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You don't need to be an X-Man to be
a superhero
JAW-dropping special effects, heart-stopping surprises and
a 100mph plot - the latest X-Men movie is a stunning thriller.
Most of the youngsters around me who whooped and cheered
through the Odeon screening must have walked back into the
real world believing they could fly, fire plasma beams from
their eyes, summon thunderbolts, punch through walls.
That's what great action movies do - lift your self-belief
to superhuman heights. But I emerged into Leicester Square
feeling a bit feeble. The movie's treacherous anti-hero, Magneto,
is a metal-bender, a Jewish magus with a mastery of magnetism.
If there were one character in the whole of Hollywood who
could be my alter ego, it ought to be Magneto. Instead, I
felt like a delivery boy on a 60cc moped who had just been
cut up by Michael Schumacher.
Magneto doesn't just bend metal - he commands it. When he
walks across a chasm, plates of steel skip like stepping stones
before him. When he wants to kill, he draws the iron from
a man's blood out through his pores. When he hijacks an aeroplane,
he suspends it in the air like a bubble in glass.
Clearly, if I wanted to take over the world, I was going
to have to up my game.
And then it occurred to me - I already had. When I teamed
up with the blind superhero DareDevil in May 1976, I used
my astounding mental energy to destroy weapons, block telepathic
attacks and bend iron bars like spaghetti.
If you don't believe me, pick up issue 133 of Marvel's DareDevil
magazine, and I'm on the cover, square-jawed and side-burned.
Without me, the red-suited defender of justice would have
been paralysed by the evil might of Mind Wave, a telepathic
madman.
My acrobatic talents aren't enough to transport me across
the city at superheroic speeds, but I pack a fair punch, my
muscles ripple impressively under a shirt of high-quality
rayon, and I arrive at the final confrontation in time to
trap Mind Wave inside a nest woven from iron bars. When DareDevil
made his big screen debut earlier this year, I was hopeful
the writer and director, Mark Steven Johnson, would invite
me to be the sidekick. In the end, it didn't happen . . .
though I don't believe the spiteful Hollywood rumours that
the star, Ben Affleck, was worried I'd steal all the romantic
scenes.
I started to wonder if Magneto was based on me. He's Jewish,
a few years older than I am - the first X-Men movie opens
at the gates of a concentration camp. Magneto is just a lad,
young Erich, but when the SS guards drag his parents away
for execution Erich's mental fury is unleashed and his metal-warping
rays tear the gates down in a twisted mass of scrap iron.
You won't find exactly that scene in my autobiography, but
it's close enough to make a pack of American lawyers lick
their lips - my parents fled the Holocaust, and my powers
first erupted when I was a child.
I was ready to go to court to prove my identity had been
stolen by Stan Lee, the brilliant mind behind all Marvel's
superheroes, when I learned that Magneto first appeared in
the first issue of X-Men magazine in September 1963.A pristine
copy could fetch £6,000 at auction. And in 1963 I was
still at school.
Sir Ian McKellen plays me - sorry, I mean Magneto -and in
every interview he makes it plain that he's proud to be in
the movie. That's great: I always wince when I read how embarrassed
Sir Alec Guinness, Ewan McGregor, Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson
all were to be associated with Star Wars. These movies must
be tough to make, with actors playing most scenes to blank
spaces which will be filled later by graphics wizardry and
CGI: computer-generated images. But there are plenty of other
tough jobs these whingeing thesps could be doing if the task
of defeating the Empire becomes too arduous.
There are vacancies at my local Burger King - it probably
pays under £5 an hour, of course, instead of the £5
million that Harrison Ford usually commands, but I bet he
could handle the line, ''D'you want fries with that?'' and
fill it with blood-curdling menace.
My gentle pal Dave Prowse, the 6'7'' iron man who overcame
crippling arthritis to play Darth Vader, knows how much his
role meant to millions of fans. The costume was hot and heavy,
and he tells me there were scenes where he was close to collapse
from fatigue and pain. But never for an instant has he regretted
his part in the series.
''People believe in Darth Vader,'' he explained to me. ''He
represents evil, and human beings have a deep-seated need
to see the hero overcome that evil icon.''
Magneto is the bad guy too, though he reluctantly helps to
save the world in the new movie. Sir Ian insists he sees the
story as a message of encouragement for youngsters coming
to terms with homosexuality, helping them to be proud of being
'different'. My ancestor Sigmund Freud would certainly recognise
some of the images - the wolf-man whose talons spear out when
he is aroused, the voluptuous girl whose kisses suck the life
out of her lovers. And there's a great scene that takes the
sting out of that scene which so many gay teenagers dread,
where young X-Man Bobby comes out to his parents: ''Mum, Dad,
there's something you ought to know . . . I'm a mutant!''
But I think Sir Ian is seeing only part of the picture. You
don't have to be gay to be different - we're all unique. And
I believe we're all superheroes.
Email
him at uri@urigeller.com
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Uri Geller - Maximise your potential, the world's leading motivational
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