The following essay will contain major spoilers for X-Men: First Class
Unless, of course, the reason you suspect that you might like it because you love movies about the Cuban Missile Crisis and no reasons involving superheroes. In that case, you probably want to check out Blast From the Past
One of the cute things that the recent Star Trek
Well, it feels like this movie is doing the exact same thing.
We’ve got characters with the exact same names and pretty much the same origins, we’re just retelling the Year One story so that we can run with the new and improved and updated X-Men stories we want to tell (and have to, every five years, lest the license to make movies revert back to Marvel). On top of that, we’ve got some of the more obscure mutants from the archives (Riptide! Tempest!) to make you ask your X-Men savvy friends “wait, who is that?” (Which is a much different experience than the one where you actually recognize folks.)
And, on top of *THAT*, we’ve got Kevin Bacon. Stealing the entire goddamn movie. Stealing it right out from under both Mr. Tumnus and that British guy who did the fingers wrong in the pub in Inglourious Basterds!
AND, ON TOP OF THAT, WE’VE GOT THE NAZIS.
Well, after all that, I was exhausted… and left feeling like most of us felt in the DC Universe pre-crisis. There’s one Earth where Superman is in his 60’s, there’s one Earth where he’s in his 30’s, there’s one where he’s still Superboy, there’s another Earth where he’s the bad guy, there’s another earth where Shazam(!) is the big guy…
X-Men: First Class does not take part in the Marvel Earth-616 continuity. It does not take place in the Ultimate continuity. It establishes a new and improved continuity all its own with a new canon and mutants that you’re not really that used to seeing on the page since the 80’s (Havok? Seriously? *BANSHEE*?) and it feels like a new and fresh story.
It’s weird that it feels so much like the writer is, for lack of a better word, cheating.
See, only us geeks would care about that crap.
Personally, I’m of the opinion that continuity isn’t worth a bucket of warm vice presidency.
If you sit down and try to plot out a family tree of the greek gods, you can’t make it work. Somewhere along the like, Zeus’s great-grandmother turns out to also be his great grand daughter. Story is just a fancy word for lie. The idea that a story must adhere to facts presented in some earlier story ignores the truth that those facts were never real in the first place.
As far as this movie goes, it’s not as though it changes much of anything. As best I can figure out, it invalidates a few cameos in X-men 2 and the Wolverine movie. Hell, this movie opens with the exact same scene as the first X-men movie.
Hank McCoy and Sebastian Shaw are talking heads in 2003 for five minutes. Knowing this, what should the filmmakers of first class have done? Avoid those characters entirely? Or should the X-movies simply never have included those little easter eggs and nods to the comic book fans that made them so popular in the first place?
What Alan said. A while ago I read The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Roberto Calasso, because Greek mythology is one of many subjects about which I am an impossible geek. (I read book after book of the stuff when I was in middle school. Mr. Popular, that was me.) The book is a beautiful exploration of how these foundational stories of our culture melt into each other.
Me, I pretty much just like watching mutants wailing on each other with their bad-ass powers for two hours. Sure, the purist in me didn’t like what they did with the Phoenix story-line in the third flick, and didn’t care for the tinkering they did with Emma Frost’s powers in this latest, but I didn’t really care.
What tinkering did they do?
Well, see, I went and exposed my ignorance. I guess they decided to give her diamond-hard skin after I stopped reading the comic books. Back in her Hellfire Club days, Ms. Frost only had telepathy IIRC.
Okay, that’s what I figured you meant. It has been canon for a fair bit of time now, though. I think it’s one of the half-a-million things Morrison did that divided the fanbase right in half.
In any case, if you haven’t picked up an X-Men comic in that long, I highly recommend you read Morrison’s run on New X-Men. It’s the best run in the history of the team (and I’m including Claremont, who wrote fun stories that didn’t understand the characters at all).
This almost falls under Canon! How much were the first three X-men movies canon to the movievers? To me the odd thing was the choice of X-men. Must were lesser know X-men, but that could easily be the point. Now the movie writers can do more things the the characters without too much nerdrage.
Still, I was happy to see Havok and Banshee. They were big characters back in the day and I would like to see how they use them.
Havok–the likeable Summers brother. His inclusion almost makes me want to see this movie.
The really bizarre thing for continuity isn’t these little things; it’s the Xavier/Mystique relationship. That raises any number of head-scratchers for the original “trilogy”, and in much the same way putting the droids in the Star Wars prequels blows holes in the plots of the original movies.
I really don’t care about continuity for the movie, since it was the first one I saw (other than watching Wolverine: Origins on a plane), but I think it’s best treated as being a reboot for many reasons. But for me, the big one is that in the first movie, the setting is one where mutants have just been discovered and the government’s trying to decide what to do about them; in this one, the government knows about mutants as of the 1960s
Making the first movie that way obviously makes sense, since introducing new viewers to a world and a fight that’s been going on for decades is a little intimidating, but it doesn’t work with the events of First Class. And, obviously, the helmet is clearly different (and in the first movie Xavier doesn’t even know about the helmet at first) and continuity is off in many other ways.
I would love to see what continuity nuts do with Tezuka’s stuff, where the same characters appear in nearly every story.
I said this in a mini-review that I wrote:
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Continuity freaks are irritated because, as a preboot to a new franchise, the movie contradicts the previous films and the comics in a number of places. I’ve gone through my “Ahsoka Tano” (Star Wars reference) moment regarding continuity so that sort of thing doesn’t bother me.
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I mean, sure, you could yell that Riptide in this movie is NOTHING like the Riptide in the comics to the point that asking your X-men savvy friends to identify him won’t help. But who cares?
Besides it’s not like the two big companies can keep their own continuity straight in the comics anyway.