X-Men: The Random Class

A group of my friends wanted to go see X-Men: First Class last night so I decided to join them. I haven’t read any articles about the movie but I’ve seen the trailers. When they first announced the movie, I had heard that it was going to be a reboot from the movies doing it right with the actual original 5 (not counting the later added group from X-Men: Deadly Genesis). Instead we get a group added from just about every phase of X-Men history: Darwin (from the recently revealed first team), Beast (who appeared in the first issue), Havok (one of the members added later in the early series), Banshee (from the first team revamp in Giant Size X-Men #1), Angel (not Warren from the original team, but the female added in 2001), and Mystique (who is mostly known as a villain with only a short association with the team). We know this is out of continuity with the other movies as Beast is his furry blue self at the end of this but was human in the 2nd movie. And what was with his feet being hands? The decision to make the Hellfire Club their first enemy was… different. The really sad part of it was when I saw that Sebastien Shaw was not only being played by Kevin Bacon but was an old Nazi. Emma was pretty accurate despite the age in relation to the other characters. The addition of Azazel, Nightcrawler’s father didn’t even make sense since he’s a demon, not a mutant. (Yes, I know not all members were mutants in the comic, but this story was especially about mutants. And then there was the character I couldn’t figure out to the credits. I was taking it to be Shinobi Shaw with all the wrong powers, but it turned out to be Riptide, a character I barely remember at all. There’s way too much “WTF” in the choices made for this movie. The one really enjoyable part was when Charles and Erik go off to recruit Wolver, it’s actually Hugh Jackman and he just tells them to fuck off.Great cameo. We see Charles lose use of his legs and Mystique leads off with Azazel (and the other bad guys) which will lead to Nightcrawler. Moira as a CIA agent though? Really?

Now, let’s step back. Let’s take out all knowledge of X-Men history and look at the movie. The lead in introducing Eric and Charles seemed extremely long. I think a lot of the early parts for Erik were taken right from the first movie. It took forever to introduce most of the characters and they could have used more development. Darwin was introduced and killed off pretty fast and Angel just flipped sides so fast it was ridiculous, though with no real character development, we shouldn’t be surprised. One comment that went out was that Banshee looked like Run from the Harry Potter movies in an X-Men uniform. The effects were pretty good and overall, it wasn’t a bad movie really if you don’t accept it as anything near cannon. Hell, if it was anywhere further from cannon, it would have had DC characters in it. (Heck, it made the X-Men Evolution TV show seem close to the regular universe in comparison.) It was interesting to watch though if you tried to forget everything you know about the X-Men. Not sure if there weill be a sequel to it or not and what they will do from this point. If you can’t abide non-continuity, don’t got anywhere near this movie. If you want an escapist moment loosely based on the X-Men franchise, check it out.

Oh, and before you wait, there’s no extra scene at the end of the credits.