X-Men (2000) vs. First Class and Origins: Wolverine

I think there will be a reset, so all the problems will vanish...

 

There was a bit of an internal inconsistency even with the first film, that Xavier and Magneto met and worked together, even building Cerebro, when they were very young but Xavier didn't start training X-Men until a long time after (since at least some of his first students are around 30 at the oldest), leaving a big gap between the time periods.
This makes some sense if mutants were pretty rare until the generation and especially second generation after Magneto and Xavier first met (also supported by them both only having three active followers in the first film) but First Class very much disregards this idea.

 

The more time passes (especially when there's a reboot in a couple of years), the more they need to rewrite Magneto's Holocaust past as well.

 

Yeh, I guess. I'm not really worried about the mix up, I'm more concerned about the overall story. I really like FC, so the dates don't bother me. I do wish they would have payed more attention though. I do agree that at this point, Magneto's backstory is getting stretched too far.

 

<<The more time passes (especially when there's a reboot in a couple of years), the more they need to rewrite Magneto's Holocaust past as well. >>
He got frozen in an iceberg at the end of WWII then dethawed five years ago

 

First Class ignored the continuity of the other movies in many places.

Is January Jones’ Emma Frost somehow the same character we saw in X-Men Origins: Wolverine?

Lauren Shuler Donner: No, she’s Emma from First Class. That’s who she was and she’s the real Emma Frost. I think January did a pretty good job of portraying her.

So there is no connection between the First Class Emma Frost and the one we see in X-Men Origins: Wolverine?

Lauren Shuler Donner: No … not really, no.

 

That raises a good point. With Iron Man, they just changed the origins of his suit from Vietnam to Afghanistan. But what subsequent historical event is likely to have the same gut-punch factor as the Holocaust or to have such an obvious impact on a character?

I think all they can do is make Erik the child of Holocaust survivors, who has had the importance of it drilled into him so much that he may as well have lived through it himself.

 

There was one storyline in the comic books, I believe #275 in the Savage Land, where Magneto got de-aged a little by magic/mutant powers.

 

The Holocaust is obviously history's most infamous crime, and may it ever remain so, but there were plenty of other atrocities in the rest of the 20th century, and I find your implication that the children of Holocaust survivors born after the fact could be dramatically more psychologically scarred as actual survivors of warfare very troubling.

Heck, there could be a Vietnamese Magneto, born and raised in My Lai.

 

The way I see it there was probably a bunch of time travelling mutants messing about off-screen causing events to occur differently at different times thereby explaining any continuity errors.

 

That's not what I was trying to say and I'm sorry if I offended anyone. I was trying to think of a storyline for him that keeps his basic background - European (a Vietnamese character would hardly be called Erik Lensherr, for example) and a survivor of an atrocity committed on European soil. of course there are other atrocities since then, committed in Europe, Africa and even central America (http://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/mar/12/jeremylennard.martinkettle) but I was simply trying to look at a means of changing Magneto's age (as actual holocaust survivors die out through old age), while linking him to that part of history.

You could make him a survivor of the Balkans conflicts of the early 1990s, I suppose, but if he was a child there, he'd now be in his 20s or 30s and a reboot would entail him being more like the Erik of First Class than the older man of the 2000 movie. Though as time goes on, I suppose that story would become more age-appropriate to him.

The reason why I think the Holocaust is perhaps important in his background is that the Nazis did set out to experiment on the likes of identical twins, as well as trying to wipe out homosexuals, gypsies and Jews. You also have Hitler's well-documented fascination with the occult and paranormal. It's not a big stretch, thus, to imagine those morbid obsessions and hatreds being transferred to mutants and to imagine a mutant survivor of them saying 'never again.'

What happened in places like Vietnam or in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge were undoubtedly unspeakable but I'm not sure that anyone set out to destroy entire line of peoples the way they did in the Holocaust. I know that there was ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and Africa but certainly the latter would entail a significant change to Erik's backstory or character.

 

^ In that case, agreed. The Nazis certainly were unique in the breadth and weirdness of their atrocities. I also think one could make a pretty great apartheid survivor Magneto, but, as you say, the options for post-WW2 white/European victims are indeed limited.

 

Or a Russian, Chinese, Cambodian, Guatemalan, Armenian, Serbian, Somalian, etc Magneto. The holocaust survivor Magneto is a fairly recent addition to the mythos anyway.

 

^See my other elaboration above.

 

My apologies, I read this after I posted.

 

^ No problem. I thought that might be the case.

Incidentally, on topic, I note that this movie will give us our third version of Gen. William Stryker. I wonder how he will compare to Brian Cox and Danny Huston?

 

Once First Class came out I just personally retconned that by having the younger Emma and Kayla be the daughters of the First Class Emma Frost by two different fathers. Both of them sort of split the difference on weaker forms of Emma Frost's powers anyway, with Kayla having the power of telepathic persuasion (though hers is only tactile) and younger Emma having the diamond skin but no telepathy.

It's a world where magical healing abilities and extremely high technology are the norm. It's not that hard to imagine that he's either wearing an exoskeleton or he was temporarily cured of his paralysis by someone's mutant power.

He was also older and bald and CGI creepy when he and Magneto went to visit young Jean in X3, and if you count the twenty years earlier bit from X3 (which seems to have taken place within a year of X1 & X2 - call it 2001 to give time for the new President to be inaugurated) that places that sequence in 1981, only two years after Origins. Xavier obviously isn't as ageless as Patrick Stewart seems to be.

 

How about the ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia in the 90s?

 

It's a fictional universe... there's no reason any reboots -have- to be set in "modern day."