Movie Review - X-Men: First Class
Watched this movie today and thought I'd try to give it a decent review since my Muse is otherwise being recalcitrant (which explains why my Star Wars RPG could be going better.)
In a word, X-Men: First Class is awesome. I loved pretty much everything about this flick and the horribly bad taste left in the wake of the disgustingly bad X-Men: The Last Stand and and the insultingly pedantic X-Men Origins: Wolverine was watched right away. From the opening scene - which was taken from the excellent opening scene of the first X-Men movie with some minor tweaks - to the last scene of the movie, I enjoyed the ride with nary a complaint. Somehow, they made the ugly yellow costumes look kind of cool, and Magneto's helmet didn't suck, and it had Michael Ironsides in it and ...
Michael Fassbender absolutely nailed Magneto. He did an excellent job of conveying the barely contained rage and despair that is Magneto, and somehow, he even managed to carry off that helmet in a way that made it look wicked cool. The very last shot of him as the Master of Magnetism made an old school comics fan such as myself giggle in glee. I really hope this movie causes his career to explode because Fassbender is just all around excellent.
Equally well done was James McAvoy as Charles Xavier. With his background as shown in this movie, you can see very much why he's more an optimist than Magneto - after all, he grew up in affluence whereas Lensherr was in a Nazi concentration camp. Later, when Xavier is ... ahem ... kind of cheating to get chicks in bed, it just made me like and understand Professor X a little better.
As before in the movie X-Verse, they played fast and loose with the continuity. Somehow, Alex Summers (Havok) is evidently older than Scott (Cyclops) and a member of the very first team rather than it better the other way around, and I'm pretty sure Riptide and Azazel weren't members of the Hellfire Club ever (the former was a Marauder, I think, who Colossus killed during the Mutant Massacre), but I'm totally cool with that since the previous movies did much the same.
Still, this is very much in the original movie X-Men universe (which makes me sad since that means the terribly crappy X-Men: The Last Stand sort of ends that series); I have no idea how the Wolverine movie fits in here, so I 'm going to pretend that it doesn't exist. There are also two surprising cameos in this that I wasn't expecting, but that's probably 'cause I've avoided spoilers for this flick.
The action is pretty decent, but, like most movies these days, gets a little too close and is a little too frenetic so you can't always tell what's going on, but that's something I've glumly become accustomed in recent years. Although its ostensibly a period piece, they don't try quite as hard as they could to get that across - there are a couple of lines that just don't feel like they belong in the 1960s. That's easy enough to overlook, however.
In the end, this movie left me wanting more. I want to see another flick set in this time period - hell, I'd like to see an entire trilogy! If they could keep this creative team and this cast ... man, I'd love to see X-Men: Second Class, perhaps even doing a big scale movie version of the first comic X-Men story from the 60s where Xavier's new team (Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Angel, Iceman, Beast) take on Magneto who is attacking an American nuke base (or something - its been a while.)
Final score: 4.5 out of 5. I liked this movie as much as I like Thor, quite possibly even better. Time will tell.
In a word, X-Men: First Class is awesome. I loved pretty much everything about this flick and the horribly bad taste left in the wake of the disgustingly bad X-Men: The Last Stand and and the insultingly pedantic X-Men Origins: Wolverine was watched right away. From the opening scene - which was taken from the excellent opening scene of the first X-Men movie with some minor tweaks - to the last scene of the movie, I enjoyed the ride with nary a complaint. Somehow, they made the ugly yellow costumes look kind of cool, and Magneto's helmet didn't suck, and it had Michael Ironsides in it and ...
Michael Fassbender absolutely nailed Magneto. He did an excellent job of conveying the barely contained rage and despair that is Magneto, and somehow, he even managed to carry off that helmet in a way that made it look wicked cool. The very last shot of him as the Master of Magnetism made an old school comics fan such as myself giggle in glee. I really hope this movie causes his career to explode because Fassbender is just all around excellent.
Equally well done was James McAvoy as Charles Xavier. With his background as shown in this movie, you can see very much why he's more an optimist than Magneto - after all, he grew up in affluence whereas Lensherr was in a Nazi concentration camp. Later, when Xavier is ... ahem ... kind of cheating to get chicks in bed, it just made me like and understand Professor X a little better.
As before in the movie X-Verse, they played fast and loose with the continuity. Somehow, Alex Summers (Havok) is evidently older than Scott (Cyclops) and a member of the very first team rather than it better the other way around, and I'm pretty sure Riptide and Azazel weren't members of the Hellfire Club ever (the former was a Marauder, I think, who Colossus killed during the Mutant Massacre), but I'm totally cool with that since the previous movies did much the same.
Still, this is very much in the original movie X-Men universe (which makes me sad since that means the terribly crappy X-Men: The Last Stand sort of ends that series); I have no idea how the Wolverine movie fits in here, so I 'm going to pretend that it doesn't exist. There are also two surprising cameos in this that I wasn't expecting, but that's probably 'cause I've avoided spoilers for this flick.
The action is pretty decent, but, like most movies these days, gets a little too close and is a little too frenetic so you can't always tell what's going on, but that's something I've glumly become accustomed in recent years. Although its ostensibly a period piece, they don't try quite as hard as they could to get that across - there are a couple of lines that just don't feel like they belong in the 1960s. That's easy enough to overlook, however.
In the end, this movie left me wanting more. I want to see another flick set in this time period - hell, I'd like to see an entire trilogy! If they could keep this creative team and this cast ... man, I'd love to see X-Men: Second Class, perhaps even doing a big scale movie version of the first comic X-Men story from the 60s where Xavier's new team (Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Angel, Iceman, Beast) take on Magneto who is attacking an American nuke base (or something - its been a while.)
Final score: 4.5 out of 5. I liked this movie as much as I like Thor, quite possibly even better. Time will tell.