X-Men: First Class

The universe of the X-Men has already had one attempt at tackling a strand of a prequel narrative with the Wolverine movie they made a couple of years ago. That movie was something of a clunker. Arguably X-Men: First Class is treading similar ground only this time the ‘origin’ story focuses on Professor X (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) and how it is the former came to create the mutant academy as seen in the X-Men films and the latter came to be an antagonist bent on promoting mutants as the next superior species on the planet.

However, a fundamental point here is that whilst First Class feels like it is directly linked to the X-Men trilogy there are differences from that set of films to this – continuity points, character ages, revisions of history – that mark it out as existing in its own universe and not a true prequel. It’s a bit like the Star Trek reboot recently – it takes a world and characters you know well and positions them onto a blank slate where the future has not already been seen.



X-Men: First Class certainly doesn’t mind sticking closely to the existing mythology, mind. The opening scene of a young Magneto unleashing his ability in a Nazi concentration camp is exactly the same as from the first X-Men (indeed, at first I believed it was simply the same footage – though given the young Magneto appears in further scenes it suggests director Matthew Vaughn just re-shot the sequence exactly as Bryan Singer (here on producing duties) did over a decade previous).

The movie has a good two hour running time though it certainly doesn’t feel that long. Indeed I thought the first third of the movie rattled along so quickly it could have done with pulling on the reins just a tad. There’s a cavalier Charles Xavier, flirting with the girls, jealously watched over by a young Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence). He is then recruited by a special mutant division of the FBI, spearheaded by Moira McTaggart (Rose Byrne, looking great in her underwear within a minute of appearing on-scene) who are all on a political collision course with the Cuban missile crisis.

Meanwhile, young future Magneto Erik is sauntering around the globe like a 007-agent on a killing spree taking down ex-Nazis in his hunt for his murderous enemy, Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon). Shaw, here as chief villain, shares the same ideology that Magneto himself will eventually espouse – being that mutants are the next evolutionary successors and should supplant humans before they are turned upon. Shaw already has a small gang of mutants, from January Jones’ Emma Frost (another scantily-clad beauty sporting eye-popping bikini tops) to Jason Flemying’s Azazel (devilishly cool if a little muted and two-dimensional).



Eventually Charles and Erik collude to thwart Shaw’s clear and present attempts at igniting nuclear war to wipe out humanity, enlisting young mutants that will eventually become the titular ‘first class’ of the mutant academy, including a pre-Beast incarnation Hank McCoy amongst a lively, entertaining bunch.



Yet the focus really is mainly on Charles and Erik and it’s in both their performances (McAvoy and Fassbender are both outstanding, with McAvoy’s Xavier just about pinching the honours thanks to a refreshing script that paints his Professor X in a whole different shade and his own cheeky, dashing verve). The essential conflict between them – of a pro-human Xavier hoping to find a truce between races rubbing up against Magneto’s fundamentally genocidal leanings – is here in tentative form. It’s sometimes subtle, how the two compromise to achieve their own ends, but eventually something has to give and it does so very dramatically, and emotionally.



See, for all the plotting (which isn’t exactly young kid-friendly with way more subtitles than you might anticipate for this sort of movie) and action set pieces (in truth not much to really set the pulse racing beyond the rip-roaring finale) the X-Men films have always been about the characters – of them finding themselves, finding acceptance and finding their way forward – and the same is true here. It’s a hoary old trope, but the character journey is king and if First Class is burdened by anything it’s the need to cater for a lot of character journeys.

For some reason I didn’t quite enjoy First Class as much as I thought I was going to. Afterwards I interrogated myself on this point, asking myself what it was the film had done to disappoint me – and in doing so I had to consider I was perhaps being too hard on it. It didn’t quite have the killer sequence to wow me, sure, and sometimes the too-cute ironic references felt stretched (twice Xavier makes a quip about his hair that undercuts what we know will eventually become an iconic baldness). But it’s a movie of great performances, of terrific energy, it’s even got a villain in Bacon’s Shaw that doesn’t feel hammy, that genuinely feels like more than a match for our heroes.

In short, it doesn’t do a lot wrong and, meanwhile, it gets on with doing everything else well. I suppose it was just the lack of surprise, the lack of edge that left me feeling a little flat. Mrs. Comet, I should add for counterbalance, who surprises herself by being a big fan of the X-Men films, came out of it having thoroughly loved it. Perhaps, then, purely my high expectations lead to my slightly deflated opinion.

X2 remains the best ever X-Men film to date. First Class doesn’t ever quite match the panache of X2’s teleporting White House infiltration, or the brute force of Wolverine defending the mansion from attacking kidnappers. Yet First Class is, at this stage, still tethered to that previous trilogy and it’s perhaps in a movie or two down the line will it really be able to stand apart as its own franchise like a genetically-modified distant cousin. X-Men: First Class in its own right is absolutely top class entertainment, without quite being best in class of the X-Men world. Genes this strong, mind, have the potential to evolve into something very special.