Even after the good folks at Fox skullfucked the continuity of one of their prized franchises, they seemed adamant about making these demented square pegs fit. Bleeding Cool begs to differ, sharing what they’ve learned about a crucial sequence for “X-Men First Class” that borrows liberally from the opening moments of 2000’s “X-Men.”
In Bryan Singer’s original film, many remember the initial moments of Erik Lensherr, the boy who would be Magneto. He is taken by SS soldiers to be lorded over in a concentration camp and separated from his family in WWII Poland. Suddenly, his magnetic abilities manifest, as he starts to manipulate the surrounding fences, almost in the shape of a malevolent claw. It’s a wonderful sequence, and the three following films, despite their highlights, never arrived at a moment as psychologically troubling.
As it turns out, director Matthew Vaughn is a big fan of that scene, and intends to recreate the milieu with his brand new cast and crew. However, Bleeding Cool won’t reveal a major digression between the scene and accepted continuity, but say that up to a point, the moment in the new film will be a scene-by-scene recreation. Singer is serving as a producer and quasi-godfather to the new film, but its unclear as to whether the new “twist” in this scene is merely a small surprise within the already-established X-universe or, as hinted in the article, a motion towards a brand new continuity.
It’s been confirmed that the majority of the new film will take place in the 1960s, so perhaps some course correction may take place? The opening of the first film clarifies that the bulk of the X-Men adventures take place in the “near future,” and in “First Class,” 15 year old “Son Of Rambow”‘s Bill Milner will play Lensherr, who ages twenty-something years later into Michael Fassbender. In keeping with original chronology, Ian McKellan’s Magneto in the original films is in his mid-seventies, which… doesn’t seem all that accurate. Perhaps this is the first step towards continuing a series without an antagonist deep into his early-bird-special years.