Films
Magneto was played by two-time Academy Award-nominee Sir Ian McKellen in the movie X-Men and its sequels, X2 and X-Men: The Last Stand. His alter ego is Erik Magnus Lensherr, which at the time was his name in the comics. He is the main antagonist of the first and third films and an Antihero in the second film. In all of these films, he wishes for mutant prosperity (or as Cyclops put it, superiority) but only so long as he remains in control of it. In addition to battling the X-Men, Magneto has no qualms about endangering or killing innocents and displays highly megalomaniacal behavior; such as taunting Rogue about nearly killing her in the second film, and later sacrificing dozens of his mutant followers in the third film by knowingly sending them against anti-mutant weapons while he remained safely out of range stating that "in chess, the pawns go first." Throughout the films, Magneto is at odds with Charles Xavier, his old friend, but displays great care towards Xavier, acknowledging Xavier's contributions to mutant kind.
In the X-Men films Magneto's resistance to mental attack does not stem from his own natural powers but is technological in nature; his helmet contains some kind of a psychic shielding component, able to completely negate both the telepathic abilities of Charles Xavier (as shown in X-Men), and also the illusion-casting abilities of Jason in X2. In these films Magneto is credited with helping Xavier to build Cerebro; it would seem that in the process of building a machine designed to amplify telepathy, Magneto learned enough to develop a means of shielding himself from it.
Read more about this topic: Magneto In Other Media
Famous quotes containing the word films:
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)
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