Summer Movie Reviews - X-men First Class

*spoiler (and rant) alert*

OK, now that I've gotten that out of the way, I'm about to go in on this on right heah! Consider yourselves fairly warned cuz I am properly pissed right now.

I expected to get a good background history of the original characters, as is the trend with many of the comic book-turned-movie feature films as of late. And though I didn't follow X-Men from its inception, I definitely got some good insight on how it all began.  I was surprised to find out that Magneto was a Holocaust survivor and also that Prof X and Mystique grew up like brother and sister. Oh, and Hugh Jackman's Wolverine profanity-laced one-liner cameo scene was pretty darn hilarious.

But one of the new recruits was a young black man that went by the name Darwin. He was the only black mutant in the movie. While I made the effort to point that out, you probably already know what's coming next... if you are also black or aware of what happens to black people in movies. Yup, it's true: he was the first--and depressingly enough, the only mutant--to get killed off (the only exception being the villain).

#epicFREAKINGfail

Unless I'm mistaken, this is the year 2011. Why are black people still getting killed first in movies?!! It's a sickening trend that probably existed since black people were allowed the privilege of gracing the silver screen. But it's one that I will never get used to--I flat-out REFUSE! I mean, the President of the United States of America is half black; I say 'half' to acknowledge his white mother (let's be open-minded and forget about the one-drop rule for just a second). What is mainstream media [still] trying to say in a not-so-subliminal way?! And it didn't slip me that there were--only--2 other mutants of color* [Latino]: one was working for the villain, and the other defected from the human side to join the villain. What's that really about?! Oh, and I didn't forget about the Asians... but I'm not sure if there were any Asian mutants in the comic book so I can't officially gripe about that one. *Yes, obviously the skin color blue was in the mix, but I'm addressing human, not mutant, phenotypic expression.

It's a low-down, dirty shame that a film in which one of the protagonists endured persecution because of his ethnicity would stoop so low as to slight the lone black male among those who were already 'different'. Was he more different than any of the other mutants? Why did he have to be the one to die, ironically while trying to 'rescue' the Latina from betraying the rest of the--otherwise all-white--group? To anyone who followed the original comic series, is this really what happened? Please let me know and I will recant my rantings and ravings.

*sigh* That just about took all the enjoyment out of my night. I'm out.