XMen First Class

SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

X-Men: First Class is a good movie. Fun, with some very cool, awesome moments and action... but it's not mind-blowing. I give it a 7.5 in 10. Very good, but not excellent.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it immensely. The characters, for the most part (and considering the changes they've undergone from comic to film), feel like the original comic characters, at least those who actually get to do things (Xavier, Magneto, Moira, Beast, Banshee to a lesser degree). The action is fast paced, the plot moves along rapidly, and efficiently as well. It tells a lot in a short time, and it tells it pretty well.

The costumes and sets look good, the Blackbird is fantastic, and the 60s recreation works very well, particularly in the military scenes. Seeing Magneto use his powers, REALLY use his powers is a fantastic movie experience. (When he starts ripping apart the yatcth with its anchor, my son asked me "Daddy, why are you smiling?") Because, come on, as much gravitas as Sir Ian McKellan brought to the role, his Magneto (and this is the first X trilogy writers' and directors' fault, not Sir Ian's) doesn't do much but float around on a disc, freeze some guns and bullets, and kill someone with a ball bearing. But Fassbender's? Whoa, man. That's MAGNETO, baby!!!!

The bad? Well, at times, director Matthew Vaughan's depiction of the 60s gets... too groovy. He takes it too far for moments, and it ends up being too campy. For the most part, Xavier and Magneto's romp-around-the-world recruiting mutants is too much buddy movie after a certain point. I was almost expecting Austin Powers to show up and say "Yeah, baby, yeah!".

Then there's characters that, frankly, could have been replaced by others. Actually, I'm thinking about ONE character: Havok. Yes, this is a different continuity, so he's obviously not Cyclops younger brother, at best, he's his dad. Other characters like Angel (not Warren, but the insect-winged girl) or Darwin obviously don't belong in this era, based on the comics... but they're really not that important to key elements of the comics as to make me care about them being "relocated". I don't even mind that they've seem to have rolled Shaw, Mr. Sinister, Stryfe, and Apocalypse all into one character.

But Havok gets his relationship to Cyclops obviously changed; his being a prisoner of the military sounds like Rusty Collins' story from the comics, and his powers are visually quite different than from the books. His personality is nothing like it is in the comics; while all other characters are basically the same, in that respect. Even Moira, who's undoubtedly the character who was the most changed (she kept her name and looks, that was basically it), was herself, personality-wise. Weren't there another half a dozen or ten energy projecting mutants from the comics you could have used? I know there are plenty.

One little plot point I would have preferred wasn't there, to be honest, is Xavier's relationship with Mystique. Not the relationship itself, but the fact that since this is a prequel; they should have not have gone in a direction that wasn't even hinted between the characters in the original X trilogy. You could have had Xavier meet her later in their lives, and have her develop the same reciprocal romantic interest in Beast that happens in the film, and that would have made her siding with Magneto in the end equally painful for the characters.

Two other points that bothered me are visual/aesthetic ones. The costumes and sets were good, as were most of the actors chosen for the parts. But January Jones as Emma Frost? She looks old, worn out... hardly the sex bomb she's in the comics. Looking at pictures of Jones, I can see she doesn't look old... it was probably bad make-up choices in X-Men: First Class... but her face still doesn't sell sultry femme fatale as Emma Frost's supposed to be. I understand if you didn't want to go with someone with TOO much of a body, someone too curvy... in that case, I believe actresses like Elisha Cuthbert or Sienna Miller would have been much better choices than January Jones.

The other visual part that bothered me is that the make-up and visual FX were at certain points a bit too cheap. They seemed to have spent all their money in the sets, and military hardware. Beast's make-up is too much of a furry convention suit, and Azazel looks too garishly red... it should have been a bit more subdued. And when you watch it, take a good look at the moment when the submarine crashes on the island... the trees are freaking little plastic trees from model kits.

All in all, it gets a 7.5, almost an 8, in 10 points. In the end, if I'm such a big X-Men fan... why didn't I like this as much as I liked Thor or Iron Man? Well, it could be that I'm such a big X-Men fan... but no, read my review again, and you'll see that most changes to comic canon, I accept them as necessary or at least as harmless, as long as they respect the spirit of the comic. But I still have to admit, that knowing the comic book material so well, that seems to be able to hinder my enjoyment, if only a little.

It's not that I freak out about every changed detail, but you have to consider that this is also a team movie. Unlike single characters, like Iron Man, Thor, or Batman, who were very successfully adapted recently, a team has much more history and vital elements that are harder to distill into basics. When you have a team with a long history and tons of characters (and man, do the X-Men have history and characters), you start to get more and more discrepancies as you adapt it into film. Yes, they're minor discrepancies, but my brain starts to register them all, and I can't stop it. Still, we're light years away from movies with bat-nipples, or Elektra. Or, God help us, Halle Berry's Catwoman.

Go see it, it's a good popcorn movie, and a worthy superhero flick. Personally, Magneto's final appearance had me squealing like a schoolgirl.