Loganbabe
Don't want your future
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Charles was in charge throughout the movie; he was the CIA's contact, he was the one training all the mutants, including Erik, he was the one who took the initiative to make the Russians attack their own ship thus stopping the American attack thus stopping the war. Why does the general audience have the idea that it was Erik in charge all the time, then, if we know that without Charles Erik would never raise that submarine, he would never improve his powers, why, he would probably be dead at the bottom of the ocean?
I think that a good explanation is that Erik's powers are completely visual. What you see is what you get - we see Erik lifting the submarine, therefore he was the one doing it on his own, and a lot of people are so in awe watching the scene that they forget that Charles was there too, all the time helping just by projecting inside Erik's head, making him reach the famous balance between serenety and rage.
Telepathy is incredibly difficult to show in movies; people will think it's oh so easy to be a telepath, just put one finger to the temple and voilá. Hence the problem I have with Charles' lack of development in FC - there should have been one or two scenes showing how telepathy can be incredibly dangerous and a very complicated power. How it was not just a funny game to Charles, how much it affected him and how much it could affect the people around him. I agree that there was no need to give him a dark, tragic persona full of issues - the fact that he had fun with his power flirting with the girls was amazing and showed how much control he had over it. The problem is that we never see him achieving that control in the movie, therefore he sometimes looked like a character who was too futile when compared to Erik, therefore a great part of the audience had difficulties in accepting that a "futile" character was, indeed, in charge.
I'll never accept the lazy excuse that they cut the telepathic battle because it looked too much like Inception. To me it just showed an apalling disinterest in the character. Imagine Vaughn saying "I had to cut the Argentinian bar scene with Erik because it looked too much like Inglorious Basterds". The telepathic battle would have been a pivotal moment to Charles, showing how powerful he was and how far could he go - even dangerously so - and it would have been a visual moment, so important to a non-visual power like telepathy.
As to why I think that telepathy is fascinating because it's so mysterious and complicated and dangerous, please read this amazing fanfiction (don't worry, no slash) http://www.fanfiction.net/s/7553474/1/Petals_On_a_Wet_Black_Bough
It's just one chapter so far but it captures Charles and Erik so brillianty and their powers and their differences and their friendship, I wish we could see a movie based on it.
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) being with feelings and stuff. And of course First Class still paints its major characters with fairly broad strokes - nuanced psychology is not really a feature of comic book movies nor does it suit them - but it humanised both Charles and Erik a great deal, to the point where I actually have trouble thinking of them in other terms than their birth names. As for Raven/Mystique, I don't even know how to relate her character here to the near-mute henchwoman in the original trilogy, it's just such a huge gap.
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