Mystique (X-Men Movies)

"We should come up with secret codenames, we're secret agents now! I'll start, I'm going to be... ...Mystique."

- Mystique in X-Men: First Class

"And Beast, remember… mutant and proud."

- Mystique bears the end of X-Men: First Class

Mystique (Raven Darkholme) is a mutant with the ability to shapeshift into anyone and also copy their voice. She was the secondary antagonist in the three first ' films but the tritagonist in , one of the main antagonists turned anti-heroine of ' and one of the main protagonists in .

In the first three X-Men movies she was portrayed by ', and in the X-Men prelogy she was portrayed by ' who would also play Katniss Everdeen. Morgan Lily plays as a child in X-Men: First Class.

Early life
Mystique's early life was rather tragic. As a little child, her mutation was so abnormal to others that she feared going to school.

Her father seemed like the only person who ever understood her, though he was not a mutant. He showed her how to fight in human form and how to be kind. Soon after a while, her father became abusive, when she turned 5. When she was 11, her parents, also fearful of her mutation, had at one point tried to kill her. Eventually, after years of abuse, Raven ran away.

X-Men: First Class
One night in 1944, Raven was caught by a young Charles Xavier while going through the cupboards searching for food, and was shape-shifted as his mother when he found her. When he caught her, they both started a friendship and adopted her. In 1962, Raven, along with Xavier, displayed their abilities to a group of CIA agents in order to convince them that mutants really existed, among them The Man in Black and Moira MacTaggert. It was Raven who convinced the government that mutants did exist by demonstrating her shapeshifting abilities.

During a failed attempt to capture Sebastian Shaw, Raven and Xavier met Erik Lehnsherr. Soon, Xavier and Lehnsherr went to find more mutants, who were then sent to Division X. The mutants included were Sean Cassidy, Alex Summers, Armando Muñoz, and Hank McCoy; they formed the original team of X-Men.

Instrumental in stopping the Cuban Missile Crisis and foiling the Hellfire Club's bid for world domination, the team eventually split when Lehnsherr (now known as Magneto) asserted that humans would never accept mutants and opted to assert rule over them instead of waiting to be interred and executed. Raven, who had become something of a protégé to Magneto, opted to join him and helped form the Brotherhood of Mutants with his new team from the Hellfire Club; Azazel, Riptide, Angel Salvadore and Emma Frost.

X-Men: Days of Future Past
In 1973, following Magneto's imprisonment at the hands of the Pentagon after the murder of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Mystique was left on her own to carry out his agenda. She traveled to Vietnam, freeing Havok, Toad and several other mutant GIs from the care of Major William Stryker, returning them to America safely. Mystique then travelled back to America, infiltrating Trask's office where she discovers to her grief, files confirming his experimentation and murder of mutants, including Angel Salvadore and Azazel.

She then travels to Paris and poses as a North Vietnamese general, aiming to intercept a meeting with Trask at the Paris Peace Conference and kill him. Mystique reveals her true identity, dispatching the guards and shoots Trask dead. Major William Stryker recovers and tasers Mystique, bringing her in for experimentation, wherein the nature of her powers are distilled and used to enable the Sentinels to adapt to counter mutant abilities. Trask becomes a martyr for the anti-mutant movement.

X-Men: Apocalypse
10 years after the events of X-Men: Days Of Future Past, Mystique is revered honored as a heroine for saving Nixon's life, even though she says she's not a heroine, and checks out an underground fight club and finds two mutants, Angel and Kurt Wagner. She rescues Wagner and gets the services of Caliban to get Wagner to the USA. Then Mystique and Wagner team up with Beast, Moira MacTaggert, Quicksilver, and the other heroes to save Magneto and Professor Charles Xavier and the world from the ancient villain, Apocalypse, and his 4 horsemen henchmen, which Magneto is apart of. After Apocalypse is defeated and destroyed, Mystique and Beast train new recruits, Cyclops, Jean, Storm, Wagner, and Quicksilver at Xavier's School.

X-Men
Years later, Raven (now known as Mystique) impersonated Henry Guyrich, (aide to Senator Kelly) as part of a plan to kidnap Kelly and turn him into a mutant, thereby ending his support of the Mutant Registration Act. However, Magneto's mutation machine also causes the senator to die.

During the battle at the Statue of Liberty to stop Magneto from using the device on the UN Summit, she has an extended fight with Wolverine, proving to be too nimble for him to hit. Wolverine defeated her when she tried to impersonate Storm to distract him. As she cannot mask her scent, he saw through the ruse and stabbed her. She survives, however, and morphs into the form of a fallen police officer. As a result, she is able to slip past the police that descend on the building.

At the end of the film, she is seen on television, impersonating Senator Kelly in order to withdraw his support of the Mutant Registration Act.

X2: X-Men United
Mystique uses her impersonation of Senator Kelly as a means to free Magneto from his plastic prison. She infiltrates Colonel William Stryker's office by impersonating Stryker's aid, Lady Deathstrike, gaining details about the prison as well as several of Stryker's plans (most important of which are the plans to "Dark Cerebro").

She frees Magneto by seducing a guard and injecting him with enough iron for Magneto to work with. After helping him escape from prison, she joins his brief alliance with the X-Men. While camped in an unknown forest area, she discovers that Jean is not in love with him anymore; then she attempts to seduce Wolverine while disguised as Jean Grey, but the scar from their previous battle gives her away. She then shifts through several forms (Storm, Rogue, then Stryker), asking him what he really wants. Prior to this, she is approached by Nightcrawler, who asks her why she doesn't use her shapeshifting powers to blend in with normal people, to which she replies, "Because we shouldn't have to."

She later impersonates Wolverine in order to gain entry to the Alkali Lake base. The disguise doesn't fool Stryker, but gains her access to the control room. From there she aids in the rescue of several captured mutants and leads the group to Dark Cerebro. She then impersonates Stryker to aid in Magneto's plan to kill every human in the world, though this is ultimately foiled.

X-Men: The Last Stand
Sometime following the events of the previous film, Mystique is captured by the government. Magneto comes to save her, but during the attempt a guard shoots a cure dart at him, prompting Mystique to save him by taking the cure (manufactured using Leech's DNA).

Personality
In X-Men 1, Mystique came off as a ruthless and completely cold-blooded women who horribly despised humanity, probably because of the miserable childhood she endured due to her natural blue appearance. Mystique also shared the same views as her leader, Magneto did. She instantly shared the belief that humanity was an evolutionary step below Mutnatkind and they would either evolve to their standards or become extinct so that mutants could reinherit the Earth.

Mystique took no hesitation, restraint and even a slight satisfaction in killing the humans she encountered, or in her eyes they are considered nothing more than homo sapiens. In X-Men 2, she was completely capable of forcing Charles Xavier to eradicate every human from the face of the Earth. She was also completely loyal towards the Brotherhood of Mutants and their cause, even abandoning her real, or in her eyes "slave name", Raven Darkholme

However this "evil" nature was actually brought on by a lifetime of betrayal and loneliness. As a young girl she completely isolated herself, out of fear of being ridiculed for her natural appearance and even at one point they tried to kill her, and eventually after years of abuse she decided to run away and landed into the backyard of Charles Xavier, an extremely powerful telepathic mutant boy who adopts Raven and trears her like her own sister.

Despite thier love and loyalty towards one another, Charles consistently urged Raven her hide her natural appearance as he knew that nobody would except her in her normal state which made her feel aloje in the world. Once she even sarcastically commented that she was more of a "pet" than his actual sister friend. However Raven's views changed when being confronted by Hank McCoy, a mutant scientist who was helping the CIA locate the extremist, Sabastian Shaw.

Hank had only developed a serum that would change mutants appearances and not affect their abilities (at the time, Hank only possessed ape-like feet) however she turned it down, realising that mutants have no rights to hide themselves which drove her further away from Charles and further towards Erik Lehnsherr (Magneto in the future) another mutant who supported the new-founded beliefs of Raven. In the end she decided to join Erik's Bortherhood of Mutants.

However after an unknown period of time Mystique decided to leave Magneto's righteous crusade (the most probable reason could be due to the fact that she felt his methods of wiping out every human on the face of the Earth were a little too extreme) which made her feel more alone than ever. Despite leaving she still retained the utmost coviction of mutant rights, rescuing a group of mutants from the military and William Stryker. Even seeing the horrible experiments that Bolivar Trask, a rogue businessman, performed on mutants brought a tear of sadness to her eye.

Eventually Raven became obsessed with hunting down and killing Trask as revenge for all the horrors he did to Mutantkind. She stubbornly refused to head the warnings of Charles and Erik that if she did kill Trask it would only create a worse future of Sentinels, a swarm of self-learning robots that have virtually wiped out all of Mutantkind in the future. After a failed assassination of Trask in Paris, she and Charles are reunited yet again but it is cut short when Erik tries to kill her, thinking it to be the only way to assure their future was to kill Mystique but fortunately she is able to escape however she is left more alone then ever.

Raven, now more convinced than ever, decides to keep to her current path and finally kill Trask in the unveiling of Sentinels to the world, unaware that if she did kill him at a public meeting like that then she would only make sure the future of Sentinels was secure. Chalres even commented that "(she) had to come home", realising that her friend hasn't changed at all she continued on her path. However after finally having Trask at her mercy, Charles, finally realising the consequences of him trying to control Raven all his life he finally leaves Raven's fate in her own hands and after this finally decides to spare Trask, assuring the future of Mutantkind everywhere.