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Rewatch: X-Men: First Class
My fellow Mutants! The real enemy is out there.
X-Men: First Class received a lot of cred from the online community upon its release last summer. Most saw it as a successful reinvigoration of a series that had lost its way with 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine. My first impression was that it was good but not great. Another watch leaves me less enamoured with it, providing the sensation of being merely decent.
It starts of in a familiar fashion, recalling the beginning of Bryan Singer’s original with a frame-by-frame re-enactment of future Magneto Eric Lenshaw’s mutant capability. However this is part of the film’s problems: adhering to the original series, using previous films as a guide to fit into the X-Men canon but knocking over the furniture whenever it deviates from the established template.
Essentially the plot revolves around the politics of Fassebender’s Magneto and James Mcavoy’s Charles Xavier. Setting it in sixties America, it’s the clearest reference the series has made to their Malcom X/Martin Luther King dynamic. Kevin Bacon’s suave Sebastian Shaw is looking to start a new age of mutant dominance, starting a nuclear war that would pave the way for mutants to inherit the earth with the newly formed X-Men standing in his way.
Mixing real-life situations with fictional ones is initially an interesting choice made by screenwriter Jane Goldman and director Matthew Vaughn. They attempt to imbue the story with a Bondian feel and a ‘what if?’ narrative but the script bottles the latter especially in its defining set-piece. The sixties setting is just a dressing: an artifice that makes it visually dissimilar from modern comic-book adaptations but the difference is surface deep. The film alludes to moments in history but does not deviate from them enough to create any substantial dramatic tension. It’s a fun ride but it feels empty at the same time.
Other problems emerge from the amount of exposition the film barrels through to set up the story (the first ½ hour is Exposition City): gender politics that borrows from James Bond, dodgy looking visual effects (basically when anyone takes flight), too many characters to service, some risible dialogue and, to top it off, some bland acting. It’s an almost Herculean feat that it feels as cohesive as it does and is as entertaining as it is despite its many faults. Vaughn keeps it going at a decent clip in the realisation that if the film pauses you’ll see its glaring seams.
Sprinkled with some decent performances here and there and a few clever action scenes, X-Men: First Class is a film that’s safer than it looks. Many of the more interesting moments (Azazel’s infiltration, Magneto and Xavier’s conversation over chess) feel like they’ve been culled from other films in the series. It’s a case of ‘X-Men: The Greatest Hits’, not adding anything particularly new to the series in thematic or dramatic terms or even expanding the mythos as such. Bonus points for the cameos but this film could have been a bit more than a re-heated version of what we’ve seen before.
6/10
A return to form? – X-Men First Class
Peace was never an option.
X-Men First Class takes place in the 1960s following James McAvoy’s Charles Xavier and Michael Fassebender’s Erik Lensherr. Before they were archenemies, they were closest of friends, working together and forming the first class of the X-Men. Working with CIA they intend to stop Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) from starting a third world war that would lead to the death of humanity and the rise of mutants.
The main problem with X-Men First Class (and I’ve now seen it twice) is the amount of story and characters the film has to get through. It bolts through its narrative starting in New York, before heading to Poland, Oxford, Switzerland, Las Vegas, Washington, Argentina and Miami, all within the first half an hour or so. This leads to many brief scenes in which character and plot details need to be laid down before we’re off to another location and another part of the story. It’s often breathless and exciting stuff as Vaughn and Goldman try to keep the film on the tracks. It’s a pace the film runs at for the good majority of its first hour but it feels as if they are too many concurrent storylines and too many characters for the film to fully satisfy each one.
This leads to the film giving most of its attention to Xavier’s and Lensherr’s warring ideologies. Its good stuff with each actor embracing their viewpoints and, for all intents and purposes, forming the fractured relationship that audiences would see in the X-Men trilogy. When the film focuses a little more on its secondary and tertiary characters, things aren’t quite as good. Apart from Beast (Nicholas Hoult) and Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) the other characters are fairly one-dimensional and underdeveloped, Darwin being a case in point as he becomes (spoiler!) little more than mutant fodder (end spoiler!). Kevin Bacon excels as Hellfire Club owner Sebastian Shaw, a former Nazi scientisr and generally unfeeling bastard who has a lot of fun in his role. Nonetheless the lack of character development strikes again in the form of Shaw’s cohorts as they’re barely given a personality and, in the case of January Jones Emma Frost, she fails to impart any in the scenes she’s involved in.
Reflecting on First Class, it’s a fast, enjoyable entry into the X-Men franchise. Certainly better than the turgid Wolverine, the jam-packed The Last Stand and the first X-Men film. It lacks the polish (in its visual effects especially) to compete with franchise’s best moments in X2-X-Men United, however considering the brief development time it had, First Class meets expectations and then some, but only just.
Trailer Watch: X-Men First Class
Now this is more like it…
I haven’t been completely won over by X-Men: First Class. First it has to overcome the reception of Wolverine (a tepid film) and the lacklustre response to the Last Stand, a film I enjoyed but it has many problems which aren’t helped by the ballooning cast.
It’s a prequel which will bring its share of difficulties (it looks as if it won’t quite fit in with the other films) and it has been beset by a number of marketing decisions that have not created a favourable perception of the film. The trailers themselves have focused on the same moments with very little in the way of new footage. I guess that’s down to the relatively short production schedule with the film only finishing shooting sometime in January/February and the lack of new visual effect shots being completed.
This trailer again focuses on the dynamic between McAvoy’s Xavier (Professor X) and Fassbender’s Eric Lensherr (Magneto), setting the emergence of mutants against the backdrop of the cold war. If anything it looks to be offering something that’s a little smarter than other comic adaps and despite a few concerns over the visual effects (will that diamond effect ever look convincing?), it has the potential to be as good as the series highpoint X2: X-men United. Both the domestic and international trailers are featured with some 720p screenshots (taken from Yahoo Movies) available for your perusal.
