After the third X-Men movie collapsed into visual and narrative chaos, the franchise seemed dead and buried not so. Prequels are usually as disastrous as sequels, but this one is fresh and imaginative and offers real promise for getting the Marvel Comics franchise back on its feet.
Marvel superheroes are in a class of their own. With plausible backgrounds for their emergence as superheroes, from spider bites for Spiderman, readers will know the stories.
X-Men, however, needed a backstory. Too many questions were left unanswered in the later films, especially about the ongoing power struggle between Magneto and Professor Charles Xavier. Magneto seemed the serious villain and Xavier the heroic protector of the oppressed, but it turns out that is not the case. The prequel shows them emerging as friends, but Magneto comes to believe there can never be common ground for mutants and humans.
He sets himself up as the mutant group's protector, while Xavier sees integration of the two strands of humanity as the way to a peaceful future.
In laying out the strands and supplying a believable backstory, the writers have also given the characters a depth, and the ideas a quality that one does not expect in comics and their cinematic derivatives. Magneto, for example, begins life as the Polish Jew Erik Lensherr, introduced as he employs his mutant powers to try to rejoin his parents in a German concentration camp. When Kevin Bacon, making an almost plausible job of playing the concentration camp commandant, the truly evil and power hungry Sebastian Shaw, exposes Erik's powers of telekinesis by shooting his beloved mother, Erik vows to revenge the act by killing Shaw.
So we are able to explore the nature of revenge, partly through the also entertaining effects of the actions that accompany Erik's revenge saga, and partly through conversations among characters, especially those between Erik and Xavier.
Plausibility reigns, you see, because the alternative position to bloody Shakespearian revenge is offered by the young Charles Xavier, newly graduated as a professor of genetics with a strong accompanying philosophical and ethical background.
What's with all the academic stuff, you may ask. It's OK. It is just that some of the character stuff is good enough to have a positive effect on the spectacle and this is an entertainer before it is anything else.
The opening sequence in the concentration camp sets the entertainment levels. As the audience is faced with convincing images of Jewish victims and their Nazi oppressors, editor Eddie Hamilton's skilful cutting and splicing neatly builds a series of climactic events, from Erik's first display of incredible power as he drives a gate open before he is overpowered by guards (and if that seems an anomaly, in the construction of the sequence, it is absolutely not) to a moment of shock and terror as Erik's mother is shot and Erik goes berserk, wrecking his surroundings and killing two of his guards.
Later set pieces include a ghoulish torture sequence in which Shaw obtains information by pulling a victim's fillings out with his mental powers.
The essential narrative foil for the mutants is a human CIA agent, played by Rose Byrne, and her brilliant normality as opposed to the stock males of the CIA, the US Government, or the armed forces is yet another factor in the effective selling of a cracker story.