X-Men: First Class opens in 1944 at Auschwitz, and it earns that opening. A Nazi officer named Klaus Schmidt watches a boy bend a metal gate with his mind. Then he brings the boy, Erik Lehnsherr, into an office and tells him to move a coin. Erik cannot. Schmidt shoots Erik’s mother, and the room comes apart.
That is the promise of the film, and it is the best thing in it. Matthew Vaughn directed X-Men: First Class, the fifth film in the X-Men series and a prequel to X-Men (2000). It runs 132 minutes. It is an action film, a science fiction film, an adventure film, and a story about two friends who will become enemies.
The friendship is the engine. The film sets out to show us Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr before the names Professor X and Magneto meant anything, and it mostly delivers on that.
Trailer, via X-Men Movies.
Two Young Men in 1962
The main action sits in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Charles, played by James McAvoy, is 24 and finishing a doctorate at Oxford. Erik, played by Michael Fassbender, is hunting Schmidt across the world.
McAvoy plays Charles as a man with an ego and a sex drive, which is the point. Vaughn has said he found the older Professor X too pious and too powerful, so the script makes the young one a rogue. McAvoy has described the character this way: “It’s quite fun because the complete opposite of that is an ego-fueled, sexed up self-serving dude.”
That is the right instinct, and McAvoy sells it. He is charming and a little smug, and you can see the man he will become without the film stopping to point at it.
Fassbender has the harder job. Erik’s anger has to carry the movie, and it does. When he hunts Schmidt, the film has weight. When he stands next to Charles, the two of them feel like people who genuinely like each other, which is what makes the split hurt later.
The Hellfire Club and the Coin
Kevin Bacon plays Schmidt, who now calls himself Sebastian Shaw. Shaw is an energy-absorbing mutant, and his powers have kept him young. He leads the Hellfire Club with Emma Frost, a telepath played by January Jones, Riptide, who makes cyclones, and Azazel, a teleporter played by Jason Flemyng.
Shaw wants a nuclear war. He is a mutant supremacist, and the film is clear about that. In Las Vegas, CIA officer Moira MacTaggert, played by Rose Byrne, follows Colonel Hendry into the club. Shaw threatens Hendry and teleports him to the Joint War Room, where Hendry argues for nuclear missiles in Turkey. Shaw kills him later.
This is where the film starts to strain. The Hellfire Club is a good idea, and Bacon plays Shaw with real menace, but the plot mechanics around him get crowded. There is a lot of running between rooms.
Division X and the Recruits
MacTaggert takes Charles and Raven to the CIA. They convince Director McCone that mutants exist and that Shaw is a threat. A CIA officer sponsors them and invites them to a secret facility called Division X.
There they meet Hank McCoy, played by Nicholas Hoult, a mutant scientist with prehensile feet. Charles uses Hank’s mutant-locating device, Cerebro, to find other mutants. The recruits are:
- Angel Salvadore, played by Zoë Kravitz
- Armando Muñoz
- Alex Summers, played by Lucas Till
- Sean Cassidy, played by Caleb Landry Jones
The recruitment section is the soft middle of X-Men: First Class. It is necessary, because the film has to assemble the team, but it plays like a checklist. Each new mutant gets a moment, and none of the moments land as hard as the Auschwitz scene.
Jennifer Lawrence plays Raven, the blue-skinned shapeshifter Charles took in as a girl. Her arc is the most interesting of the supporting stories, because it is about a person deciding whether to hide what she is. Lawrence is good in it. The film does not give her enough room.
What the Film Gets Right
The period setting is the best choice Vaughn makes. 1962 is not decoration here. The Cuban Missile Crisis gives Shaw a real clock to run against, and it lets the film tie mutant politics to actual history without much cheating.
The film also understands that Charles and Erik are the story. McAvoy and Fassbender were cast with that in mind. Vaughn has said McAvoy auditioned with every actor considered for Magneto to test the chemistry, and you can see the work. Their scenes together are the reason to watch.
Vaughn wrote the final script with Jane Goldman. The credited writers also include Sheldon Turner, Bryan Singer, Zack Stentz and Ashley Miller. That is a lot of hands, and it shows in the uneven middle.
Singer, who directed X-Men and X2, became involved in 2009 but could only produce and co-write because of other projects. Producer Lauren Shuler Donner first thought of a young X-Men prequel during the production of X2. Producer Simon Kinberg later suggested an adaptation of the comic series X-Men: First Class to 20th Century Fox, though the film does not follow the comic closely. Principal photography began in August 2010 and concluded in December.
The Verdict on X-Men: First Class
X-Men: First Class is a good film with a great first scene and a saggy middle. It is the fifth film in the series and the first in a prequel tetralogy, and it does the job a prequel has to do: it makes you understand why these two men will hate each other.
The problem is that it also has to be a summer action film. The Hellfire Club plot exists to give the movie a villain and a finale, and it mostly works, but it crowds out the relationship that the film is actually about. Every time the movie cuts away from Charles and Erik to explain Shaw’s plan, it loses something.
The supporting cast is full of good actors given thin material. Rose Byrne is fine as MacTaggert, but the role is mostly exposition. January Jones has little to do as Emma Frost. Oliver Platt appears as a Man in Black Suit, which tells you what the film thinks of its own human characters.
McAvoy and Fassbender are the reason this works. McAvoy’s Charles is a charmer who has not yet learned restraint, and the film is honest about the fact that his charm is a kind of power he enjoys using. Fassbender’s Erik is a man built out of one terrible afternoon, and the film never lets you forget it.
The Auschwitz scene is not just the best scene in X-Men: First Class. It is the argument for the whole film. Everything after it is trying to live up to it, and not everything does.
The film’s tagline is “Witness the moment that will change our world.” The moment it actually earns is smaller and better: a boy who cannot move a coin, and a man who kills his mother to teach him.
The Numbers
- Title: X-Men: First Class
- Year: 2011
- Director: Matthew Vaughn
- Runtime: 132 minutes
- Genres: Action, Science Fiction, Adventure
- Set primarily in: 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis
- Metacritic: 65/100
- Score: 6.5 of 10
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