Amazingly enough, I saw X-Men: First Class yesterday and, like everyone else, liked it quite a bit. It’s not Matthew Vaughn’s best movie, or the best comic-book movie, but it ranks pretty high on the list and was, by most any standard, an enormous amount of fun. Some thoughts:

* Henry Jackman’s score had an eerily similar feel to the score in Layer Cake. It was great; catchy and interesting.

* Also great: Any time Michael Ironside appears. But for some reason he was credited as “M. Ironside”. Wonder why.

* Has Kevin Bacon ever been more fun? Not that I can think of off the top of my head. He was fabulous.

* Yes, Michael Fassbender should take over the Bond mantle as soon as Daniel Craig is ready to move on. It’s funny: In Layer Cake, Vaughn included a little moment of Craig moving around a corner with a handgun almost as an overt audition for the role. And he does the same for Fassbender here, especially in the bar in Argentina.

* A point made by Galley Friend Mike Russell: To get a PG-13, you can only use the word “fuck” once. This was the single greatest MPAA-targeted use of the word in the history of film.

* Vaughn did lots of things right, but the biggest was the skill in sketching characters in just enough detail that the movie could be both ensemble and character-driven. He balanced spending the right amount of time with each. That can’t have been easy.

* Now a longer point: I’d argue that X-Men: First Class is really about Mystique. Charles and Erik are the two poles of the film, each making a slightly-complicated moral argument. Their dialogues are pitched exactly to Mystique, who is the archetype of the mutant every-girl. She is the movie’s heart: Winning us over when we first meet her as a scared and hungry little girl. Throughout the film, she’s the most likable character: Sabotaging Charles’ attempt to seduce a girl at the bar; drinking Cokes while he pounds the hard stuff; curling up in his arms to sleep, not quite the way a little sister would, but even more comfortably than a child-hood best-friend; longing for Hank McCoy to look up from his test-tubes and kiss her. And not only is she the most endearing character, she’s also the only character with a real arc: Charles and Erik’s minds are made up from the moment they meet one another. They have a friendship–a real one–but neither is ever in danger of actually falling for the other’s worldview.

But the most important thing about Mystique is that, more than any other mutant in the film, she embodies both sides of the Charles-Erik divide. Charles understands that homo sapiens will be afraid of the power of mutants, and Mystique’s power is uniquely threatening to society. (More on this in a moment.) This is why he urges accommodation. Erik understands that mutants will be outcasts because of their powers, and Mystique’s appearance is exactly the sort of burden which marks her for specially unpleasant treatment. Unlike Beast, whose appearance marks him as mutant, but whose powers are unthreatening; or Charles and Erik, whose appearances are normal, but whose powers are destabilizingly dangerous, Mystique has the worst of both worlds. That the most sympathetic character should have to bear this double burden makes her situation all the more affecting.

And when Mystique chooses Erik’s path–chooses it despite her conflicted heart and very real love of Charles–it makes X-Men: First Class a work of real tragedy.

* Also, Jennifer Lawrence was great in the role, giving it exactly the right blend of sweetness and melancholy. I’m now totally on board with her as Katniss in Hunger Games.

* It’s been well-remarked on that it’s interesting to see the early Magneto, but it’s equally interesting to see the early Professor X. Later in the comics, Professor X is not always a teddy bear. He has to make hard choices and when he does, he can be quite ruthless. Watching him flirt with girls in a bar carried the same sort of sadness that you feel at the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring, when Frodo is playing sweetly in the grass with not a care in the world.

* Finally, one serious complaint. The biggest weakness of the X-Men world is the inability to take seriously the concerns humans might have about homo superior. That’s okay so far as it goes–this is comic book material and we’re meant to identify with the mutants. But if there really were X-Men-style mutants, society–any society–would have a hard time figuring out what to do. Not with most of the mutants–Beast and Angel and Cyclops and Toad don’t represent existential threats to a stable society. But some mutants–Charles, Erik, Mystique–do. In a world where Charles Xavier can freeze people, blank their memories, and read their minds, how could you trust the stock market, the justice system, or elections? In a world with Mystique, how could any identity be secure? In a world with Magneto, we all exist only subject to his whim–in Ultimatum, he pulls the earth slightly off its magnetic poles, making him a walking, talking, doomsday device.

You don’t have to be Senator Kelly, the bigoted sponsor of the Mutant Registration Act, or some other generic black-hat trotted out by Marvel to have very real concerns as to how society might remain liberal and functional in a world with Mystique and Charles and Erik. Maybe there’s a way. Maybe there isn’t. (Maybe there’s a third alternative, like giving mutants their own homeland, Genosha-style.)

But neither the comics nor the films ever take these concerns seriously. Instead, mutants are mere civil rights champions struggling for acceptance against a cruel and bigoted world of “mutie” haters. It’s all “mutant pride” and Malcolm-Martin arguments, as if the ability to end the world or make the courts, elections, and financial markets unworkable were no different than skin color or sexual orientation.

I don’t mean to make too much of this point–as I said, I love the X-Men and this is what they are. But in the same way that The Dark Knight was able to transcend comic-book material by grappling honestly with a Big Question (Can liberalism protect the liberal order?), I suspect that X-Men stories would be even richer and more interesting if they dealt more honestly with the question of why society would be threatened by mutants.