In the X-Men prequels, Xavier is allowed to have human failings - to be judgmental in First Class, to indulge in self-pity in Days of Future Past, to feed his pride in Dark Phoenix. Part of this simply comes from treating Xavier as a person rather than a paragon. Indeed, Xavier is a “ model minority,” training an army of mutant children to risk (and even sacrifice) their lives to protect “ a world that hates and fears them.” It makes sense that Xavier appears a saint, particularly when compared to “ mad old terrorist twat” Magneto.įirst Class and the movies that followed dared to explicitly question and challenge Xavier and to blur some of the boundaries between Xavier and Magneto. However, while Magneto embraces violence as a means to that end, Professor X believes in peace between mutants and humankind. Still, Xavier and Magneto agree on a common cause of the advancement of mutant rights. It relies on a grossly oversimplified, if not “ entirely inaccurate,” representation of both King and Malcolm X, tied into the larger issues with using the X-Men as a direct stand-in for an oppressed minority group. Though a popular point of comparison, this is a crass analogy. One of the clichés of the X-Men franchise is that Professor X is the Martin Luther King Jr. The ‘90s crossover Onslaught was based around the idea of the character’s unleashed “ dark side.” Deadly Genesis retconned a dark secret into the franchise’s roots.įirst Class offers something a little more nuanced and more engaging. Writer Chris Claremont suggested that Xavier had crossed ethical boundaries as a young man, sleeping with a patient and fathering a son.
#X men first class series#
The idea of a “flawed” Professor Xavier was nothing new in the comics, despite the presentations of Xavier in mass media such as X-Men: The Animated Series and the original X-Men franchise. In contrast, the rebooted X-Men films offer a deliberately flawed and ambiguous interpretation of Charles Xavier. There was no doubting that he had the best interests of everyone at heart. The version of Charles Xavier featured in X-Men and X2 was benignly paternalistic. After all, he was played by Patrick Stewart, best known for his work on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
In the original trilogy, Charles Xavier was largely presented as a paragon of virtue. Xavier brushes up against both respectability politics and superhero conventions in Dark Phoenix. He plays a major part in fighting Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac) in X-Men: Apocalypse. His crisis of faith is a major plot point in X-Men: Days of Future Past. He is recruited by the CIA as an expert on mutants in X-Men: First Class and ends up putting together a team to fight the Hellfire Club. However, as played by James McAvoy, Charles Xavier is an active protagonist of the rebooted films that followed the third X-Men. This is obvious even looking at the cinematic X-Men trilogy X-Men, X2, and X-Men: The Last Stand each incapacitate or remove Patrick Stewart’s Professor Xavier before the eponymous team enters the third act. It is no surprise that Xavier has been killed off (and retired) several times over the decades, as he was never truly the focus of the stories. Theoretically, there were few problems that Xavier couldn’t solve using his psychic gifts.Īs such, Xavier traditionally fell into the role of the responsible adult whose job it was to act as a foil to the active protagonists of the book. His psychic powers were used to coordinate the young mutants but also posed a variety of plotting problems. He was the owner and headmaster of the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters, responsible for corralling the teenagers who made up the team. While Ian McKellen and Michael Fassbender earned a lot of deserved praise for their portrayals of Magneto, it is worth singling out one of the franchise’s most interesting and underrated interpretations of a classic X-Men character: James McAvoy’s Professor Charles Xavier.Īs originally conceived by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Professor Xavier was more of a plot function than a character.
It struggled with some classic characters like Cyclops and Storm, but it did well with others. With the release of The New Mutants on streaming, Fox’s X-Men franchise has truly concluded.
0 kommentar(er)
