It’s quite possibly the best opening to any superhero movie ever made: At the crowded threshold of Auschwitz, a young boy is torn from his mother’s arms. Separated by a metal gate and held back by a band of Nazi soldiers, it’s impossible to reach her. His outstretched hands claw at nothing but air, but in his desperation, the gate that separates them bends uncannily to his will, reformed in the jagged shape of an X.
In that instant, Magneto is born. It’d take more cruelty and dehumanization to mold him into the supervillain who’d wage battle after battle against humans on the side of mutantkind, but this brief vignette, deployed in the opening moments of X-Men, went a long way in getting that point across. For a long time — more than a decade! — that sequence was a load-bearing addition to his characterization; paired with the quiet intensity of Ian McKellen’s performance, it was all most fans needed to sympathize with such a wounded character. It’s the kind of scene you don’t want to mess with; that X-Men: First Class not only reuses it, but adds onto it in extended flashbacks, should have doomed the film before its opening titles. Somehow, though, that risk paid off, setting the tone for the rare prequel that builds on the strengths of the original film.
