Part 1: Magneto's Origin

1:17 - 4:14 (2:57)

So, if you're making a movie about mutants with superpowers you can do it in one of exactly two ways:

1) Spend a good chunk of the film not showing the viewers mutants using their powers in order to heighten the impact when you finally do show the goods.
2) Give it to them right away. In the first fucking scene. Because its a goddamn movie about mutants. Fuck restraint.

The filmmakers mercifully went with option number 2 and we get magneto bending a gate here in the first scene but part of me wonders if they made Jaws in the 21st century if we wouldn't get a full on shot of the shark in all his CGI glory in the first 5 minutes.

The scene takes place in 1944 Poland and a young Magneto watches his mother taken away by Nazi's. He's able to bend the gate but a solider knocks him out and we fade to white as young Magneto goes unconscious. It's a little weird that our superhero action movie starts with a sympathetic introduction to the villain but I like it. It's efficient storytelling; in just under 3 minutes and with no dialogue we establish our antagonist is a complicated character with strong and relatable motivations who can manipulate metal. I mean fuck Nazis, amirite? Also the Holocaust setting nicely sets up the themes for the rest of the movie. Does anything evoke racism and genocide more than the Holocaust?

Opening Credit: This Movie is About Mutants

 0:00 - 1:16 (1:16)

So we get a nice little touch on the 20th Century Fox logo that starts the movie off in that it takes just a second longer for the X in Fox to fade away than the rest of the logo. Get it? X. It's a cute detail and I honestly like it. I always like when they pimp out the studio logo for a specific movie. Its like a little gold star the studio gives to the movie for being special.

"You're worth it, X-Men movie"-20th Century Fox Logo

So we start off with this bit of expository voice-over by Professor X, who at this point in the movie is just a disembodied voice:

"Mutation. It is the key to our evolution. It has allowed us to evolve from a single-celled organism to the dominant species on this planet. This process is slow, normally taking thousands of years. But every few hundred millenia, evolution leaps forward"

This is a nice efficient way to get the premise out of the way. The bit of magic that the audience just has to accept at face value. Mutants are a thing. Deal with it. No, it doesn't take thousands of generations of natural selection for a person to evolve something as incredibly complex as shooting friggin' lasers out of their goddamn eyes. It just happens. I'm a huge fan that this passage implies that this happened a few hundred millenia ago too. You know what this means? T-Rexes shooting friggin' lasers out of their goddamn eyes! Yes please. Make that movie now, please.

Anyways, this voiceover occurs over some fancy computer generated DNA and we get the single opening credit; the studio and the license owners. You know all those people who made the movie and created the characters? Fuck them! They'll get their credits at the end! Corporations first!

 

We get a brief shot of a shiny metal x and the we zoom in on the blue dot in the center and it's actually the first shot of the first scene of the movie! Oooh, fancy transitions.  

Introduction

So you've stumbled upon this blog and you're probably wondering what you're in for? No? Well I'm going to give you what might be the most in depth review of the X-Men movies of all time. You're Welcome. I'm not some crazy obsessive X-Men fanboy. I like the comics well enough but have not read that many of them and I enjoyed the 90's cartoon when I was a kid. I'm simply a guy who likes movies and wanted to do a scene by scene review of a movie as an intellectual exercise. Just to see what I can learn by watching movies very closely and breaking that shit down. I chose the X-Men movies because:

1)There's a shit ton of them. 6 and counting. I won't be running out of material anytime soon.
2)There isn't a masterpiece among them. This would be a pretty boring exercise if every scene my analysis boiled down to OMG that was A-MAZE-ING!
3)They run the gamut from very good to very bad. This should be more educational for me.
4)Even the bad ones are entertaining enough. I'm no masochist.

Enjoy.

I like the tag line on this poster. Trust A Few/Fear The Rest. Given that X-Men is often read as an allegory for racism, I think its kind of awesome that the anti-progressive message of this poster is: trust some minorities, but fear most of them.