X-Men: First Class (2011)

Directed by: Matthew Vaughn
Written by: Ashley Edward Miller, Zack Stentz, Jane Goldman, Matthew Vaughn, Sheldon Turner, Bryan Singer, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Chris Claremont
Cast: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Rose Byrne, January Jones, Jennifer Lawrence, Oliver Platt, Kevin Bacon

It all starts with those damned dirty Nazis.

Always looking for a new weapon to use in the ongoing war, the Nazis have captured young Erik Lehnsherr (Bill Milner) and his family. Erik's a special young boy, seemingly having the ability to move and control metal through the power of thought alone. The Nazis have their famed soft touch; Erik's mother is murdered in front of his eyes by the evil Doctor Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) in order to push him to obey and train his powers to their full potential.

"Never forget!" - a line used in reality in reference to the Holocaust and also spoken within X-Men: First Class - and Erik, aka Magneto (Michael Fassbender), never does. Nearly twenty years later, Erik is an adult; much stronger, much meaner, hunting and killing Nazis with a burning passion. His ultimate goal is to track down and assassinate the cruel Doctor Shaw who had killed his mother.

However, Erik is not alone; a new breed of mutants has spontaneously sprung up across the nation. One of the more powerful and prominent mutants is a young and cocky Charles Xavier (James McAvoy). Xavier has made it a life mission to study the nature of mutations, and thus better understand his own powerful telepathy as well as to further unite the growing population of mutants. He makes an early alliance with the blue shape-shifter Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), and grows up with the girl almost like brother and sister (a perception which Mystique comes to resent).

Other alliances form as Xavier develops a way to locate and track down other mutants. Xavier finds the vengeful Erik and convinces the man into uniting against the evil Sebastian Shaw. He also manages to bring in other mutants, including a young doctor who eventually becomes Beast (Nicholas Hoult), as well as Banshee (Caleb Landry Jones), Havoc (Lucas Till), and Angel (Zoë Kravitz). Their attempts at recruitment are not always successful, as is demonstrated in a brief cameo with Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) refusing the invitation with a snarling "Fuck off!"

The new team does, of course, track down and do battle with the nefarious Sebastian Shaw, who is - if you haven't already guessed - the main villain of the film and a powerful mutant in his own right. Shaw has recruited a small team of mutants to his own side, calling themselves the "Hellfire Club". The goal of Shaw and his recruits is to vastly whittle down the population of humanity, and thus leave the doors open for domination and growth of the blossoming mutant population. This evil plot is based upon a rather creative interpretation of the events behind the Cuban Missile Crisis, and sets up a showdown between the two factions in an extravagant battle of who-has-the-biggest-mutation.

X-Men: First Class is perhaps the best film so far within the entire X-Men franchise. There may be a bit of head-to-head with X2 - it's admittedly years since I've seen it - but the take-away is that director Matthew Vaughn has managed to put together a fun, entertaining, and well conceived film in a franchise of movies that are often rather lacking.

A lot of this quality comes in a manner not often well used in X-Men films - character development. X-Men: First Class spends a lot of time creating an arc with its major characters, particularly Magneto, Xavier, and Mystique. Magneto is especially well defined, and while it is easy to understand the man's bitterness and anger, it is something to watch the man work through this rage and come to the conclusions that he does. That's really fundamentally what character development is all about, and X-Men: First Class does have occurrence to do it fairly well; show a character in a base state, throw rocks and garbage at them, and then show the arc of change that this pummeling of trash has caused upon their character.

Mystique is also well done. This is the most illuminating appearance this character has ever had throughout the entire franchise. You begin to understand her bitterness as she matures past adolescence; as with anyone with a pulse, this is generally a time when an interest in sex begins to grow, and Mystique sadly finds that the great majority of men find her natural form disturbing or even repulsive (I do realize a loud sub-set of the geek population may beg to differ, but they were not represented within this film). As with Magneto, X-Men: First Class really manages to convey an arc with Mystique, and you go away feeling an understanding of why she makes the philosophical changes that she does.

This character building is far from throughout the entire cast; though, this is fairly reasonable, as there really is only so much you can do in the length of a standard theatrical film. Many of the other less prominent X-men, such as Havoc or Banshee, don't really get that much development. The three sub-villains that provide back up to Sebastian Shaw have no arc at all, really. There is a minimal amount of time spent with the icy Emma Frost (January Jones), and her motivations and personality are never really conveyed. There is even less time allowed for the villaneous Azazel (Jason Flemyng) or Riptide (Alex Gonzalez), who are mainly there to dish out violence throughout the film and then get beat up at the end. I don't think either have a single line in the entire film. One thing done well is that both of these characters were shown as so mean, and so seemingly undefeatable, that it really was entertaining to see them finally get pummeled in the final scenes.

The action itself is very entertaining and lot of this is, of course, based on rather spectacular displays of mutant powers. Magento is very much in form throughout the film and really has a lot of great tricks to pull with the metal manipulating shtick. A big surprise for me though - especially considering that he was really only a sub-villain - was how damned fun it was to watch Azazel kill people. This guy is just plain mean. Teleportation is a pretty neat trick; but grabbing people and teleporting a mile up in the air with them only to teleport yourself back to the ground - allowing the hapless victim to fall to their death - well, that's just a damned cruel thing to do. There's one wincing scene wherein he does this in rapid succession with a dozen or so victims, leaving them all to fall and crunch against the hard ground like a horrid human rain.

As is obvious, X-Men: First Class takes place predominantly in the early 1960's, and surprisingly missing are the usual time-period cues. People dress about right for the time - I guess, anyway. There's also the required backup footage for the Cuban Missile Crisis event, complete with a young Kennedy making his strong speeches. It's a common trick for time period based films to use popular songs to underline the age; there's none of that in X-Men: First Class. No Elvis, no Beatles, no anyone else that was popular in the early 60's. Nor is there any real mention of social movements, popular films of the time, or really anything to remind us of what age we are in. This isn't really a bad thing, and it is an interesting directorial choice and must have been quite intentional. Often music used to set the age can come off as contrived or silly. Think of The 70's Show, for way of counterexample - the entire sitcom was based entirely upon the silly fashion, bad disco, and lack of cell phones of its time. "Look at us! We're in the 70's! It's whacky!" the show exclaimed. In contrast, X-Men: First Class takes its decade in such a calm and measured way that it nearly ignores the frame of time in which it resides. What a great call - this a strength, in that it avoids distracting the viewer with lame time period cliches and sticks with moving the story forward.

X-Men: First Class is definitely an entertaining film; however it's not quite a perfect one. Its mistakes are far, far smaller than the great bulk of X-Men films. I couldn't help but snicker at how lousy a chess player Xavier is - see if you can catch how stupidly he loses his queen in a chess game with Magneto. This is a paltry error (and I call it an error because a super genius like Xavier wouldn't lose his queen without setting up a checkmate to follow), but it's kind of a funny one to me. There's also a scene in which shape-shifting Mystique imitates the form of a helmet wearing Sebastian Shaw in order to fool an enemy, though it would have been impossible for her to know anything about the helmet at that time. As a matter of fact, I don't think she'd even seen Shaw face-to-face yet, so how was she able to imitate him at all? Both of these errors are tiny to the point of being petty, and I may even have made a misinterpretation on both accounts; this is likely the most consistent and logically sound X-Men film to date, and does so while remaining highly entertaining and fun. Go see it and enjoy.

This is a Day Two Review.

Rating: (4 out of 5):