"(You're one of them?!) Very astute of you Colonel Hendry. You wanna guess what I can do? I've got the power to absorb energy. Keeps me young. That's the boring part. The fun stuff is what I can do with it once I've got it."
Wait a minute… this guy still hasn’t received a proper proposal and official consensus? Well that just isn’t right. I guess that means that, once again, it’s.... (dramatic pause) proposal time.
On a side note, due to changing my username since posting this, for some weird reason, you can't see the votes anymore. If you want to see them, and by extension, the proof that this was approved, follow the redirect here.
What’s the work?[]
X-Men: First Class is a superhero film from 2011, the fifth installment in the live-action X-Men film series, and acts as a prequel to the first movie from the year 2000. It’s primarily set in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis and focuses mostly on the origin of the relationship between Professor Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr/Magneto, as well as their respective groups, the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Mutants. Plot-wise, it centers on how after meeting up, they try to recruit other mutants on behalf of the CIA to form a team and stop a mutant supremacist, who with the help of his comrades/followers, is bent on enacting nuclear war between the US and Russia. Plus, Erik has a very strong personal vendetta against this individual for what he did to him during his childhood. And of course, this person would be the topic of the proposal.
Who is he and what does he do?[]
Sebastian Shaw is a powerful mutant who has the ability to absorb energy and then unleash it in a weaponized fashion. He is first introduced operating under the alias Dr. Klaus Schmidt and working as a scientist with the Nazis in World War II. After seeing Erik bend a metal gate when desperate to get back to his parents, whom he was forcibly separated from, he becomes intrigued and meets with him in his office. Wanting to see him consciously use his metal-manipulation ability, he urges him to show it to him by moving a coin on his desk. While he initially acts quite friendly, to the point of offering him chocolate, he quickly shows his true color when, seeing that he can’t do it, he decides to use a much less… kind method to motivate him. He then has a couple of soldiers bring in his mother for a very quick reunion before he threatens to shoot her if he can’t move the coin before he counts to 3. Unfortunately, even then, Erik is unable to do it, which results in him coldly shooting his mother. This sends Erik into a rage which causes him to start savagely wrecking all the metal components in both his office and the neighboring experiment room, including crushing the skulls of the two soldiers who escorted his mother by crushing their helmets. Shaw, of course, simply reacts with giddy delight to all this, and realizes that the way to unlock his power is through anger and pain, commenting on all the fun they’ll have together.
In the present tense of the film, set 18 years later, Erik has now been shaped into a very angry and vengeful young man whose main focus is to track down and kill him for going on to subject him to vile experiments, but even more so to avenge his mother’s death. Shaw, meanwhile, has now become the leader of the Hellfire Club, a group of mutants with aspirations of world domination. To this end, he intends to manipulate the US and Russia into engaging in nuclear war so that in the aftermath of the widespread death and destruction, mutant-kind will dominate what’s left of the human race. But of course, his care for his fellow mutants is really just a ruse, as I’ll get into later; his real priority is to personally rule over them, and any mutants whom he cannot charm to his side are just as much his enemies as normal humans are.
To this end, he is first seeing arranging a private meeting with Colonel Bob Hendry from the US army to strong-arm him into supporting building an American missile site in Turkey, which is just outside the Russian border, to rile up tensions. After he does so by demonstrating his comrades’ abilities, the man tries to cut ties with him by threatening to set off a hand grenade when he visits him later on his yacht if he doesn’t allow him to walk away with his money. However, this fails miserably; Shaw calls his bluff since he can see that he’s too scared to do it, but calmly does it himself and contains the blast using his power. With clear understated enjoyment, he then obliterates him by simply tapping him with the pent up energy. On a similar note, he meets with a soviet general later in Russia. When he fails to get him to send soviet missiles to Cuba through manipulation, since the man knows that’s all but asking for war with the US, he summons his followers to force him into it by making it clear in no uncertain terms that his life is forfeit if he doesn’t convince his government to do it.
Between these events, Shaw, along with his followers, Azazel and Riptide, attack the Division X facility, which is the government facility that Charles and Erik are using and bringing young, teenage mutants they’re recruiting for their cause to(which includes Charles’ adopted sister Raven, also known as Mystique). They go on to massacre all of the CIA agents and soldiers positioned there, with Azazel and himself doing most of the dirty work; Azazel uses his teleportation ability to take many of them into the air and drop them from a great height to their deaths, while Shaw himself threatens a CIA agent to tell him where the mutants are. When a bunch of soldiers try swarming him and opening fire, Shaw simply absorbs all the bullets, then absorbs a blast from a rocket launcher and uses the accumulated energy to massacre them in one fell swoop. He then approaches the young mutants and tries to convince them that they’re on the same side and to join his cause, promising that they’ll be able to live like “kings and queens”. After convincing Angel Salvadore to join him, Darwin, another recruit, pretends that’s he’s coming with him too, only to use the opportunity as a distraction to allow another mutant, Alex Summers, the chance to attack him with his energy rings. However, Shaw simply absorbs the attack and sadistically forces the energy down Darwin’s throat, killing him with an explosion from the inside out.
At the climax, Shaw accompanies the Russian fleet in his submarine to the outskirts of a small island in Cuba where the US military and Soviet Union have sent their forces to engage in a tense stand-off. He then has his comrades kill the crew of a Russian vessel with the missiles and steer it past an embargo line that has been agreed between both sides that if breached, will warrant the beginning of a nuclear war. However, thanks to some quick thinking from Charles, who uses his telepathy to make a crew member on the Russian’s flagship launch a missile and destroy the ship, it’s narrowly averted (his comrades escape thanks to Azazel’s teleportation). Deciding that “they just need another match to light the fuse”, Shaw attempts to absorb the energy from the sub’s nuclear reactor to turn himself into a human atom bomb so he can destroy all their surroundings, including, presumably, all of Cuba, to trigger it that way. However, he’s foiled when the X-Men track his sub from their jet, and Erik uses his magnetic power to lift it out of the water and deposit it on land. He then infiltrates the sub and engages in a battle with Shaw. However, Shaw initially has the upper hand and viciously beats down Erik, while trying to convince him that everything he did to him, he did for him, and tries to convince him to join him in his quest to overthrow the humans. However, Erik manages to remove the helmet he was using to protect himself from Charles’ telepathic powers, which allows Charles to mentally freeze him. Erik then begrudgingly admits that he is what he is thanks to him and that he even agrees with his philosophy; however, he can’t forgive him for killing his mother. He then takes out the same coin he presented him all those years ago, and despite Charles’ pleas for him not to take revenge, Erik gives the genocidal mutant supremacist a karmic death by pushing the coin through his forehead and out the other end.
Mitigating Factors[]
You have to give credit where it’s due; when he’s at his best, Sebastian Shaw can be so charming, polite and charismatic that it’s quite tempting to believe that he really cares about his fellow mutants, as well as his fellow Hellfire Club comrades. However, as we all know, actions speak louder than words, and Shaw’s actions very loudly contradict any possible good or well-intentioned qualities he initially seems to have. For example, he light-heartedly chides Emma Frost, his closest colleague and possible lover, when Erik comes aboard his yacht to kill him and she knocks him into the water, saying “they don’t hurt their own”. However, not too much later, he cold-bloodedly murders Darwin, a mutant who’s a young adult at most, just for standing up to him, which demonstrates quite clearly that he has no regard for the lives of mutants if they’re not on his side (if the horrible experiments he subjected Erik to as a boy weren’t proof enough already). And no, even his colleagues are not exempt from this. This is seen quite clearly when none other than Emma Frost, whom he seemed like he might actually love, gets captured by Charles and Eric and put in custody by the CIA after he sends her to establish contact with the soviet general he meets later. Despite being able to break her out easily if he wanted to (which Erik does at the end), he doesn’t even waste a thought on doing so, and pretty much treats Angel as a new, young replacement for her after her recruitment. So yeah, if he was willing to abandon even her without a second thought, it’s pretty obvious that any of his comrades are just replaceable enforcement to him.
Finally, while he does tell Erik how proud he is of him in their final confrontation, it’s pretty clear he means that he’s proud of what he forcibly shaped him into. He’s also doing this in the middle of beating him down, which also makes it quite clear what the real message is; become a valuable ally in overthrowing the “normal people” like I hoped you would be, or die. So to conclude this section, I think it’s pretty apparent that Shaw’s supposed care for his fellow mutants and talk of creating a better and safer world for them is just pretense, and he’s really just a very high-functioning psychopath who’s great at faking friendliness, affection and love, but is incapable of actually feeling any of these things for anyone. All he really cares about is creating a new world order where he’s on top, and they’re just the allies he needs to charm over to help him make it happen.
Heinousness[]
Frankly, the X-Men franchise has always had a pretty ridiculous heinous standard, and the live-action films are certainly no exception. Even before Shaw, we had William Stryker, who wanted to commit genocide on mutants, and likewise, even Erik/Magneto himself tried to reverse Cerebro to kill all humans in the same movie. And that’s without touching on Apocalypse trying to recreate the world in his image, or Dr. Zander Rice and Donald Pierce nearly driving mutants to extinction and their atrocities towards children and pregnant women.
That said, I still think Sebastian Shaw stands among the worst of them, both in terms of the scale of his atrocities and on a personal level. After all, Magneto has plenty of redeeming and sympathetic qualities, and even Stryker had a somewhat tragic backstory and genuinely believed he was making the world safer by exterminating mutants. Shaw essentially takes the worst traits of both and blends them together without the sincere good intentions or any other humanizing traits. His actual body count is pretty considerable, such as his and Azazel’s massacre at the Division X facility, but of course, it’s his goal to manipulate and/or force the US and Russia into nuclear war, and use any mutants he can persuade to support him so he can hold the world in the palm of his hand in the aftermath, that really makes him stand out. It certainly helps that he was willing to go as far as turning himself into a human atom bomb to obliterate the fleets of both sides, and very likely all of Cuba, to make it happen when the initial plan failed. Needless to say, his attempted body count is well in the millions. Plus, as Erik even admits, he’s responsible for how he turned out, which in turn, technically makes him responsible for Magneto’s whole existence and all the bad things he goes on to do after he kills him. And let’s face it; callously using a boy, who was a pre-teen at most, as a lab rat for what was likely at least a few years, as well as depriving him of his mother to make him that way, is the kind of thing that’s deplorable on an intimate level in pretty much any given work.
Final Verdict[]
I know the X-Men series has a high standard, but I still think this guy is one of its worst villains. It’s telling when you can make someone like William Stryker look like a half-decent person in comparison. But of course, it’s up to you. As always, thanks for reading my detailed proposals and have a nice day!