And Cyclops, the team leader, wore a special visor to control the powerful blasts which would otherwise shoot from his eyes.The X-Men had been brought together by the wheelchair-bound Professor Charles Xavier - the most powerful mutant telepath on earth. Xavier ran a private school in Westchester County, upstate New York. But this was a front for his real enterprise, the drilling of his five pupils into the X-Men, an elite cadre that could play a decisive role in the coming war between mutants and humans. The former were hated and feared by the latter, who saw in them an unwelcome reminder of the price of atomic progress. But war might also be sparked by Xavier's former friend turned nemesis, Magneto, who led his own band of mutants against the X-Men. Magneto believed that mutants were "homo superior", the next stage of human evolution.

As such it was their destiny to dominate and ultimately supersede homo sapiens. Although they were hated by humans, the X-Men were pledged to defend them against the kind of intolerance expressed by Magneto. Although as mutants that was what they faced every day in ordinary life.Unlike most big summer movies, Bryan Singer's new film adaptation of the X-Men isn't stuffed with the sugary treats that Hollywood studios normally use to entice kids. It is a film about a team of super-powered heroes, so naturally there's the requisite amount of fight scenes and special effects But these are simply backdrop. And in the foreground is a far more compelling drama about belief, identity and loss of innocence.The film opens during the darkest moments of the 20th century. At a Nazi labour camp in Poland, Eric Lehnsherr, a young Jew, watches his parents being shoved into a line of wretched, older prisoners that is snaking its way toward an ominous-looking building Smoke starts to billow from its tall, narrow chimney.

Lehnsherr watches them walk to their death in impotent horror. In the following scene, we meet Lehnsherr again, as a white-haired, mature man (played by Ian McKellen) who has discovered that he has the ability to control magnetism. He can bend steel bars, levitate cars and bring planes crashing to the ground. He calls himself Magneto and he plans to use his power to end the kind of suffering he witnessed as a child.But Lehnsherr doesn't intend to become a champion of the weak He aims to be the oppressor of the strong. He will conquer armies, subjugate nations and establish his own new order.