—Spoilers Ahead—

Also, this version of the scene was the best I could find on YouTube, sorry about the weird subtitles.


I tend to stay away from character themes in these posts since rarely does a character theme drive a specific moment in cinema (hence why we associate them with characters and not moments). But with Magneto’s theme in X-Men: First Class, I just can’t resist. The theme doesn’t just act as a character theme throughout the movie—it’s not like hearing Harry Potter’s theme and thinking “yep, that’s Harry Potter alright.” When you hear Frankenstein’s Monster (aka Magneto’s theme), you instead think “holy crap, that’s the bar scene in Argentina where Eric stared down the former Nazis before revealing that he himself was held in a concentration camp, then proceeding to utterly wipe them out.” And that’s what makes this theme so special. The scene itself is not perfect by any means—the zoom-in-as-a-character-says-something-cool at the end is unecessary, and the first man’s scream is, well, a bit on the comical side—but the way in which Magneto’s theme is integrated into it elevates the moment to the point where it becomes iconic (at least in my eyes). Unfortunately this theme did not make a return when Bryan Singer retook the franchise with X-Men: Days of Future Past, to my dismay. But at least we got the John Ottman’s opening title theme back, so……there’s that I guess.