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TheX-Menhave a cinematic legacy spanning a quarter of a century, and a comic book history that goes back three decades beyond that. They are undeniably one of the most popular superhero teams in popular culture history for a myriad of reasons. The fact that they serve as such an effective allegory for social commentary is and always has been a cornerstone of their success, but there are more fundamental reasons for their popularity as well. For one, they’re such a diverse superhero team. Everyone chips in, and the powers and abilities of all the individual members perfectly and creatively complement one another.
But not allX-Menare created equal. Some are undeniably more powerful than others. One of the most powerful members of the team’s roster, if not the most powerful, is Professor Charles Xavier. So great is his power that it often causes problems for people trying to write engaging stories about Marvel’s mutants.
Just Who Is Professor Charles Xavier, Anyway?
Professor Charles Xavier is the dean of his eponymous school for gifted youngsters and the leader of the X-Men — a team of heroes comprised of hismost gifted and skilled students. He is the most powerful telepath in the world, capable of reading and controlling minds, creating telepathic illusions, altering people’s memories, and much, much more. He’s been around since the first issues ofX-Menin 1963 (a few pesky deaths notwithstanding) and will surely continue being around in Marvel Comics for decades to come.
Thanks to a device known as Cerebro, he can amplify his natural abilities and touch the minds of people the world over. In the year 2000, Professor X and his students appeared on the big screen for the very first time and kicked superhero cinema into high gear, sandwiched betweenBladeandSpider-Man. This is also the first time we saw that with Xavier’s great power came great challenges for screenwriters.
Thecinematic Professor X, played by Sir Patrick Stewart, is a pretty faithful adaptation of the character from the comics. He is shown to have the same sort of ability to read and project thoughts and control minds. He even has his very own Cerebro to amplify his powers further, which he uses to locate various mutants throughout the film. This introduces a potential narrative problem as we progress through the second and third acts of the movie.
The team learns that the villainous Magneto has developed a device to transform humans into mutants. The device is flawed, however, and those transformed ultimately don’t survive. The X-Men need to stop Magneto before he can use this device in whatever plan he has concocted. Finding his Brotherhood of Mutants (and a kidnapped Rogue) is a fairly simple task for the powerful Professor and merely involves a simple trip to Cerebro. This fact is actually sewn pretty deftly into the narrative — theshape-shifting Mystiquesabotages Cerebro, rendering Xavier comatose when he attempts to use the machine to locate her compatriots.
Sidelining the Professor in this way serves the story of the first X-Men movie extremely well. It raises the stakes with the Professor fighting for his life at the same time the X-Men pursue Magneto. It also creates dramatic tension as Jean Grey stretches her own telepathic abilities to the limit to use a repaired Cerebro to track down Magneto’s Brotherhood. This little story arc also highlights the simple narrative challenge Xavier creates — he is perhaps too powerful. His abilities mean he can solve too many problems too easily, making it hard to build tension.
Solving The So-Called ‘Professor X Problem’ Became Imperative With EachX-MenFilm
The screenplay of the first movie navigated these narrative challenges perfectly. Maybe too perfectly. It set the blueprint for how to handle Professor X in subsequent movies: simply get him and his abilities out of the way. InX2, the film’s antagonist, William Stryker, captures and subdues Xavier until he can use him and a knockoff Cerebro to locate and eliminate the world’s mutants. This again weaves Professor X’s abilities nicely into the story, but in doing so, the film also makes the mistake of showing just how overpowered the character is.
Earlier in the film, Xavier is seen freezing rooms full of people in their tracks using his telepathic powers. Stryker also points out that, thanks to Cerebro, Xavier is the only person alive who even knows how many mutants there are in the world, and by the Professor’s own admission, he could kill any individual on the planet when using Cerebro simply by concentrating too hard. So here is a character who can seemingly neutralize any threat anywhere on Earth and solve any problem before it begins just by thinking. That is not a great recipe for building tension.
So, comeX-Men: The Last Stand, the last movie in the original trilogy, Professor X once again needs to be removed from the story. It’s not quite as elegantly handled as it is in previous films — he explodes. He is literally atomized, and therefore, his powers are no longer in play. You can see that there is a variation on a theme in these movies when writing around Professor X’s powers, but the most egregious example is still to come.
X-Men: Days of Future PastKept Him Around, Just Depowered
Days of Future Pastis a fantastic time-hopping adventure that pairs up the original X-Men cast members with their newercounterparts fromX-Men: First Class(which would have, and perhaps should have, been a perfect capper on the entireX-Mencinematic saga). Wolverine travels back in time to prevent a devastating war between humans and mutants before it ever began. His first step is to find a younger Professor X, convince him that his mission is legitimate, and enlist his help.
This would be a straightforward matter of Charles reading Wolverine’s mind…were it not for the fact that a treatment that grants Xavier use of his paralyzed legs also takes away his mutant abilities. This is contrived, but potentially forgivable, were there not too many subsequent scenes where people look to Xavier to use his suppressed powers to get them out of tricky spots.
This really hangs a lantern on the entire narrative problem Professor X poses — he could solve a lot of the problems faced by the X-Men single-handedly and without much trouble, just by thinking about it. So, for this reason,X-Menscreenwriters time and again got around this by finding ways to just remove him and/or his abilities from the story entirely.
