- Location: Century Boulder
- I don't read prefaces to books, I don't follow sports during the preseason, and I don't watch "making-of" documentaries. In much the same vein, I tend not to seek out superhero origin stories. If the origin was really worth telling, we'd refer to it as the story and call the rest a sequel. As you might imagine, I was not predisposed to like X-Men: First Class. Informing this predisposition was the absolutely dreadful X-Men Origins: Wolverine from a few years ago and, to a lesser extent, the dull parts of the first X-Men movie. With these considerations in mind, I am pleased to report that X-Men: First Class was not awful.
- The story, as you've no doubt surmised, presents the origins of the heroic X-Men and their various mutant archenemies. Set primarily against the backdrop of the Kennedy era and, specifically, the Cuban missile crisis, the film follows the government-sponsored efforts of Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender) to locate, recruit, and train some of the young mutant talent that seems to be sprouting up around the world. Lehnsherr, eventually also known as Magneto, is clearly motivated by revenge for the brutal murder of his mother at the hands of a Nazi scientist calling himself Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), who has in the ensuing years landed the attention of CIA agent (and lone mutant-friendly human) Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne). Xavier's reasons for conspiring with the CIA to contact mutants are slightly less obvious, although I suppose it's natural enough for him to have fallen into the role of protector when his family adopted the shapeshifter Raven, eventually also known as Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence). Regardless, Charles and Erik manage to collect themselves a small troupe of mutants (earning only one hilarious rebuff in the process) and happily get to work honing their powers.
- Like every group that has called themselves X-Men, this bunch is a mix of personalities, some better developed than others. The most interesting, like bigfooted Hank McCoy (Nicholas Hoult) and the aforementioned Raven, spend most of the film struggling with how they feel about being mutants. The others, like winged Angel (Zoe Kravitz), adaptable Darwin (Edi Gathegi), wailing Banshee (Caleb Landry Jones), and ummm...energy blasting Havok (Lucas Till), are mostly there to fill out the roster. Not that much of a roster would be needed to topple the b-list talents that Shaw has assembled, including the scantily-clad psychic Emma Frost (January Jones) and a few Nightcrawler and Storm knockoffs (Jason Flemyng and Álex González). Fortunately, none of the acting is as bad as some of these characters, and McAvoy, Fassbender, Bacon, Hoult, and Lawrence especially all turn in good enough performances to keep things watchable.
- When it's at its best, X-Men: First Class is fun in the way that many of the early James Bond films were fun. You know, insane Cold War adventures, kooky gadgets, mandarin collars, and all that. When the film doesn't work, it's partly because it fails to play by its own weird rules. Emma Frost can transform her skin into diamonds, but she is vulnerable to bed posts? Sebastian Shaw can absorb punches, grenades, and nuclear reactors, but he can't handle a coin? Maybe comic book aficionados have ways to explain these events, but the rest of us should blame the writers. A bigger problem, however, that is endemic to most origin stories is that the film is constrained to land on familiar terrain, even if the story has provided no compelling reasons to land there. Thus, Xavier loses the use of his legs near the film's end in a somewhat arbitrary manner. Thus, the team quickly agrees that nicknames like Beast and Banshee are somehow more palatable than than Hank and Sean. If you want to see a much more enjoyable treatment of superheroes in the 60's, check out the immensely more thoughtful Justice League: The New Frontier. If you're desperate for an X-Men movie, at least I'll admit that you could do much worse than this one.
- Cameos from Hugh Jackman, Rebecca Romijn, Michael Ironside, and Ray Wise (in order of increasing scariness).
- There is also a mutant cameo by Storm when Xavier is using Cerebro.
- The film contains a strange visual reference to Basic Instinct, of all things.
- To the list of great film "NOOOOOOOO!"s, we can now add Magneto's "NEIIIIIN!"
