‘X-Men: First Class’ is the fifth movie in Fox’s X-Men franchise and is the start of what is said to be a new trilogy. The movie stars James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Kevin Bacon, and is directed by Matthew Vaughn. The plot primarily revolves around the relationship between Professor X and Magneto before they were leading their respective groups, The X-Men and The Brotherhood of Mutants. The film also shows the origins of many other mutants including Mystique and Beast.
The first thing I want to touch on here is the story though. Now I myself am a pretty big comic book fan and as hard as it is, I am ignoring the comics here and just referring to the movie franchise. Now the franchise has only been around since 2000 and only five movies have been made but yet they can’t seem to keep any of the storylines straight here. About the only things that are consistent are the names and whose good and evil….oh wait they screwed that up here too. Over at Fox they can’t even decide which mutants are going to be good and evil from film to film or the ages of them in the films. With all these problems, which I’m not going to specifically mention here, it’s almost easier to just look at the film as a reboot of the series, but wait! You can’t view a film as a reboot when they’re referencing the earlier movies in the series every few scenes. So to say the least, the story here was pretty screwed up.
As for the acting in the movie, it was pretty good. Fassbender’s portrayal of Magneto was very entertaining. He did an excellent job of making you feel what he felt, be it good or bad. The only part where he dropped the ball was when he was actually being Magneto, he just didn’t seem evil enough. McAvoy had a very interesting take on Professor X, he was something of playboy, using his knowledge of mutants to hook up at bars and yet he was still the all knowing Professor X when the story called for it. The problem is that while you see all the characters in the movie grow and evolve, he just kind of stays the same. He simply switches between the two sides of himself whenever he sees fit and it didn’t really work. I did very much enjoy Bacon’s portrayal of Sebastian Shaw. He’s the kind of villain you can really get behind, one that you truly believe will destroy the world if he isn’t stopped. As for the rest of the cast, nobody had any huge parts, some didn’t even have speaking lines.
The action scenes in the movie were all very well done. The best usually featuring Magneto. The movie has a lot of very short fights sprinkled throughout and even a nice training montage that could’ve been made a classic with some “Gonna Fly Now” (Rocky Theme). It was also nice seeing another teleporter in the movie. That’s just one thing these movies really have down, how to make fights involving teleporters look awesome. This is especially apparent in the fight between Beast and Azazel, which was definitely a high point of the film.
All in all though, this was a pretty great movie and probably the best X-Men movie to date. The story is very jumbled if you follow the movie stories but as a stand alone movie, it was nothing short of entertaining and I definitely recommend going to see this one.
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