Throwback to the future

To cash in on the cinema release (at least in how much they charge for the adverts), Film 4 displayed the original X-Men movie. It had the same controversial concentration/extermination camp scene at the beginning. It does have an emotional tug at the sight of a family being torn apart through no fault of their own and Erik Lehnsherr physically displaying his own love by twisting the gate. However, I’m glad I saw it first in X-Men: First Class as it has a better fit there with Lehnsherr on his mission that takes out Nazis who fled to South America as he tracks down Sebastian Shaw. In the first movie though, the comparison between Jews and mutants is a little overwrought. Having such a grand concept might have filled the scriptwriter with a sense of completion that he didn’t need to do much with the plot. Indeed, there are few movies that I can think of that do so little in the course of a feature-length running time. As a thread in a comic it might have been passable, yet here the film, by setting up so many of the characters, seems in many ways a prologue for X2, which was more fun seeing as it made better use of the time asked of its audience. I can see why one of my university friends told me he fell asleep during it. Prior to last night I had only seen the last ten minutes. All three of the original films are eclipsed by the ‘prequel’ which has effortless style, though some of the loose ends do not tie up (for instance, Professor X said in the 2000 picture he first met Magneto when he and his soon-to-become archenemy were 18, where First Class implies that their original contact was when both were 30) – in that way it is also like Batman Begins, which is not a bad position to be in, though I would be happy if they concluded the 1960s X-Men story as it is.