X-Complaints: Race

X-Men: First Class (2011)
IMDb | Wikipedia | Official Site

Directed by Matthew Vaughan
Written by Vaughan and 5 other people
Starring James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender

My Recommendation: Great movie with a few glaring flaws

X-Men comics have a long history of exploring racism and prejudice, but the script for X-Men: First Class has a surprisingly simplistic understanding of racial politics.

The only black woman is a stripper who goes over to the bad guys at the first opportunity.  The only black man is killed faster than a redshirt on Kirk's away team.  For a film set in the civil rights heyday of 1962, this seems embarrassingly oblivious.  New York Times columnist Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it this way:

"Here is a period piece for our postracial times — in the era of Ella Baker and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the most powerful adversaries of spectacular apartheid are a team of enlightened white dudes."

When race is invoked, there is absolutely no nuance.  Comics Alliance blogger David Brothers points out the black character's other primary function:

"He was there so that when someone said 'slavery' when talking about mutant rights, the camera could focus on his face in one of the cheapest bits of direction I've ever seen. Yes, of course that would make the black guy mad. Congrats! You've got a rudimentary understanding of history, and I'm really happy for you. Way to hammer home the civil rights metaphor at the heart of the X-Men in the clumsiest way possible."

Perhaps I'm being overly critical of a comic book movie, but when you have scenes set against the Lincoln Memorial, when your characters say things like "Mutant... and proud," you're not shying away from the race allegory.  But with such clumsy execution, you're not doing it justice either.