X-Men: First Class was a major breath of fresh air when it premiered in 2011, but - as we saw with Emma Frost already - the film wasn't without its problems. Among the film's worst offences is the treatment of Darwin, a mutant who was unceremoniously killed off near the film's second act.
What makes this death so egregious is the fact that it doesn't make even remote sense. Darwin's powers allow him to adapt to anything in order to survive - the film goes out of its way, in fact, to hammer this point home - and yet a cheap fireball administered by Bacon's Shaw fells him then and there.
It's beyond silly, and emblematic of the franchise's tendency to waste potential in every avenue it possibly can. Darwin is scarcely referenced after the fact, and becomes only the sixteenth (or so) X-Men character killed before their time.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
