After some hoops and hurdles, everyone at 20th Century Fox decided that they wanted to make an X-Men movie that wasn’t just sometimes good, but that was frequently good throughout the lengthy runtime. Still eager to stick to prequels, the result was a film that would tell the story of how Professor X and Magneto met, and how they formed the X-Men. Wolverine, after hogging the spotlight for so long, reduced to one funny cameo in this film. A big part of why this film works is because it grounds the genre in real life events in a way few other Marvel movies do, that being in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Sabastian Shaw, a mutant who absorbs any type of energy thrown at him and who can then use it to wreak destruction, seeks to provoke the nuclear war by escalating the crisis so that he can absorb all that nuclear power and use it to position himself as the leader of a new mutant Earth, rid of humans. An interesting twist on this is that he stands for everything Magneto does and they agree on a lot of things. Unfortunately, Sabastian Shaw was responsible for the death of Magneto’s mother, as well as experimenting on him alongside the Nazi’s during his time at the concentration camps in the Second World War, something Magneto isn’t going to look past. The first half of the film is all about grounding this group of X-Men in the real world: Charles is getting a PHD at Oxford, Magneto is hunting former Nazi’s in Argentina, and the CIA are trying to prevent US missiles being placed in Turkey. It’s all espionage that builds through character driven drama. Marvel films like Captain America: The First Avenger, and the first Iron Man have attempted this idea of inserting heroes into real life political events, but they never fully commit to it. Captain America stops fighting the overt Nazis and ends up fighting a secret organisation, Hydra, instead. Iron Man eventually stops hunting the Taliban-stand-in group and just fights another guy in a robot suit. But X-Men, just like it did back in 2000, commits entirely to the themes, setting and premise. I think that edge is what makes these films feel more unique and stand apart. When assembling a team to confront Shaw, both Charles and Magneto become mentors to the young teenagers who will become the first X-Men. There’s an interesting duality in how they teach: Charles shows moral and emotional support, encouraging mutants to use their powers as an extension of themselves, while Magneto asserts that their powers are them. He pushes Banshee off a huge satellite, which sounds harsh until it actually works at getting him to use his new powers in ways that Charles couldn’t. But, on the other side of things, Charles fundamentally cannot understand the struggles of Mystique or Beast who do not have “invisible” mutations, which makes them easy targets for discrimination. So it isn’t necessarily Magneto’s acceptance of Mystique’s natural blue look that turns her to his side by the film’s end (along with some other mutants too), so much as it is the fact he acknowledges her struggle in a way Charles is unable to. But the best part of the film has to be the emotional climax for Charles and Magneto. The US and Russians have launched a missile strike at the mutants, thinking them a greater threat than the nuclear war that was just averted, and Magneto is able to redirect the missiles back at the boats. Charles is the only person capable of talking him down, but chooses his words so, so poorly: “There’s good innocent men on those boats just following orders.” This has to be the worst possible thing to say to a Holocaust survivor, no? And sure enough, Magneto tells him he’s fed-up of being at the mercy of men following orders. In previous X-Men films it’s easy to see Magneto has a point but is going about it wrong, and easier to view Charles as the obvious moral good. First Class is different because it flips the script, just a little, so that you see the areas in which Charles is making mistakes, and the areas in which Magneto’s ideology is strongest. The parallel between the persecution of the Jews and the mutant struggle is stronger here than it ever has been for Magneto’s character: A Nazi earlier in the film informs him that he too was just under orders, we revisit an expands upon the scene from the original X-Men at the concentration camp, and Magneto is vocal that his specific grip is that he was once persecuted for being a Jew, and is not about to relive that reality as a mutant too. It’s easier to form an emotional connection to his ideology in this film, rather than just a practical acknowledgement that he makes some good points despite being a bit evil sometimes. I think X-Men: First Class is easily one of the best films in this franchise, and a true return to form after X-Men 3 and the first Wolverine film. It might be up there with some of the best the superhero genre can offer: It has all the good VFX, action, unique powers and uses for those powers, as well as a great character driven story full of conflict and moral grey areas that all get resolved.