X-Men: First Class Review

The X-Men movies have never been a holy grail for great super hero movies. Never masterpieces, yet never a complete flop. X-Men: First Class revolutionises the franchise and shows Marvel’s true power in the face of the big screen.

First Class gives viewers an insight into the origins of the historically well known super heroes Professor X and Magneto. The film begins at their young childhood and shows both the beginning of the evil within Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbinder) and the sibling-like bond between Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Raven, also known as Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence).

Years go by and whilst Charles is researching and learning more about other mutants, Erik is religiously hunting to avenge the death of his mother by killing Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon). Shaw becomes the driving force for the Cuban Missile Crisis –an already historically tense and global situation – and makes everything much worse by including hate-fuelled mutants. Meanwhile Erik and Charles team up with a group of young mutants in order to bring about world peace and hopefully keep the mutant identity a secret from the concerning humans.

The acting in First Class is, well…First Class! Fassbinder, McAvoy, Bacon, Hoult and many others give a brilliant performance. Even the 11-15 year old actors from the movies start shine out with a bright future ahead of them. Some of the younger mutants could have improved, but their minor lack of skill is overshadowed by the more major cast members’ strengths and Fassbinder’s amazing ability for passive aggressive roles.

Secondly, the script for First Class is absolutely tremendous. Many one liners (including a hilarious cameo!) amazed me such as “Peace was never an option”, some were included in the epic trailers but that didn’t completely spoil their effect. The story is rather predictable and nothing to gaze at but that’s to be expected from a blockbuster title like this one. However the memorable background of the Cold War sets a grittier, more realistic tone to the super hero movie which is quite unusual considering Marvel’s background. It was great to see how mutants were supposedly to blame for the Cuban Missile Crisis and does a great job of twisting a very important event in history. The beginning of the movie is the greatest part as it’s set in the gruesome time of WWII and I only wish that this darker side of that time period was further developed.

Being an X-men and overall Marvel fan, I was edgy to see how they portrayed each character in relation to the characters actual origin. Thankfully I was pleased on most areas. Characters such as Beast, Mystique and Xavier were vital as they played large roles in the comics and previous movies but had a major life changing event happen to them. Beast becomes increasingly animal-like, Mystique changes sides and Xavier becomes paralyzed and all but one where taken care of very well with clear dedication to each character’s origin.

X-Men: First Class is a brilliant blockbuster movie that will please people on many fronts, whether you’re an X-Men fan or not. The writing is brilliant along with the acting, character portrayal and many other aspects. This is definitely a film to put on your ‘to see’ list. It suffers from very minor problems such as a predictable story, some questionable editing choices and a cameo from Stan Lee but overall, a must see movie.