If there's one thing I hate, its being wrong.
Not in the sense of being wrong if my data is wrong, I'd much rather be corrected there than to be using and giving out incorrect data. No, I mean being wrong on my critical judgments. I can gauge how good or bad a movie is by the trailer, the cast list, the director, and my own relentless cynicism.....but mostly the trailer. But so far, I have been wrong multiple times this summer about some of the movies released. One of them was X-Men: First Class.
My initial feeling when I saw the first trailer was that this movie was going to be severely disappointing, perhaps as much of a letdown as X-Men 3, which I saw before I became more of a critic. X-Men: First Class surprised me in that it seems as if those making it learned a little from X-Men 3 and Wolverine: Origins on how not to make superhero movies, and made a movie that is on par with X-Men 2.
X-Men: First Class primarily centers around Erik Lensheer and Charles Xavier, who the world better knows in modern times as Professor X and Magneto. Long before they had those "code names", in the 1940s, they were just kids living their respective lives: English Charles with his family in high class and money in northern New York, and Jewish Erik in a Nazi concentration camp. We get to see a remake of the opening scene from the first X-Men movie, where young Erik, being pulled away from his family in the concentration camp, channels his powers and bends a metal gate. This interests a man named Dr. Schmidt, played by.....Kevin Bacon? One of the grand surprises of this film, or more precisely, the trailer, was that it didn't reveal that Kevin Bacon was in this movie. Anyways, Dr. Schmidt conducts experiments on young Erik to trigger his powers of magnetism. Over in New York, young Charles can't sleep one night, wanders in the kitchen, and finds his mother there....but its not his mother. Its a homeless girl, named Raven, who can shape-shift.....the mutant we later know as Mystique. Raven is invited by Charles into his family (which struck me as odd that a child could invite someone into his family and parents wouldn't argue), and they spend the next nearly twenty years together.
Flash forward to 1962, and Charles Xavier (played by James McAvoy) is now a noted graduate of Oxford University in genetics, specifically mutation. Erik Lensheer (played by Michael Fassbender) has spent his life hunting down Dr. Schmidt to get revenge. A CIA agent, played by Rose Byrne, finds Charles in England and asks for him to assist with taking down Schmidt. Both Charles and Erik meet when trying to confront Schmidt, now calling himself Sebastian Shaw. Shaw is the leader of The Hellfire Club, a secret society of the rich and powerful (and many of them mutants) who want to take over the world. Shaw has a dream, and like most villains his dream to truly epic: start World War Three, watch the world mutate (an odd tie-in to something Xavier had sad earlier about how the Nuclear Age had accelerated mutation in humans and how this had caused this generation of mutants to exist), and rule over a planet that was mostly mutants. How was Shaw going to do this? Easy: use the Cuban Missle Crisis as a cover to start the end of humanity. So Erik and Charles team up (with help from the CIA), meet up with the then-much-more-human-looking Dr. Hank McCoy (Beast, played by Nicholoas Hoult), use McCoys invention Cereboro to locate other mutants, recruit the mutants, and work on taking Shaw down. They also manage to tie-in how Charles established his home as a mutant training center, after the CIA facility where Charles and Eriks mutant recruits gets attacked by Shaw and his mutants, and they need to relocate to someplace safer. I'll leave the rest of the plot alone, but it manages to establish how Charles became paraplegic, where the name X-Men came from, and how Erik became Magneto and started his mutant terrorist group The Brotherhood of Mutants.
A little funny thing they did was have two cameos: one of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine (who, when Charles and Erik introduce themselves, tells them both to fuck off), and Rebecca Romjin as Mystique (when she tries to seduce Magneto).
The good aspects can be summed up pretty easily: good script, good flow, good effects, mostly good performances.
There were some let downs in this movie, mostly because of some of the acting choices. While McAvoy, Fassbender, Hoult, and of course Bacon did a fine job, a lot of the actors didn't have much in terms of acting "chops". This was especially felt with the two main female characters, played by Jennifer Lawrence and January Jones as Mystique and Emma Frost, respectively. It felt like they were there to look pretty and little else; their range was severely lacking. This could also be said of Lucas Till (who played Havoc) and Caleb Landry Jones (who played Banshee), both of whom would be fine in a typical teen drama/horror film, but here....it felt like they needed a bit more polish to their work. Another problem I had, or more precisely have, is that in trying to do a movie with so many characters, we really don't see that much of the characters beyond the mains, and very little of The Hellfire Club. Having a movie with many characters requires more time and energy than what you can get out of a normal movie or requires the movie to have be longer to get just some characterization out of all the characters, which doesn't always go over well with movie audiences (see: the 1984 movie of the novel Dune).
Origin stories in movies are something that are necessary to explain certain elements of characters (like their motivations), but it must be used properly, or ends up feeling either like padding, or just a big mistake. The Dark Knight did this well by not having an origin story for The Joker at all, he was just some psycho nutter that managed to go from being a bank robber to a terrorist that threatened a major metropolitan with some very good planning. Origin stories can sometimes be a necessity, and X-Men:First Class is nothing but an origin story, but its presented in such a (mostly) compelling manner that it ties up (almost) any loose ends that non-fans had when they went and saw the other X-Men movies. I really hope they don't make a sequel, because we really don't need anymore origin story. But hey, this movie did well at the box office, so I know better than that.
Pros: Script, effects, most of the main casts acting, story flow, an origin story that worked.
Cons: Too many characters, not all the cast acted at the same level, they're going to make a sequel and they're probably going to fuck it up.
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