Banana Scoop

Okay, I know I’m a couple of weeks late.  I actually saw this movie a week after it came out, but I’m still oozing from its excellence that I still have the need put my thoughts into words.  After a jumble of bad publicity photos and promotion, including a bad first image and a questionable first trailer, the movie still impressed.  Anchored heavily towards character development, an idea absent in ‘Last Stand’ and ‘Origins: Wolverine’, this film succeeds in reviving the interesting world of X-Men.  Any cheesiness and awkward moments observed are balanced out with strong performances by James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender to make First Class a welcome edition to the X-Men franchise.

The story mainly follows the early lives of Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr, Professor X and Magneto respectively.  But these times are long before either of them were under those aliases, and hardly recognizable from Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan’s take on the two mutants, audiences will find them refreshing with their youth.  In particular, Fassbender’s deliciously dark take on a young Magneto will have audiences cringing for more as we see the power of magnetism is truly a terrifying thing  to behold and by putting it in the hands of a character more relatable than McKellan’s character, an audience can both fear and awe at it’s awesome power.

In this film there is heavy emphasis on the historical events occurring this time.  Set during the height of the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis, these serve as major plot advancers to propel the story.  Admist these events, the characters in the movie are each going through their own issues with identity and purpose.  And instead of focusing on the big picture, director Michael Vaughn focuses on character development and dialogue to make everyone in the movie serve a purpose than ‘Mutant #12’, as seen in previous X-Men installments.  On one hand, we have Erik Lehnsherr plotting his revenge on the man who killed his mother and on the other we have Charles Xavier finding his purpose in life as a young intellectual.  The two meet CIA operative Moira MacTaggart (the beautiful Rose Byrne) and soon get involved in defusing the Cuban Missile Crisis.  By recruiting some other mutants with an early version of Cerebro, they eventually make a team of mutants to counter another group of  mutants led by Kevin Bacon’s Sebastian Shaw, a mutant who’s perpetuating an eventual World War III and whose power is as deliciously terrifying as Lehnshurr’s.

1 Movie, 2 Crushes: Rose Byrne and Michael Fassbender

The climax of the film is a moment where both Soviet and US ships are in a standoff on the shore of Cuba.  On the verge of WWIII, Xavier and Lehnshurr’s team arrive and inevitably have showdown with Shaw and his mutants.  These fights are cheesy and seem almost forced in, but they lead to the tense and dramatic showdown between Lehnsherr and Shaw.  When the smoke clears and Xavier and Lehnsherr believe they’ve won, they gain a new enemy, the human race.  Throughout the film, Lehnsherr warns Xavier over and over again about how the humans will betray them, and if we didn’t know Lehnsherr would later become Magneto the antagonist, we would probably have been on his side the entire time compared to Xavier’s naive nature.  The ending provides excellent closure as we see the set up of how Xavier ended up in a wheel chair and how Lehnsherr assumed the alias Magneto.

Director Michael Vaughn (Kick-Ass) makes a movie that is pleasantly more enjoyable than the last two previous installments of the X-Men Franchise.  Instead of trying to fit a hundred mutants in one movie and expecting them to develop on their own, Vaughn focuses on the relationships between his characters and the dialogue between them.  Conversation about identity issues, repressed anger, and pride in oneself all serve as intellectual and thought provoking points for the audience to think about and Vaughn’s sprinkle of style and action entertain also.  All in all, X-Men: First Class is a movie that allows us to welcome mutants again in open arms.

4/5 Stars

I call everything Michael Fassbender did as Magneto in this movie 'Fassbending'. I look forward to seeing him again.