Pun Salad

Why, yes, this is the second consecutive movie we watched in which Rose Byrne appeared. Good catch.

It's (yet another) X-Men movie, this one—you may have guessed—an origin story. It starts in the 1940s, when both Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr were mutant kids. Young Charles is growing up rich and privileged, when meets up with the shapeshifter Raven (who just happens to be raiding the family fridge). This gives him an early start on the Professor X road: protection and guidance of troubled youngsters with fearsome powers.

But meanwhile in Europe, Erik, being Jewish, is in a Nazi death camp. It's run by the supremely evil Sebastian Shaw, who makes the other Nazis look like wimps. Shaw also bumps off Erik's mom. It's perhaps understandable that Erik is saddled with Issues at this impressionable age.

Jump forward to the early 60s, and Erik is in a cold-blooded pursuit of Shaw, looking for revenge. Shaw, for his part, has turned his Nazi past into a more comic-book-traditional role: super-villainous head of an international criminal gang. And Charles is recruited by the CIA to gather up mutants and bring their skills to furthering American interests. Eventually Charles and Erik meet and begin their complex and tumultuous relationship, as they both need to thwart Shaw's (literally) apocalyptic schemes.

It's a big-budget extravaganza, loaded with impressive special effects, and the actors are pretty good. But the plot is rooted in Cold War history, and hints at USA/USSR moral equivalence; the real problems are caused by those pesky evil mutants. I'm still anti-Communist enough to find this grating, even set in comic-book fiction.

And as I've previously mentioned, there's something about James McAvoy (who plays Charles) that makes me want to give him a good slap.