Living Up to Its Name, X-Men: First Class Delivers

Summer 2011 is one filled with heavily anticipated super-hero movies – Thor, X-Men: First Class, Captain America and Green Lantern. Just like the last few “comic book” summers, this one has plenty of hype and scrutiny headed its way, perhaps even a little more than before. You could say that 2011 is the first summer of the second decade of the comic book movie era, an era that began with X-Men way back in 2000. In its wake we've received a pantheon of comic book movies – both good and bad – that have seen the successes and failures of the genre discussed, debated and dissected ad nauseum, with many comic and film fans growing weary of what they see as sub-standard realizations of comics, especially super-heroes on screen. So with X-Men: First Class going back to the beginning (both literally and figuratively), how does it play? Well, let me give you my take.

I've never been a big reader of the X-Men comics, but I've more or less enjoyed the films to date, although X3 didn't do much of anything for me. X-Men was OK, especially considering it was the first of its kind (I do personally find it a bit boring), but X2: X-Men United was great! My initial reaction to First Class is that I enjoyed it more than X-Men and certainly X3, but maybe not quite as much as X2. And who know, maybe my impression will change with time.

First Class is a prequel and takes us back to the beginning of the mutant story which is in the 1960s (or 1940's if we're being very precise). This movie feels like it's own story in almost every way which I really appreciated. I never felt like the creators were going out of their way to setup something specifically for the movies that already exist, so it was free to be its own story. That said, I also never felt like this story created any conflict with the existing installments either, so kudos to director Matthew Vaughn and the writers.

The stage for the story is the Cuban Missile Crisis, wherein the United States and Soviet Union stood on the brink of all-out nuclear war. According to this story, history was not all it seemed. A powerful mutant named Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) was actually manipulating the situation with the help of his beautiful femme fatale Emma Frost (January Jones) and associated mutants known collectively as the Hellfire Club. Shaw wants nuclear exchange because his mutation allows him to absorb kinetic energy and thus grow more powerful. You guessed it – Shaw wants to rule the world.

The CIA is onto to Shaw and his gang (somewhat) but they don't fully understand what is going on until agent Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne) observes the mutants using their powers while spying on them. Feeling they have no choice but to fight fire with fire, the CIA seeks out a mutant expert. Enter newly-titled "professor" Charles Xavier (a powerful telepath) (James McAvoy) and his longtime childhood friend Raven Darkholme (a shapeshifter) (Jennifer Lawrence) who join with the CIA to locate mutants and help stop the Hellfire Club.

In the meantime, Erik Lensherr (Michael Fassbender) is on a personal mission of vengeance against Shaw because it turns out that Shaw was helping the Nazis at the concentration camp Erik and his family were imprisoned at during the Holocaust. Erik uses his power (magnetism) to aid him in his quest. Both hot on Shaw's tail, Erik and Charles run into each other and Charles convinces Erik to join them. The problem is that Charles and Erik have very different views on mutants – Charles wants peaceful co-existence with humans and Erik wants humans to take their place beneath mutants, aka homo-superior.

Long story short, the two do become friends and work together to locate and train mutants but ultimately take different paths during the final confrontation with Shaw, thus setting the stage for all X-Men stories to follow, including the movies we already know. Again, I appreciated that First Class never felt tied-down by the existing movies and yet didn't conflict with them either.

As an origin story I thought the story worked quite well. The audience gets the origins of Professor X and Magneto in entertaining fashion and those of the greater collection of X-Men without all the “teenaged angst” as other reviews have pointed out. The characters weren't whiny and self-loathing as the younger mutants seemed to be in the other films, but rather more conflicted as to what their place in the world was, especially Raven/Mystique and Hank/Beast (Nicholas Hoult) who are on a journey of self-acceptance, more-so than Charles and Erik because their mutations are visible to the naked eye.

The movie also presented a good balance between action, drama and humor, preventing it from being just a slap-stick affair, a CGI expo or just plain boring. Additionally, I felt the film was well cast top to bottom. McAvoy and Fassbender make the characters their own but they don't conflict with the characters as we already know them. They also gave some depth to the Professor X/Magneto relationship without getting bogged down and slowing the overall pace of the movie.

Some reviews have taken issue with Kevin Bacon's “over-acting”, but let's keep perspective here – Kevin Bacon has a game named after him and is partly famous just for being himself. Considering that he in no way distracted from the film, you'll get no complaints from me.

After the disappointment of X3, the X-Men franchise had a lot to lose with X-Men: First Class. Thankfully Vaughn and his talented cast delivered a well-made and entertaining installment to the franchise which has me on board for future installments. Have no fear - X-Men: First Class lives up to its name. 8/10