X-Men: First Class

Review by Jason Donner

We've endured two terrible sequels since the X-Men movies last gleamed with the pure awesomeness of a true Summer blockbuster and now, like Star Trek and James Bond, it's getting a reboot up its butt to shake some of the tedium off and, by the looks of things, this is something that should have been done a long time ago.

It's X-Men: First Class, a sort-of prequel and kind-of reboot to the X-Men movies hoping to shake off the stink of The Last Stand and Wolverine.  So far, so good!

Taking one giant step back into the 1960's right in the lap of the Cuban Missile Crisis, X-Men: First Class documents how a young Professor Xavier (played very well by James McAvoy) first assembles his X-Men.  Among them is a young Magneto (played equally well by Michael Fassbender) dealing with the fresh pain of his parents deaths at the hands of the Nazis.

It's a very scary time for the world.  Not only is every collected human on the planet staring down the barrel at the very real threat of nuclear war, but the very first mutants are beginning to immerge and, while man of them stay hidden out of fear, some of them believe that they are the next step in human evolution and they will do anything -- including that before mentioned nuclear war -- to insure that they wind up on top of the heap.

That group is the Hellfire Club and it's headed by a man named Sebastian Shaw, played by Kevin Bacon who looks like he's having the time of his life playing someone so suave.  Shaw wants nuclear war because he has a somewhat-religious belief that mutants were born of the atom and will evolve by it.

Honestly, Shaw's rather James Bond plan doesn't matter, because I wouldn't even call him the main antagonist of the story.  That's not to insult Mr. Bacon at all because he is really fun in this movie and he's named after one of my favorite things in the universe, he just has the unfortunate luck of simply being a cinematic means to an end.

The true confrontational meat in this story is Magneto and his justifiable anger and need for revenge.  If X-Men: First Class has a main villain, it would be the man Magneto is to become.  Watching Erik go from being angry and unsure of himself to the supervillain he is by the end of the picture is enrapturing mostly because many of the decisions he makes are decisions I can't say I wouldn't make myself.  It's impossible to say that Professor X or Magneto is entirely right or entirely wrong and it's that kind of moral ambiguity that makes the movie so interesting.  Tearing The Golden Gate Bridge out of place and using it to cross over to Alcatraz to kill a bunch of scientists is evil... having incompatible goals is something else all together.

There are many other things in this movie that makes it work.  The secondary characters are fun and interesting, there are some clever action sequences with some clever uses of powers, and some character archs that you simply never see coming.  I know the whole Mystique origin story threw me for a loop, but it made perfect sense as it played out.

There are also two cameos in this movie.  One is subtle while the other is not -- the one that is not could very well be one of the best cameos in the history of cameos.

Not only is X-Men First Class the best X-Men movie, but it could also be the best Marvel superhero movie so far -- at the very least, it's on par with the first Iron Man movie.  I simply enjoyed this movie; It was wonderfully written, smartly paced, and was full of great actors playing great characters.  I wish all superhero movies could be like this!

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