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First Class (2011) vs X-Men (2000) - Continuity Issue

posted 8 years ago by Brew_Swayne
5 replies | jump to latest

Was just watching the X-Men (2000) movie yesterday on FX and something occured to me that I hadn't picked up on before.

In the movie, Professor X and Wolverine are in Cerebro and Charles is explaining what it does. Logan asks why he doesn't use it to find Magneto, and Charles replies that Magneto has somehow figured out a way to disrupt it, but he's not sure how. Of course, this is in reference to Magneto's helmet. So according to this movie, Charles is totally unaware of this helmet or what it does.

So now we've got First Class and Sebastian originally has the helmet, which Magneto takes from him after he kills him. Magneto is then wearing the helmet on the beach with Charles near the end of the movie, so Charles is well aware of the existence of this helmet and what it's capable of doing.

Obviously when they made the original in 2000 there was no way to know that an origin story would be done a decade later, but for continuity's sake, this seems like something that the First Class writers either overlooked or ignored while working on the prequel. Not a big enough deal that I think either movie is really affected by it, but it had been a while since I saw the original and it jumped out at me.

Anyone else catch this?

[–] Xaeden 8 years ago

Yes, there are a number of these. Another example is Xavier saying, in the first film, that he met Magneto at the age of 17.

The writers decided to purposely ignore previously established elements that they felt would have hindered the narrative that they wanted to tell. The result was not a straight prequel but instead a quasi-reboot that alluded to the original films but carved its own path. Then the movie didn't perform as well as the studio would have liked and to salvage things they came up with the idea to use the original cast to promote the new cast in DOFP, which definitively merged the two series and, in doing so, attempted to fill as many of the discrepancies as they reasonably could while hoping audiences would forgive/forget the rest.

For example, we now have an explanation of why Xavier was to be walking in flashbacks dated post 1962. In the new timeline he gets off the drug completely before those flashbacks occurred, but we know that in the original timeline he was on it for longer and we also know (per Beast) that there's a middle ground where Xavier can both have his powers (albeit not at full strength) and walk. Xavier was instead purposely taking too much in order to completely block the voices but because of this we can now reason that he eventually transitioned to a lower dosage before getting off it completely. Hench his walking and minorly using his powers in Origins and The Last Stand.

Something like the 17 year old thing, though, is just one of those things we're expected to ignore.

[–] maximmm (3408) 6 years ago

And still the new cast sucks (reboot is in the works, I wonder if they'll use 20 year olds this time around)

[–] JoWilli (21643) 6 years ago

will they reboot again?

[–] GreenGoblinsOck8 (7986) 6 years ago

Of course. Marvel will want to make their own X-Men movie with their own cast. They won't want to pay the expensive salories of the previous cast and crew.

[–] DracTarashV2 (4497) 8 years ago

Frankly, I expected to see some details be changed and/or ignored. And why not? After Origins/Last Stand, methinks it felt safe to say that continuity was no longer going to matter in this franchise all that much. I’ve just come to accept it.