X-Men First Class… Should you see it?

Hello all.

We’re gonna take a short break from Mortal Kombat, so I can tell you how much X-Men: First Class rocked!

I am so impressed with this movie and what 20th Century Fox has accomplished. This is probably my favorite X-movie if not one of my new all time favorite super hero movies by far. I can say for a fact that much of the praise this movie has received is well deserved.

So what is so good about this movie? Let me see if I can give a brief review without spoiling anything.

The movie is about the relationship between Xavier and Magneto. It goes into their origins and takes us on a brief journey to demonstrate how these two characters became so close and yet strayed so far apart.

The screenplay played out very well. The act’s flowed well into each other and everything worked into supporting the overall narrative. One thing that I really enjoyed is how balanced this movie is with the amount of story and action. This movie has great action scenes but the story was so engrossing that I found myself longing for the quiet character scene after the action sequences on more than one occasion.

That’s not to say that the action was bad at all though. As a matter of fact there are some great action sequences in the film. Without spoiling anything all I’ll say is that it’s still awesome to see how much of a bad ass Magneto is.

Speaking of which, Michael Fassbender was great as Magneto. His performance was so good that I looked at him as Magneto without any thoughts on Ian Mckellan. The same can be said of James McAvoy as Charles Xavier. These actors did so well in their performance that I found myself engrossed even further into these characters. Both of these characters strengths and shortcomings shined brightly while on screen. Fassbender stole the show in many instances though. Fassbender brought heaps of charisma to the anger fueled master of magnetism. I dare say that his performance caught the charismatic nature of the character seen in many X-Men comics. But McAvoy didn’t fade into the background either. McAvoy put so much effort into portraying the open-heart idealism that fuels Xavier. It can often come off as being naive yet McAvoy makes you believe that Xavier is well aware of what may happen. He just want’s to believe in people so much that it can also be his shortcoming. We also get to see how helpful and caring Xavier can be and how he would become the leader we will see him as in the original X-films. Other honorable mentions go to Kevin Bacon as Sebastian Shaw, Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique, and Nicholas Hoult for his different, yet fantastic take on Dr. Hank McCoy.

There is also a bit of fan pleasing for comic fans as well. I can’t go into it but there are some sequences, and one specific scene in particular, that made me extremely giddy. The movie also did a good job of erasing the continuity of X3. Yay! That movie officially doesn’t count anymore in the timeline. Additionally, the costumes for the team were more comic based yet still believable. Blue and gold for the win!

That is not to say that this film is flawless though. It definitely has some problems. Writing-wise, there are scenes in which the writers gave obscenely simple explanations to problems presented earlier in the story. One is so haphazard and lazy that I found myself thinking “What the hell?”. Also the film can suffer visually at times. There were some sequences with characters that fly that looked so goofy it was hard not to laugh. There were also some very silly moments that didn’t work too well in the film. The film also tried to pack so much into the movie that some characters and ideas got underutilized. Azazel is one of these characters that really didn’t get much time within the movie. Not to mention that some performances were mediocre at best. One example is January Jones as Emma Frost. Ms. Jones looked great as right hand woman of the Hellfire Club but her performance was very bland. I really wanted more from her performance and never got it. The same can be said of some of the other cast as well. The film was great overall though.

So what is the final verdict? I think it should be obvious.