X-MEN: FIRST CLASS - Grading+Discussion **SPOILERS!**

[archeryguy1701]

I'll be giving my review tomorrow.... I went to the midnight showing Thursday completely exhausted, so I want to see it one more time before I make my final verdict. At the moment though, it is ranking very high for me.

Temis the Vorta wrote:

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Considering they've always fucked up Prof X's accent (the character being American), it's a bit late to start complaining about lack of attention to detail in that regards. But it does show a lack of respect on the directors' part for the integrity of the characters.

Looks like the opening is a bit soft. Doesn't surprise me - there are just too many comic book (and comic book-like) movies jostling around each summer, and the ones that don't have an obvious reason to go see them will get lost.

There's no big hook to this movie to get people into the theater. The X-Men movies to date didn't create some huge curiosity to see their origins. Who really cares where or why they came about? None of the actors are big draws. It's an easy movie to ignore.

I personally can't see either McAvoy as Prof X or Fassbinder as Magneto, although they might be perfectly good actors for other roles. As a longtime X-Men comics fan, I just don't recognize the characters as they've been presented in the movies, and the trend has been getting worse as the series goes along.

For X-Men to have a Bond-like atmosphere (if true) is just completely wrong for the story. The comics in the 60s never had anything Bond-like about them. They were far too serious for that.

Temis, you might put some thought into checking the movie out. I was pretty skeptical going into it myself, part from always being a tad warry of reboot/ origins stories for characters that I already know and love (I was unsure about STXI going into that as well) and part from not being particularly sold on the trailers. It was far better than I was expecting. The guy who played Xavier did a good job and the guy who played Magneto was phenominal- he was a constant scene stealer for me.

davejames wrote:

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Also, the way Shaw went about tricking the US and Russians into nearly starting a war just felt way too simplistic and cartoonish to me. Instead of using any kind of clever emotional manipulation or playing on people's insecurities.... all he did was basically threaten people into doing his bidding. He might as well have saved time and had his devil-looking buddy teleport into the missle control rooms and push the launch buttons himself. lol

Gotham Central wrote:

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2) Why exactly did the US and Russians suddenly get all buddy buddy and decide to kill the mutants on the beach? That actually made no sense...and in the context of the Cold War actually makes even less sense. The US government discovers that mutants exist. it hires some of them...who show that they have the ability to find other mutants and recruit them into working for the US government. They put them into the field, they stop a war and then that same government decides to KILL THEIR OWN AGENTS FOR NO REASON. They had not gone rogue, they'd proven their value in the field by successfully infiltrating the Soviet Union...yet they turn on them for no reason. That plot development needed to be fleshed out more. I get that in the Marvel universe people think superpowers are scary instead of cool...but this was just illogical.

I think the best explanation for these two things is just the fact that the idea of mutants is such a new concept to these people. In the case of Shaw threatening the countries, no one's really sure of what he's capable of if they don't listen to him, so they're afraid of his powers or potential powers. Same thing for the Russians and Americans attacking the mutant contingent at the end. They have mutants who are capable of controlling other people, manipulating metal, appear and disappear, pretend to be anyone, shoot blasts of energy, and who knows what else. Yes, some of the mutants are good, but they also are dealing with some very bad mutants. Again, not knowing how many there are or what they're capable of, they were scared to let them go. And no one except Moira really knew what the X-men's role in stopping the war was. They had a Russian commander who blew up the freighter for reasons that no one knows and then you have a jet come out of no where and start battling a sub that no one knew about. From the US/ Russian perspective, it probably looked like two aggresive parties fighting their war in the middle of the two country's war.

[darthraidr]

D.

this movie was just bad. it was too long, it was boring, it was cliched... i enjoyed one cameo in the film, and i am sure a couple small parts here and there. but it was easily the worse movie i've seen this summer.

i guess it was one of the better x-men films... maybe... i dunno...i think all the x-men films are pretty mediocre (except for hugh jackman as wolverine). so it's about par for the course i guess.

[JD]

Hilbilly Rage wrote:

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Obviously Alex Summers is Scott's dad, but the others I didn't know. ?

In the comics he's his brother. Did they change that for the movie? Their father was actually Christopher Summers aka Corsair, a sometimes space pirate. They also have another brother, the mutant villain Vulcan. I haven't actually read any of the comics myself, but from I've read on Wikipedia and the Marvel Comics Database, it sounds like the Summers have a pretty crazy family.

[Admiral2]

captcalhoun wrote:

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Banshee's accent should be Irish, not Scottish, Admiral.

It still ain't there, is it?

[Lookingglassman]

I'm not really into Xmen, but I went to see this anyway and it was pretty good. I liked the cameo by Wolverine and how it showed why things are the way they are in Xmen.

The best part was the preview for the upcoming remake of "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes" now being called, "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" I LOVE the Planet of the Apes!

[Evil Twin]

Saw it tonight. In a nutshell, cheesy, but fun. Gotta say I'm shocked to see so many people rating this higher than X2 (my all time favorite superhero movie.) I found X2 to be a much better written and acted movie. First Class is rather ham-fisted by comparison. Doesn't quite have the coolness and elegance of X2. But don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed it a lot and liked seeing the origin of things from the past films (despite some continuity errors ) and it was great seeing Professor X and Magneto in their prime. LOVED the Wolverine cameo. Totally unexpected and hilarious.

My ranking of the films:

X2
X-Men
First Class
Wolverine
.
.
.
.
Last Stand

Oh yeah, I don't read the comics so... What's the relationship between Azazel and Nightcrawler, considering their similarities?

[Trekker4747]

X-Men: First Class

My Grade: A

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The recently bumpy X-Men movie franchise makes a bold, great, return in this movie. X-Men 3, for me, was just a lame movie with a lot of stuff I just didn't care for, Wolverine was okay but forgettable. The first two X-Men movies I found fun and entertaining but in the wake of comic-book movies having taken on a more serious form in the recent years X1 and X2's "flaws" are more apparent.

X-Men: First Class takes place in the early late 1950s/early 1960s and follows the two men who will become friends but later push for those with special abilities beyond man in different ways.

First we have Erik/Magneto a man who was captured as a boy in the 1940s by Nazis and held captive in Auschwitz where a German soldier would find interest in Erik's ability to control metal and manipulate Erik's emotions to capitalize on the boy's power catalyzing it by killing Erik's mother before his very eyes. Years later, after the war, Erik is seeking out the man who killed his mother but will eventually come across.

Charles Xavier a rich, brash, and somewhat cocky man with a keen interest in genetics, mutation and doing what he can to find a way to help mutants live among humans and be accepted. When Charles and Erik meat they form a friendship and work together to help the CIA to stop a rogue band of mutants with plans of world conquest lead by the very man who killed Erik's mother. Charles and Erik's friendship begins to clash as both have different ideals on mutant kind, one wants revenge and to rise up as the genetically better people the other wants everyone to just work together.

It all comes across very nicely as we run into other mutants in X-Men's roster who team up with the CIA for the mission and find themselves pulled by their leaders with two very different ideals.

The movie sets up interesting dynamics between all of the characters most notably between Charles and Erik and Charles and the girl who will become the shape-shifting Mystique. Charles, as young boy, encounters a young Mystique when she breaks into his home to steal food; but he be-friends her and the two develop a brother/sister/sem-romantic relationship that becomes strained as Mystique begins to get the impression that Charles -in apparent defiance to everything he stands for- wants her to remain in a form that appears human rather than her natural form of a blue-skinned scaly humanoid.

The movie plays well as a period piece and the climax centers around the Cuban Missile Crisis culminating into a great action scene as The X-Men are "revealed" to the militaries of the U.S. and Russia.

Probably the movie's only "flaw" is that, for me, some of the secondary mutants used aren't interesting. It's was fine seeing Emma Frost and Beast but the other mutants used, frankly, are not interesting with the possible exception of Alex Summers. Angel and Banshee, for me, just weren't interesting enough and I'm sure there's plenty of other mutants in the X-Men franchise who could have been used.

The movie also comes across -to -me- as a hard reboot of the X-Men franchise as much of it contradicts information revealed in the other X-Men movies (all set decades after this movie take place.) For example, Alex Summers (Havok) appears in this movie as a young adult even though he's supposed to be the younger brother of Scott Summers (Cyclops) who not only appears as a teenager in Wolverine (set in the late 70s) but is a young man in the X1-X3 (set in the 2000s.) X3 had sequence set in the 1980s or 1990s with a able-bodied Xavier, still friends with Erik, still going around interviewing prospective mutants. This movie has the two getting their falling-out in the 1960s. Wolverine also shows a middle-aged and still able-bodied Xavier in the 1970s. (Wolverine also shows, apparently, a young Emma Frost a decade after this movie is set where she's a 30-something year old woman.)

This movie contradicts all of that so it seems, to me, that this is hard-reboot of the franchise that is ignoring all of the previous movies and setting its own path.

Which is all fine and good as this was a movie I fully enjoyed though it also felt "rushed" as it seems the Xavier/Erik friendship and falling out could've been stretched out over a trilogy of movies as it's implied in the other movies that the two worked together very closely and were friends for a very long time, here it seems like a matter of months.

But it's all well done and you can certainly see the brash, naive, dreams Xavier has and where Magneto's hate for humans comes from. So I give it an "A", only downgraded from A+ due to murky continuity with the other movies, using a couple of "weak" mutants and what seemed like a truncated time-line on the friendship between the two friends who'd fight each other on opposite sides of a war, yet still remain friendly to one another.

There's also one great cameo in the movie that wasn't expected for me, though it happened right when I began to wonder why they never learned of him, and another good cameo that also wasn't expected.

X-Men fans, comic-book fans should find plenty to enjoy in this movie.

[Aeolusdallas]

Evil Twin wrote:

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Saw it tonight. In a nutshell, cheesy, but fun. Gotta say I'm shocked to see so many people rating this higher than X2 (my all time favorite superhero movie.) I found X2 to be a much better written and acted movie. First Class is rather ham-fisted by comparison. Doesn't quite have the coolness and elegance of X2. But don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed it a lot and liked seeing the origin of things from the past films (despite some continuity errors ) and it was great seeing Professor X and Magneto in their prime. LOVED the Wolverine cameo. Totally unexpected and hilarious.

My ranking of the films:

X2
X-Men
First Class
Wolverine
.
.
.
.
Last Stand

Oh yeah, I don't read the comics so... What's the relationship between Azazel and Nightcrawler, considering their similarities?

Azazel is Nightcrawlers father and Mystique is his mother

[ColeMercury]

Hilbilly Rage wrote:

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Obviously Alex Summers is Scott's dad

Or maybe his uncle?

[HoneyBLilly]

ColeMercury wrote:

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Or maybe his uncle?

I was thinking uncle too.

Or cousin.

And I really need to stay away from this thread since I can't see it yet. Oh well . . . I can live with that.

[UssGlenn]

Trekker4747 wrote:

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Which is all fine and good as this was a movie I fully enjoyed though it also felt "rushed" as it seems the Xavier/Erik friendship and falling out could've been stretched out over a trilogy of movies as it's implied in the other movies that the two worked together very closely and were friends for a very long time, here it seems like a matter of months.

Well if they wanted to, there's no reason they couldn't have them reconcile for a while before having another falling out. I don't think Erik has done anything so horrible yet as to prevent that.

[throwback]

The film was okay. The aspect of the film that I didn't like is when both the American and Soviet fleets launched a combined military strike against the mutants. I thought the depiction of the fleets and their leaders was too Hollywoodish and less real life.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Just got back. I thought this movie was pretty fuckin awesome and still stand by my Pre-emptive A+!

That first scene with young Erik was all kinds of awesome. Surprised he didn't attempt to take Shaw out right then and there though. Fassbender as Magneto was excellent. Loved the bit with the stabbing of the hand, throw, retract and restab the hand.

McEvoy's Xavier was pretty well done. He did a good job.

How did the Russians know to build the antitelepath helmet in the first place? I was actually anticipating some kind of mention to Project Omega Red, but that probably doesn't happen until way later anyways.

Logan's (Pre adamantium) cameo was a nice touch. "go fuck yourselves..." priceless.

Rebecca Romain O'Connor's cameo was also unexpected.

Shaw and his cronies seemed a little too mustache twirly for my taste. But Azazel had some pretty cool sequences with the teleporting and dropping of agents. That was Badass! Riptide was kind of a bland goon. Harry Leland would have been a wiser choice. And instead of Angel Salvator, they should have used Sunspot's father since he was a Hellfire Club member. Darwin, was well canon fodder like somebody mentioned earlier.

As for the Emma Frost, January's performance seemed slightly on par with Kelly Hu's Deathstrike. Only with slightly more personality. Just slightly. I'm not sure why Bryan Singer's female sidekicks come off kind of wooden.

All in all I loved this movie, my girlfriend didn't enjoy it as much as she did Thor. I thought it was way better than Thor, personally. There seemed to be alot more at stake in this movie.

[Trekker4747]

UssGlenn wrote:

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Well if they wanted to, there's no reason they couldn't have them reconcile for a while before having another falling out. I don't think Erik has done anything so horrible yet as to prevent that.

Well, Erik is partly responsible for Charles getting crippled -though the movies suggest they mostly remained on "friendly" terms after their separate ideologies took hold. It also seemed this movie wanted to show us the "breaking point" between the two when their separate beliefs broke them from working together.

[BenRoethig]

Gotham Central wrote:

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I'm not really an X-Men fan but I did find the film enjoyable.

Things that did not make sense to me:

1) Why did Xavier mind wipe Moira? Did he think she would betray him in some way? What was the point. All that did was effectively discredit her for her superiors.

To prevent her from giving up the location during interrogation, especially since the CIA had Emma Frost in their custody.

2) Why exactly did the US and Russians suddenly get all buddy buddy and decide to kill the mutants on the beach? That actually made no sense...and in the context of the Cold War actually makes even less sense.

Like it made no sense for us and the Soviets to come together for the common threat of the Nazis during WWII? The world isn't black and white.

he US government discovers that mutants exist. it hires some of them...who show that they have the ability to find other mutants and recruit them into working for the US government. They put them into the field, they stop a war and then that same government decides to KILL THEIR OWN AGENTS FOR NO REASON. They had not gone rogue, they'd proven their value in the field by successfully infiltrating the Soviet Union...yet they turn on them for no reason. That plot development needed to be fleshed out more. I get that in the Marvel universe people think superpowers are scary instead of cool...but this was just illogical.

They also proved a handful a powerful mutants had weapon level power and considered them to be a potential threat.