I enjoyed X-Men: First Class, it's almost as good X2. They did a nice job inventing a new origin for the movie characters (vs the comics) and had some nice nods to the present day movies.
A prequel that's the fifth film in a series has the issue that it's not quite an origin story and that some of the outcome is known. X-Men: First Class navigates this well. It's mostly the origin of Magneto, not so much the origin of his powers but rather his world view. He's a survivor of Nazi concentration camps, which the comics effectively added to his background in the eighties. The Hellfire Club (another 80s creation) is an underground organization of evil mutants seeking world domination. Sebastian Shaw and the White Witch are the villains orchestrating the Cuban Missile Crisis. The CIA learns about mutants and seeks Xavier to help and he puts together a team including Magneto and a collection of mutants from different eras of the comics.
It works because the basic premise of the X-Men is about a group of outsiders who just want to fit in. Xavier wants them to remain secret until they feel comfortable with themselves and the world is ready for them. Erik thinks there is nothing to hide and they have to make the world accept them. Shaw just wants to eliminate everyone and rule. Combine this with a little bit of teenagers coming of age and there's enough grounding to build a summer movie on. The film confuses it's 1962 setting with the later sixties, but the miniskirts and SR-71 and general Bond-like nature add to the fun.
Both James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender were good casting choices. They played very well off of each other and did as well as Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in the first movies. Kevin Bacon was a bit over the top as Shaw but that was okay in this case as he is the main villain but isn't the one the story really depends on. Jennifer Lawrence, who I loved in Winter's Bone did ok as Mystique. The story loses her character a little but for someone who was around Charles as long as she was, she never picked up his confidence and that showed in Lawrence's performance. January Jones played Emma Frost with as little emotion as she plays every other character. The others are fine though aren't given much. At first it looks like Moira (who's been turned from a geneticist in the comics to a CIA agent in the film) would be a fun Emma Peel kind of character but then she's mostly forgotten.
The film is a bit sexist. They tried to explain it given the inequalities of the era with a few references of women serving drinks or not being useful in the CIA, but not quite enough. Every female character appeared in their underwear (including all the extras). None of the men did. Well, one woman was hit on in a bar and another was killed in a concentration camp. For a film about how minorities are treated it seems a mistake.
X-Men First Class kept me interested the whole time. Like the first two movies, I thought the characters behaved and fought as if they really had these powers. I enjoyed Azazel's teleportation fighting style as much as I did Nightcrawler's in X2. The more minor characters are forgotten a bit too much in the final battle but I still liked it. I appreciated that both Xavier's and Erik's methods had merits and flaws. It strikes me as wrong that Xavier basically wanted to keep mutants in the closet.
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