New ‘X-Men’ prequel explores foes’ past, predicts fertile future - Entertainment, Movies - Navy Times

New ‘X-Men’ prequel explores foes’ past, predicts fertile future

Mutants, it seems, are only as good as the creators assembling their chromosomes.

Director Bryan Singer’s first two installments of the “X-Men” trilogy were about as smart and provocative as comic-book adaptations are likely to get.

After Singer left, the trilogy wrapped up with a dud, followed by a limp spinoff chronicling the origins of fan favorite Wolverine.

Now Singer is back as a producer for “X-Men: First Class.”

Matthew Vaughn (“Stardust,” ‘‘Kick-Ass”) was wisely recruited as director and co-writer.

The result is one of the best Marvel adaptations, packed with action, humor, and retro 1960s style that’s both campy and sexy and a revisionist history lesson that puts the X-Men at the center of the Cuban missile crisis.

The young cast led by James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender is no match for Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and the rest of the grand ensemble Singer enlisted for the first “X-Men” flick in 2000.

Yet McAvoy has playful energy and unshakable nobility, while Fassbender captures slow-burning wrath and unflinching pragmatism, which nicely prefigure Stewart’s Professor X and McKellen’s Magneto.

We’re introduced to McAvoy’s Charles Xavier and Fassbender’s Erik Lehnsherr as boys in the 1940s. Their vastly different upbringings underscore the differences that eventually will turn them from best friends to bitter rivals.

Charles grows up in a privileged home believing he’s a freak of nature, the only one of his kind, until he meets shape-shifting mutant Raven (Jennifer Lawrence).

Raven and Charles forge a foster-sibling relationship, while Erik, a Polish Jew, suffers unspeakable tragedy during the Holocaust as the Nazis try to use the boy’s power to control metal.

Charles and Erik team up in the early 1960s as part of a CIA operation against Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), a mutant who can absorb explosive energy and aims to set off a nuclear war to wipe out humanity so his kind can inherit the Earth. Bacon is clearly having a blast playing the U.S. against the Soviets.

Among those initially fighting for the good guys are intrepid CIA agent Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne), her nameless team leader (a sadly under-used Oliver Platt), and mutants Beast, Banshee, Havok and Angel.

But allegiances change, and the point of the prequel is to spell out who switched sides and why. At the heart is the break between Charles and Erik, and the filmmakers, clearly plotting a prequel trilogy, leave plenty of loose ends to tie up.