Recently I started watching the X-Men movies, I haven't gone through all of them yet, but I will say I find Magneto to be... disappointing.
I have never read any Marvel comics, nor do they particularily interest me, except for Magneto. I want to read about Magneto. Going into the films I didn't know much about him other than he was some sort of mutant and that he was a Jewish Holocaust survivor, which is incredibly important to his story.
I truly do not know what he is like in the comics, but I feel like the films barely take into account his history at all when choosing his ideology.
I actually do like how the films show him constantly prepared for war, for the worst outcome humanity can bring, because he's experienced it, he knows the warning signs. But beyond that, I cannot fathom a Holocaust survivor, especially not a Jewish Holocaust survivor, thinking the way he does.
In the first film he wants to turn everyone into a mutant, that way mutants can't be discriminated against. Which is an incredibly odd solution. Personally I just don't think the guy who was forced into body modifications (tattoo), and whose fellow prisoners were experimented on, would be down to potentially completely transform the bodies of billions (literal eugenics). It's especially strange when paired with the third movie where he is outraged at the idea of a "cure" because he thinks it would eventually be forced upon mutants (and somehow this is different than him forcing mutation onto humans*).
There's also the fact that throughout the films he keeps going on and on about how mutants are the next step in evolution, and how they are superior to humans. You know what ideology that belief reminds me of? Nazism.** This is where him being a Jewish survivor makes this belief especially strange. As a Jew in Nazi Germany, he would have been seen as the lowest of the low. Inferior to everyone, based on his birth. The humans are humans because of their birth, and yet he falls into the same traps as the Nazis did with him.
In one film he intends to kill all the humans, which would of course be the largest genocide to occur in history. Again, very aligned with Nazism. And personally, if I was part of a small ethnic minority that had recently been genocided on such a massive scale that literally 2/3rds of its population in Europe was lost, and modern day numbers have still not recovered since before that event, I would not want to kill anymore members of my tribe.
The last of the X-Men films I have seen for now, X-Men: First Class, I actually think did a better job at giving Erik the complexities needed. Because Xavier is right in some ways, but so is Erik, and that is the most clear in this film. Still, I don't love how it ended. With Erik agreeing with the beliefs of the Nazi that killed his mother, and again having this idea of being superior. (Frankly I didn't care that Erik wanted to kill the Nazi guy. Charles was making such a big deal out of it. And I am personally not one for vigilanty violence. But, killing the Nazi that killed your mother? Am I supposed to feel like Erik crossed some moral boundary doing that?)
It just feels like since Magneto is the villain, they just push him to whatever extreme he needs to be at in order to fufill the writers' narrative, whether or not it makes sense for his character.
*I am a biology nerd. While there are many inaccuracies in science fiction I can ignore, the X-Men films acting like mutants and humans are different species truly pisses me off. THAT'S NOT HOW BIOLOGY WORKS. If every mutation that happened meant something was a new species, why is the girl with heterochromia a human instead of a mutant? Why are all blond people not mutants? Professor X does kind of talk about this a little in one of the films, but that doesn't mean the idea of mutants being another species doesn't still get perpetrated over and over again by the narrative.
**It is important to note, while I do mention how several of his beliefs parallel Nazism. He himself is not a Nazi, an essential aspect of Nazism is antisemitism. Magneto is a Jew, not an antisemite, therefore, not a Nazi. I find it incredibly dangerous how much we've watered down the term Nazi today to just meaning anyone you don't agree with politically. Nazism is not any wrong in the world, it is specific, and the watering down of Nazism is a form of Holocaust denial.
Important Note: Yes, I am fully aware of trauma pushing people into believing terrible things. Yes, I have known people who are hateful of certain groups due to that trauma. But I've never heard of them trying to genocide the groups they hate. And everything is especially odd in this case, because humans and mutants have no clear barrier between them. Mutants can have human parents, mutants can have human babies.*** I guess mutants are more like queer people in that way, where you don't necessarily match your family. But if a queer person went, "Let's kill all the straight people." That would sound absolutely ridiculous, in many cases they exist because two straight people procreated.
I think there can be something truly interesting with Erik becoming the thing he hates. With being pushed too far, and coming out the other side with sharp edges. But the way the films choose to handle this still strikes me as incredibly odd, and again is more there to serve the specific story they want to tell rather than serving the character. I think an important factor in writing Magneto is that he has to be a little bit right. I don't know much about him, but I know he's a complex character, and part of that means he does actually have a point. And I'm not saying he never has any sort of valid points in the films, but it all gets overshadowed by the ridiculousness of how his extremeism is presented.
***More biology nerd things. It was mentioned in one of the films that the mutant gene gets passed down from men to children. And I frankly cannot figure out how that would work. It's been a while since I took a genetics class, and my knowledge on the subject isn't particularily thorough. But from my understanding, if passing down the gene is sex-specific, then it would be on the X or Y chromosome. Since the mutant gene cannot be passed down by women, it cannot be on the X chromosome. But, the Y chromosome doesn't really carry alleles. There are probably exceptions to this rule, but even so, if the mutant gene was on the Y chromosome this would mean men could not pass on the mutant gene to females (unless intersex). There might be a biological explanation that could explain this inheritance pattern, afterall, there are a lot of exceptions in nature, but there are none that I know of. So if anyone can think of how this would work, I'd be curious to know.