Advertisement

Donning the Shades

Aaron Johnson’s getting his second super-hero role. Specifically, he’s going to play Cyclops in X-Men: First Class, one of the flood of X-Men movies coming our way, including a second Wolverine movie and a Deadpool movie coming next year and X-Men Origins: Magneto due in 2012. At this rate, they’re going to function more like serial television specials than movies, which’ll be a good thing if they’re better than the first Wolverine origins flick. But I digress.I’ll be curious to see both how they set up Cyclops’s character, and how Johnson pulls it off, which I think will depend quite a bit on the direction they choose for him. One of the things I thought rung a little false about Kick-Ass was that Johnson was trying a little too hard to play a somewhat crude, grasping American teenager. Johnson’s definitely not American. And while his engagement to Sam Taylor-Wood, his Nowhere Boy director who is 23 years older than he is and the mother of his daughter, may be ill-advised or a little odd, it’s not likely that it would have ever come to past if he was completely unpolished and immature.James Marsden’s depressive Cyclops in the initial X-Men film trilogy was relatively tiresome, and given how broody and temperamental Wolverine was, the two didn’t offer as deeply contrasting options for Jean Grey as they might have. But a sober-minded superhero might be a reasonable match for the character, and for the talents and mien of the next man who will be portraying him. I can see the young John Lennon growing up into a man who broods over responsibility and love.

Advertisement