X-Men: First Class – Bittersweet lament of a super fan

The new X-Men film has received mostly favorable reviews including this site, but has had about the same opening weekend as the first X-Men film and about half of the third, critically panned film (X-Men: The Last Stand). From my perspective as a fan of the X-Men property in general, I’m glad the effort has been made to make a good film. X-Men: First Class is a film that has appeal for both the common fan of movies or the “super-fan” of the comics.  Immediately after seeing the movie, I was overwhelmed by positivity and pleasant emotions. Yet I felt conflicted the more time I spent thinking since then, as bits and pieces of things I mostly didn’t think about began to surface.

First off, considering the reportedly rushed schedule and multiple script rewrites (including a well publicized change after Inception — source), I think Matthew Vaughn did a very admirable job given the constraints.  There are still problems with the film, but I’ll try to be careful with spoilers.

In general, the acting is excellent — the two lead characters, Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender — minor accent troubles aside), provide true emotional resonance to the film. Without those performances, this would be a far poorer film. The actors playing the young recruits are decent enough, but in many cases aren’t really interesting or fleshed out. And none of the villains are especially interesting, except for Sebastian Shaw, played well with a smug arrogance by Kevin Bacon.

One issue with this movie, and this isn’t a complete indictment of the film, but more the targeted audience — we don’t know many of these tertiary characters. Even as a big fan of the series, I had no idea who the tornado creating mutant was (turns out it was someone I’d never heard of called Riptide, played by Álex González) as his name was NEVER mentioned. Azazel (Jason Flemyng, severely underused), who does get some great actions scenes is essentially an unknown. And Emma Frost … that did not work at all. In many ways, her portrayal as a sort of “ice queen” was a misstep on the screen and one that didn’ t pay justice to an interesting female character. It’s hard to say if January Jones was playing too subtle because of the material or because of her capabilities as an actress. But the Emma Frost I know from the comics is far more intriguing; a lady with wit and arrogance — something barely seen in the film.

There are other things that confused fans of the movies, but not the comics — they expect to see Cyclops and Wolverine, but except for small, cute references, they will be disappointed to see a bunch of characters that I might like seeing – but they don’t care about. The film is responsible for asking us to care about all these characters, but the only ones I cared about were Xavier, Erik, and Raven/Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence). I felt actual pathos there, not just simple manipulations as with the others.

I felt affected on a emotional level by the movie, so I have to admit that when it works, it works very well. But when it doesn’t, the movie doesn’t drag but afterwards you might be disappointed by the potential. With so many moments of joy and excitement, you may not notice the moments of eye-rolling or contrivance. I didn’t really notice them myself until I thought about it after I had left the theater.

When it comes down to it, do I recommend it? Yes, you should see this film if you liked either of the first two X-Men movies.  Its strong parts make up for its weak parts. That’s my main feeling — this is a 3 out of 5 decent but flawed movie combined with a 5 out of 5 affecting and powerful movie. It’s worth your time to see this for those 5 out of 5 elements.

Getting into SPOILERS a bit here:

I was somewhat troubled by the only death of a mutant character (other than the villain) being one of the few non-white actors, and the other almost immediately joining the “evil” side. This was another issue with the film: motivation. Although Beast (Nicholas Hoult) acted effectively, his struggle seemed a bit silly and shallow. In the comics, he did have this sort of problem with his self-appearance — but only AFTER he was already blue and furry.

The ending was too rushed, in my opinion — I would have preferred seeing Charles and Erik still friends, but on the path to separate. And maybe in the next film, we’d see the actual schism. Here, the last ten minutes seemed like it was designed to say “Oh, wait … here’s everything to allow the first X-Men movie to happen,” although maybe that wasn’t a choice that Vaughn made, but one forced on him by the studio.

It’s interesting for me to see inspirations coming from recent X-Men comic book runs I’ve liked, such as New X-Men by Grant Morrison or Astonishing X-Men by Joss Whedon, both of which I’d recommend. The diamond mutant ability of Emma Frost was from New X-Men, for example, as well as the winged Angel Salvadore (Zoë Kravitz) character. Yet both weren’t used to such great effect in the First Class movie.

Clacked by Jeremy Fogelman
on Jun 07, 2011 @ 14:28 EST5EDT