Further X-Men: First Class Thoughts

[iaria]

Some more thoughts upon another watch.

Charles, Raven and Erik

Charles, Raven and Erik are still the best things about this movie. I loved pretty much everything about them. The Charles/Erik and Charles/Raven relationships were wonderful. Charles/Raven was actually my favourite thing about it. I mean, clearly I loved what we got from the Charles/Erik relationship (despite some grumbles) but I’ve loved them since the nineties while Charles/Raven was completely unexpected. I would never have thought of making them siblings but the execution of it was fabulous and now I adore the idea. I want them always to be siblings now.

• Young Charles is remarkable obtuse and you see that mostly in his behaviour towards Raven. I think most of their issues fall to miscommunication. Perhaps because Charles is so used to reading people's minds but with Raven he can't? Everything Charles does with regards to Raven is about protecting her. He is terrified that one day she'll be revealed as a mutant and he won't be able to save her*. He lets that fear blind him to what she wants and what she's saying. Charles wants safety, Raven wants freedom. She doesn't see his protectiveness as the fear and love motived that it is. She wants to be accepted as she is. He doesn't realise that she doesn't know that he accepts and loves her exactly as she is.

Their short scene in their apartment is so sad because he just does not get what is going on with her and that he's inadvertently hurting her. I can't believe that he didn't get from that conversation that what she was really asking was if she was attractive in her natural form. But then the miscommunication isn't entirely on his side. With that scene in the mansion kitchen she takes his reaction as a rejection of who she really is and that he doesn't accept her. When really he a) just doesn't want to see his sister naked and b) is trying to be supportive re: the cure, because he thinks that it's what she wants.

Ugh, these two. I just want to lock them in a room with a therapist until they talk it all out and make up. They are so wonderful with each other, I love the ease and affection they have with each other, and honestly their break up is more painful then Charles and Erik's.

*which adds a different layer of depth to his insistence that humans and mutants can coexist and that humans will eventually accept them. He's an idealist but he's not an idiot, he understands human nature very well both good and bad (telepath, duh).

• I loved this bit as well:

Erik: Honestly Charles, I don’t know how you survived such hardship.
Raven: Well, it was a hardship softened by me.

• "He's different. But he's never had to hide." You know, I don't actually agree. It's true that physically he blends in, which is all Raven is thinking about, but she doesn't even consider the mental aspect. Charles ability isn’t really accepted – Erik is all ‘be yourself, be proud of being a mutant/your abilities’ and Raven is all "mutant and proud" – but she won’t let Charles in her mind, doesn’t accept him. Charles has been forced to hide a huge part of himself, just as much as Raven imo. There has been no one he can talk mind-to-mind with and, excepting Raven, he has always had to be on guard and careful not to reveal too much (info he's picked up from people's minds that he shouldn't know, for example.) He hasn't be free any more than she has.

• Charles and Raven's first meeting was really lovely. I loved that Charles first reaction to seeing Raven in her natural form is a big grin.

• Still love Charles/Erik. I do miss their longer friendship of other versions but there's something great as well about how they so immediately connect with each other and how quickly they become so important to each other. I still loved all the scenes I mentioned in my other review. Possibly my favourite moment - "I want you by my side." ♥ And the way Charles says "My friend" and his sorrow that he can't agree with Erik and follow his path. I thought they, and their eternal disagreement with each other, was done so well. They care for each other so much but are so fundamentally different in how they view the world, and so strong in their own sense of morals and right/wrong, that they can't meet in the middle.

I loved this exchange:

"Killing Shaw will not bring you peace." - Charles
"Peace was never an option." - Erik

• Still love Charles in all his arrogant, oblivious, thinks he knows best, manipulative glory. ♥

• I still love Charles telling Raven to go, that was a great moment of growth in their relationship after a movie of obtuseness and miscommunication, but wtf Raven?! I can't believe she actually left. That is her brother, her family, lying there bleeding! He could have easily died from his wounds and she wouldn't know. And Erik! Him just leaving Charles there while he has the allegiance of a teleporter at hand. I think until contradicted I'm choosing to believe that Erik did send Azazel back for them.

• Erik being the one to convince Raven that she should walk around naked really bothers me. As an origin for that choice - well, it should have been one she made herself. I don't think Erik was trying to be manipulative in that scene but that's really how it came off. First, he rejects her advances, then tells her that he prefers the 'real Raven' and calls her blue self "perfection" which is something Raven has desperately wanted and has been searching for the entire movie.

Then he throws out that completely ridiculous tiger metaphor. WTF, Erik? You don't cover up a tiger because it's an animal which Raven certainly isn't. There is a difference between accepting what you look like and walking around naked. Would he say the same thing to blue Hank or to Azazel? I don't think so. Him connecting her being naked in her natural form to freedom was pretty much the perfect cap on this unintended bit of manipulation.

Other

• The scene where Raven morphs into the older Rebecca R. version and then back into the Jennifer version made me realise how visually perfect the casting was. I can completely buy Jennifer’s Raven as a younger version of Rebecca’s.

• I’m sad that Charles and Erik didn’t build Cerebro in this version. Frankly them building it - with Charles telepathy and Erik's sense of metal - with Hank (his smarts) makes far more sense then just Hank building it based on theory. If only they hadn't had such a compressed timeline it would have worked.

• The training sequences were fun. I liked the incongruity of Erik begging Charles to shoot him and Charles casually telling Sean not to forget to scream before he jumps out a window. I loved the scene where Erik pushes Sean off the satellite dish. I just really wish that the sequence took place over a longer period of time.

• This movie has a serious issue with sexism and its female characters and it stick out more the second time watching (now that I can see past my squee for all things Charles/Erik/Raven.) Things that bothered me include:

- Moira having to strip down to her underwear in order to sneak into the Hellfire Club.

- Angel being a stripper, an apparently completely new background just for this movie, because of course the only female mutant found is a stripper, wth?

- The lingering question on why Emma got undressed in her scene with the Russian general when she was only going to make him think she was having sex with him. There really was no reason for that.

- Raven’s uniform zipper being down while everyone else was zipped to their throat. Sigh. It's the small things sometimes.

• The way Moira's memory was erased bothered me a bit more the second time. I think because of just how loyal she was to him. I really wish that instead they had discussed it and then made the decision together even if it was a very in-character action for him to take.

• Darwin's death is still completely stupid and I refuse to believe it's permanent. At the same time it also makes no sense. On the ship Shaw tells Emma “we don’t hurt our own kind” so what the hell was with him killing Darwin? Especially when just before he does he’s all “protecting your fellow mutants, feels good” to Alex and seems pleased that they were trying to protect each other. He had no reason to kill Darwin and certainly didn't need to in order to escape. It was just dumb all around.

• I noticed this time during the chess scene Erik tells Charles that the humans will turn on them and he can't see it because he thinks they're all like Moira. ...implying that Erik does see Moira as an ally to mutants. He places her as someone trustworthy, someone not like the other humans. Interesting. Also Charles states in return that Erik thinks all humans are like Shaw (as opposed to Moira) except - Shaw isn't human. So that doesn't really work.

• The attack on the CIA base starts with two agents looking at them like freaks and being assholes and the attack ends with an off-screen soldier telling Shaw to allow ‘us normal humans go” but in between we also get a bunch of agents protecting the mutants, dying to protect them. They could have run but a large number of them didn’t and that means something too.

• I do love the Emma scene where she confronts the CIA agents. She’s their ‘prisoner’ but that scene shows that she’s really not. She's definitely playing her own long game which involves her staying captured because I don't buy them keeping her otherwise. I wish we could have gotten more of what was happening in her head.

• After Hank revealed his mutation I wish Raven had shown hers so we could have seen both Hank's and Erik's reactions and it would have made the following scene between the three of them work beter.

• I liked Moira shooting at Erik at the end. Certainly metal bullets are not the best choice to use against Erik and she knows that but she had to do something so she did. I doubt she expected to hit him but she succeeded in distracting him. If he hadn't accidentally hit Charles then Charles might have even been able to get his helmet off.

• I loved Charles reaction to feeling Emma in his head for the first time - awe and pleasure. He thought it was incredible and I love that about him.

• I liked Agent Oliver Platt (who does not have a name) a lot. His reaction to seeing Raven shift for the first time was pretty much the same as Charles. He's so enthusiastic about mutations and mutants and I was sad when he died.

• That Erik would take from a mutant killing his human mother and torturing him that all humans had to die is a bit head scratching. It makes Erik's vendetta against Shaw make sense but his hatred of humanity a little less.