X-Men: First Class (2011)

Director: Matthew Vaughn

Entertainment grade: A–

History grade: D+

In the summer of 1962, the Soviets started to build missile sites in Cuba. The Americans found out in October of that year. The discovery led to the Cuban missile crisis – 13 days of tense strategising and negotiations during which the world came horrifyingly close to all-out nuclear war.

Science

Rhenish Bacon ... Kevin plays Nazi Sebastian Shaw

The film begins in 1944 in Poland, where a boy with an unusual ability to move metal objects by force of will is under study by an evil Nazi-aligned scientist, Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon). Just to make things clear from the start, superhero mutants are not a historical fact. Still, it's not a documentary. Moreover, Nazi scientists did perform horrible experiments on people they considered to be biologically unusual. The movie's Sebastian Shaw appears to have been based to some extent on unrepentant real-life monster Josef Mengele – who, like Shaw, escaped to Argentina after the fall of Hitler.

Strategy

Shack Frost ... Shaw and his icy assistant in their lair

Forward to 1962. Shaw is bent on creating nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, for no better reason than that he's a supervillain and it just won't do to sit around all day knitting booties or hugging puppies. His telepathic sidekick, Emma Frost (January Jones), kitted out in space-age white plastic minidresses anachronistically based on André Courrèges and Paco Rabanne designs from 1964, lures an American general into his lair. "I hear you blocked the proposition to reposition Jupiter missiles in Turkey," Shaw says.

"You reposition missiles in Turkey, or anywhere that close to Russia, and you're looking at war," stutters the general. "Nuclear war."

In reality, the US did position Jupiter missiles in Turkey, though not at the behest of an evil mutant supervillain – unless that's how you'd describe the Pentagon. The decision had been made under the Eisenhower administration, rather than providing an immediate trigger for the crisis in 1962. So unimportant were these missiles to the United States that President Kennedy forgot they were there. When Soviet missiles were discovered in Cuba, he exclaimed in front of his executive committee: "It's just as if we suddenly began to put a major number of MRBMs [medium-range ballistic missiles] in Turkey. Now that'd be goddamn dangerous, I would think." There was silence, and it fell to his national security adviser to explain: "Well, we did, Mr President." Nevertheless, the Turkish missiles did become a bargaining chip. Kennedy secretly agreed to remove them to help resolve the crisis.

War

Shore as hell ... in the film a Cuban bay hosts the apocalyptic standoff

The Americans set up a naval blockade to prevent Soviet ships from reaching Cuba. In the movie, a ship ploughs on towards it with three big obvious nuclear weapons, complete with red-star emblems, strapped to its deck. In real life, Soviet ships did not carry missiles in plain sight because their commanders were not completely insane. There was a convoy rather than just one ship, but perhaps the film's budget got in the way of that. Meanwhile, the picturesque scene of the Soviet and American ships lined up "eyeball to eyeball", in Secretary of State Dean Rusk's famous phrase, a short swim away from Cuba's sandy beaches and swaying palm trees, is fantasy. The naval blockade was set up 500 miles from the coast of Cuba. In the movie, a ship gets blown up; in real life, none did. Then again, in the movie the missile crisis is averted by a gang of superhero mutants on an incongruously high-tech plane flown by a massive, blue, furry Cookie Monster-type fellow wearing horn-rimmed spectacles.

Conspiracy

Round the bend ... could bullet-guider Magneto have killed JFK?

Director Matthew Vaughn has talked of a possible sequel. "I thought it would be fun to open with the Kennedy assassination, and we reveal that the magic bullet was controlled by Magneto," he said. "That would explain the physics of it, and we see that he's pissed off because Kennedy took all the credit for saving the world and mutants weren't even mentioned." Well, it's no less daft than a few of the theories some people really do believe about the Kennedy assassination. The real question for the film-makers will be which side the X-Men take when it comes to Vietnam.

Verdict

Old flame ... X-Men has a hoot manipulating history

Setting aside the superhero mutant thesis, which if the film had been less enjoyable might have earned it an automatic fail, X-Men: First Class has a lot of fun shapeshifting around real cold war events.

• Alex von Tunzelmann's Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder and the Cold War in the Caribbean is published now.