Hanno's blog

Recently, a new X-Men movie made it to the cinemas. I quite liked the first three X-Men movies. I wasn't very impressed by the prequel-movie Wolverine, which tells the story of one of the characters.

Now there's X-Men first class. Again a prequel, but from a different perspective. Wolverine only has a very short cameo appearance, this time the movie telling the story of many other X-Men characters. Prequels are difficult. They must tell a story that already has some fixed points and a fixed outcome that's already known my most viewers. The new X-Men film suffers exactly from that problems.

The movie does a very brave task - it tries not only to tell a prequel story to the other movies, it also involves a whole bunch of historic events. From the nazi concentration camps to nuclear weapons and the cuba crisis. This sounds like too much for a science fiction movie, but surprisingly it handles this part not so bad. It even motivated me to improve my history knowledge and read something about Argentinia's role in hiding nazis after the second world war (some german information here). It seems the movie is pretty close to real history in that respect.

But there's another problem in this movie. I found the main plot just doesn't fit. And that's due to the fact its a prequel where the outcome is already decided:

(please stop reading here if you haven't seen the movie and still want to see it - spoilers ahead)

The development of the charakter Erik Lensherr alias Magneto. As the victim of some cruel experiments by a mad Nazi scientist, his life is one of anger and revenge. But his opponent - and all viewers of the other X-Men movies already know that - has a role which is exactly what Magneto's role will be later. So in the end, he kills him - and then just replaces him. All allies of his biggest enemy just become allies of him. That just doesn't make sense.

(now you can read again)

All in all, it's still a pretty good movie. If you like such movies, it has its moments. But the in my opinion illogical story destroys a lot.

Final word: We had two X-Men prequels now. But X-Men 3 ended with a perfect cliffhanger. It should be resolved at some point - I'd like to see X-Men 4.