It certainly doesn't help that every other line is something along the lines of "I'M NOT GOING TO LET THEM START WORLD WAR III" or "WE HAVE TO STOP WORLD WAR III." Seriously, it's insane. Either the writers wanted us to think this whole thing is ridiculously silly or they never bothered to read through their script to check for repetitive dialogue. I GET IT GUYS, WORLD WAR III, IT'S A THING THAT COULD HAPPEN IF YOU GUYS DON'T STOP IT. NOW STOP FUCKING TALKING ABOUT HOW THEY'RE GOING TO START WORLD WAR III IF AND FUCKING STOP WORLD WAR III" It got so bad that I started counting how many times the phrase "start World War III" and its variants popped up; I got lost somewhere in the double digits. I smell an epic drinking game in the works!

But back to those zany Soviets. Worse than taking the punch out of the World War III doomsday scenario our heroes are fighting to avert, this portrayal paints a false image of the commies, who were in fact an extremely nasty, dangerous bunch. One of the greatest threats the free world has ever known, as a matter of fact, what with the oppression and mass killings and military strength and nuclear capabilities and iron grip over an enormous territory. This double-standard is particularly egregious when compared to the damn dirty Nazis at the film's beginning, who are portrayed, well, accurately: the kind of folks who'll gleefully execute a kid's mom before his eyes just for shits and giggles. Unlike Captain America, this movie has the balls to show what World War II was really all about.

Rather than introducing a new spin on what is anything but a black-and-white debate, X-Men: First Class retreads the same tired ideas fully played out in the original X-Men trilogy. Like Magneto in those films, Sebastian Shaw is a mutant supremacist who wants to wipe out mankind, while Charles is the nonviolent (as far as superheroes go) advocate of peace and equality between man and mutant. Those may be two opposing philosophies, but contrary to what First Class implies the argument itself is not inherently dualistic. The Hellfire Club's comic book incarnation is a testament to this; within its exclusive ranks are both men and mutants, who treat each other as equals. The Club attempts to impose this Utopian ideal by force in its quest for world domination. When its elite Inner Circle of humans, mutants, cyborgs and weird astral parasite things runs the show, the unwashed masses who aren't on board will get washed away in the Flood. Here, the Hellfire Club is no different than the X-Men trilogy's Brotherhood of Mutants. In fact it actually becomes the Brotherhood after Magneto exacts vengeance on Shaw and seizes control of it for himself. I'll admit there's a certain poetry to this, in having Magneto follow down Shaw's path at the end of First Class - becoming the very monster he sought to destroy - but letting Magneto come to his own conclusions instead co-opting someone else's would have been a more satisfying character arc and would have saved the film from being derivative.

While we're on the subject of mutants, boy did the writers pick a dumb fucking bunch to fill out the ranks. Riptide? Darwin? Azazel? Azazel? The X-Men universe is probably the most expansive in all comicdom, surely there are some far more interesting characters we haven't seen on film yet that they could've pulled out of the mythos. Like Dazzler. Wait. No. Anyway you get the point. But this is probably just the fanboy in me talking in the first place. I hate that guy.

X-Men: First Class tries its hand at genre-blending, but it doesn't work out, and the film can't seem to settle on a tone. The picture inconsistently vacillates between Nazi-hunting revenge flick, 60s spy film send-up, traditional superhero origin, historical drama, team movie, bromance buddy comedy and erotic thriller. Vaughn's direction in each individual sequence is impeccable, but they don't mesh well together. And unlike those in Captain America or, say, Kill Bill (it was on AMC last night, what do you want from me?), these scenes don't appear to be making a statement about the tropes themselves, which would have made the jarring dissonance more forgivable.

But there's still a lot X-Men: First Class has going for it. Although most of the film is a blur to me, there is one image that I not only remember, but has vividly stuck with me from the moment I left the theater. That kind of thing is extremely rare, and it's a testament to just how affecting the imagery of this movie is. Here's the shot:

Or at least the best I could find on the interwebs. For context, this scene is part of the picture's "we're building a team" montage, where Charles and Erik track down and recruit members for their first class. Here, they find Angel Salvadore, a mutant working as an exotic dancer. There's something so incredibly eerie, so uncanny about the way Vaughn and cinematographer John Mathieson frame this scene. Between the saturated red colors, the unnaturally-precise symmetry, and our protagonists themselves, looking on from an alienating vanishing point with sleazy, chauvinist glee in their Mad Men duds...it looks like something out of a Kubrick film, doesn't it? I mean can't you imagine this scene coming from The Shining? Or Eyes Wide Shut? The Hellfire Club's front, after all - a classy, exclusive underworld where the ultra-rich and important can act on their seediest, most debauched fantasies - is essentially the depraved high society sex cult from that film, sans the kinky whipping each other with animal masks on and what have you. For me, at least, this scene produced the same incredible visceral reaction that Kubrick's signature techniques do.

And of course there's boatloads of David Lynch going on here, too - it has got such a creepy, vouyeristic feel to it, like we're seeing something we shouldn't be. The look on Charles and Erik's self-satisfied faces as they watch this bug-stripper hybrid thing showing off her mutant goods...the whole scene is both sickening and teasingly intriguing, leaving the audience uncomfortable even as it begs for more (and uncomfortable as they beg for more). It's a great shot, likely one of many in X-Men: First Class. A second viewing would have probably revealed more images with such staying power to me. I'm thinking the coin-through-the-brain scene probably had it.

X-Men: First Class is an undeniably well-made, energetic action flick that breathes new life into the sagging X-Men flm franchise. It is totally worth seeing, maybe more than once. It has got heart, dazzling effects and a killer visual eye. But while all that makes damn good weekend entertainment, it takes a strong, well-constructed story to make a truly great superhero movie, which despite some great moments is something this film doesn't entirely deliver. Is X-Men: First Class on par with Spider-Man 2, The Dark Knight or Iron Man, as some have opined? Nah, not in a long shot.