Copyright slashfilm
We here at /Film are big proponents of valuing one's education, but that's nothing compared to how "Gen V" tackles one of the X-Men's core tenants. While Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters factored into several movies, arguably only 2000's "X-Men" truly made this setting and its students integral to its plot. The super-team is otherwise too busy dealing with end-of-the-world threats, timeline funkiness, and any other excuse to take the action to more exciting locales. Meanwhile, "Gen V" not only embraced its premise as a superhero school, it actually retconned its own season 1 finale to bring things back to the discomfiting confines of Godolkin University in season 2. This shared school setting isn't just a surface-level similarity, either. By taking place almost entirely on the God U campus, "Gen V" becomes a coming-of-age story about the social aspects of these characters. Too many of the "X-Men" movies were content to coast by on simply alluding to the students and teachers that make up the X-Mansion, assuming they depicted them at all. (Does anyone really feel like those films successfully sold us on the idea of anyone besides Xavier teaching full-time when they're not saving the world?) "Gen V," meanwhile, lives this reality and foregrounds it for each and every figure. Sure, "Gen V" features X-Men analogies aplenty: Marie is Jean Grey, Jordan is Cyclops, and Ethan Slater's Thomas Godolkin (through his "meat puppet," Hamish Linklater's Cipher) is the twisted Professor X to Polarity's (Sean Patrick Thomas) heroic Magneto. But by fully embodying the themes and ideals that the soon-to-be defunct "X-Men" franchise merely gestured towards, the series ultimately delivers the X-Men story fans have been waiting for. "Gen V" is streaming on Prime Video.
