I have to be honest. My doubt was at an all-time high when I saw the first screenshots of First Class. Who the hell is this person playing Professor X? Ditto for Magneto. This was supposed to be Xavier's first class! Where the hell were the screen shots of Cyclops, Iceman, Marvel Girl, Storm, and Angel? I thought they wanted to do things right. There was no way in hell this movie was going to be good, and there was no way in hell I was going to see it. After all, the biggest name in the movie is Kevin Bacon, but I didn't think even Kevin Bacon could weather the giant dump Fox Entertainment has taken on the X-men franchise. Regardless (or irregardless, for my buddy George), I heard it was good, and I mustered up enough energy to let my girlfriend buy a ticket. I'll try and keep the spoilers to a minimum.
Not many movies are able to take complete clips from an earlier film, re-use it a decade later and have it be a success. Props to director Matthew Vaughn. The first bit of the movie goes back and forth between the time lines of Erik Lehnsherr and Charles Xavier. While Xavier was living the good life of living in mansions, meeting and be-friending Raven Darkholm, and reading minds...Lensherr was living the good life of watching Kevin Bacon off his madre. Kevin Bacon plays the "being evil for a good cause that is all too familiar in comics" character in Sebastian Shaw. Shaw is sneaky, manipulative, powerful, and dark. Bottom line, his character is a creep. Give me one scenario where Kevin Bacon has a hard time playing a creeper. Exactly. Great casting there.
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The winner for best creepy weasel? Kevin Bacon![/caption]Shaw wants to turn the United States on Russia and like-wise, playing into the historic Cuban Missile Crisis. By doing so, somehow he and his poor-man's Brotherhood of Mutants will rise from the ashes of humanity's nuclear wars, and rule all mankind. Xavier and Lensherr have other plans, putting together a team of mutants to help put a stop to Shaw's insanity. And so it goes, the beginning of the story behind it all and the building blocks under the X-Men franchise.
The Good
James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender do an outstanding job at their respective roles. They create a bonding of anger, acceptance, sadness, and understanding in a friendship that is closely resembling of Obi-Wan and Anakin. The actors hit each and every one of their parts flawlessly. McAvoy does his job of soothing the audience with his voice, making us remember that being different doesn't always mean being bad. Fassbender shows us anger through pain and suffering. He shows us true ache for revenge and exactly how weak we can be when we hurt emotionally. Aside from Bacon, these two play their parts to perfection.
I've always been the guy that prefers the real thing to special effects. I love watching things blow up for real rather than a fake explosion taking it out. I think I have to reverse this when it comes to Superhero movies. When comics are put into cartoons, they can capture the limitless power our favorite heroes has. In movies, this becomes a little tougher, and nothing annoyed me more than watching Halle Berry or Hugh Jackman being pulled around the set by stage ropes. Sometimes it's okay to use special effects, especially in a comic book movie. Things don't always need to look real, that's part of magic of comics, super powers are unrealistic. First class does a great job improving from the other movies and using CGI when necessary. It even looks good too.
The storyline is excellent. It keeps you interested the entire time, which is saying a lot for a two-hour plus flick. If you want it to follow comic story-lines and plots, you're going to be extremely disappointed. You've got to go into this movie wanting something fresh. You must go into it saying okay, this is someone else's view on how something was created. I'm a comic nut, I have to admit, it was hard to overlook comic discrepancies in this film...but I did so at the beginning and I'm glad I did. It gives you a nice, refreshing, quenched to get a new storyline out of it. I would always prefer a new, good storyline to an awful butchered one.
The addition of new and obscure mutants was cool, but not without it's downside. We'll get to that in a moment.
The acting was solid on all accounts. There were some cheesy parts, but once again, this goes hand in hand with it being a comic book movie.
Small cameos made the movie even more enjoyable.
The Bad
I still can't wrap my head around the fact that this is a prequel. If this movie presented itself as a reboot of the series, I would feel a lot better about it. Because it presents itself as a direct prequel poses problems for the timelines in it's own story. Characters that were just little kids in prior movies are fully grown in this one that takes place years and years before hand. Characters that are supposed to be younger siblings of current X-Men are almost fully grown in the year of 1962. It just seems like their timelines are confused and their characters are jumbled. I had the same feeling when Sabretooth and Wolverine had such a relationship in the Wolverine movie, yet when they met in the first movie, there was no rivalry at all.
The introduction of Havok and Banshee, mixed with inclusion of Beast got me fired up. But I had a hard time giving a shit about any of the other characters. Azazel, who was Nightcrawler's father...along with Riptide had almost no lines in the movie what-so-ever. Rather than being actual characters, they seemed like mindless drones that jumped ship from one evil dictator to another. They seemed to use some kind of combined Tempest/Angel (New X-Men) character that made the Pyro move from the other movies, but because of underdeveloped acting and character development, you found her actions unsurprising and done before. Casting Lenny Kravitz's daughter didn't help things. Banshee and Havok were casted okay, and had minimum development, which was at least better than nothing. Hank McCoy was the most well done character on the team aside from the two leads.
Mystique's costume design was awful. Ten times worse than the other three movies. It wasn't that it was ugly, because I'm sure it was supposed to be that way, it just looked terrible.
Darwin's character dying was probably a great move on the director's part, being that he was terrible, and had a cool death...but it didn't help laying the rest "token black guy dies in every movie" saying...as I'm pretty sure he was the only full-on black man/woman in the film. I couldn't help but turn my head whenever Kevin Bacon mentioned the word "slavery", and the camera panned a confused shot of Darwin. Interesting.
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I got an entire two minutes of lines in this movie![/caption]Overall
Even with the few things I didn't like about the movie, it was still extremely enjoyable. I wouldn't quite label it the best comic movie ever as I've seen a lot of reviewers say, but it was still very good. If you're a comic book fan, remember, just go in with an open mind and relax. Let this story write itself in your brain. If you're not a comic fan, you will be impressed either way. I don't think it tops Thor so far this summer, but I can guarantee it is better than Green Lantern will be.
-Stephen-
Rating
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