Movie Review: X-Men: First Class

I've heard a few bad things about this movie. Most of the issues they have seem to center around the accents, or lack thereof, in the characters. You know what? I don't have an issue with that. I'll even forgive departure from the original story if it helps convert things from a comic book to a movie. I mean Spiderman 3 got into the Venom symbiote without talking about the Secret Wars on some other planet. The Incredible Hulk changed the gamma bomb to some other gamma ray experiment. I'm not familiar enough with the Hellfire Club in X-Men lore to be able to tell you what they screwed up. And it doesn't really matter.

The movie starts with a scene from the original X-Men movie. I'm assuming that they refilmed it for this movie, but they did a good job recreating the scene. It's where a young Magneto (Erik) is being separated from his family by the Nazis. Kevin Bacon wants to exploit Erik's power but makes a horrible mistake in how he goes about it and put's Erik on a lifelong quest to kill escaped Nazis, and Kevin Bacon especially.

Meanwhile, young Charles Xavier finds an even younger Mystique lurking around in his kitchen. We never see his parents, but it's clear he's managed to get them to adopt her, or at least be her foster family.

Eventually Charles and Mystique are taken on by a government agency to help them deal with an organization called The Hellfire Club led by Kevin Bacon and several other mutants that want to take over the world by having normal people wipe themselves out first. Charles and Erik meet while trying to pursue the Hellfire Club and procede to collect other mutants with the help of the government. At first it's just to form a community, but soon they need training to help save the world. The whole movie comes to a head at the heart of the Cuban Missle Crisis.

I liked the movie. It was funny, a good story well told, and shows how the big and little things in the lives of the mutants drove them into one camp or another. The Magneto movie clearly wasn't ever gonna get made so they incorporated that storyline into this movie. The story was co-written and the movie produced by Brian Singer. This was good because Singer was the writer/director of X-Men 1 & 2, but not 3. Three was the one that sucked.

I'll probably get it on DVD.