Starring: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Kevin Bacon, Jennifer Lawrence and January Jones
Directed By: Matthew Vaughn
Story By: Sheldon Turner and Bryan Singer
Screenplay By: Ashley Edward Miller, Zack Stentz, Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn
Produced By: Gregory Goodman, Simon Kinberg, Lauren Shuler Donner and Bryan Singer
Distributor: 20th Century Fox
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: Approximately 132 minutes
Website: x-menfirstclassmovie.com
Budget: $160 million
Genre: Action, Drama
Release Date: June 3, 2011
Pretend you are a major movie studio; say, Fox. You’ve just found out that Disney, one of your biggest competitors, has bought Marvel Comics, who has in the past licensed their characters to you to make movies. These movies have made you many hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. As per pre-existing contracts, you, the studio, must have a new movie based on those previously licensed characters out within a set time frame. If you do not have a new movie out within that time frame, the rights revert back to Marvel, and thereby Disney, who will make their own movies out of them. Many more millions of dollars will be made, but they will be made by a major competitor. What do you do?
You make a movie. You make a movie before the rights revert and you pray you get it out there before time runs out.
X-Men: First Class is the product of this screwy system, fifth in a relatively long franchise with two good movies (2000’s X-Men and 2003’s X2) and two mediocre ones (X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine). The existence of X-Men: First Class is a crass cash-in, a deadline-beating Hail-Mary pass of a movie designed to eke a few more dollars from a well-known property… and despite being all those things, it’s actually pretty good.
Moving on from the creative dead end that was The Last Stand, First Class puts the action in 1962 and in the thick of the Cold War. Though the two would later go on to be generals in the war for genetic supremacy in the modern-set X-Men movies, in this era, Oxford intellectual Charles Xavier (Atonement’s James McAvoy) and traumatized Holocaust survivor Erik Lensherr (Michael Fassbender of Inglourious Basterds) are unique “mutants” – humans born with amazing powers activated at puberty. X can change your mind with a thought from his, and “Magneto” can control magnetic fields. They’re early super heroes and villains in an era when such a thing is rare, and we’re decades away from Xavier‘s scads of “X-Men” and Magneto’s more militant team of mutants.
In this era, the two men are unique specimens in a world where they must hide their abilities. Accompanied by ravishing shape-changer Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence of Winter’s Bone), Xavier is drawn into the CIA’s plans to search for others of the relatively rare mutants. At the same time, Erik is tracking down Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon. Yes, Kevin Bacon), the man who recognized Erik’s potential for superhuman power back at the camps and spent years mentally and physically torturing him to tap that power. Both men eventually find themselves in pursuit of Shaw, now reinventing himself as a Bond villain-type as head of the ostentatious mutant enclave, the Hellfire Club. To get to Shaw, the two men will have to work together despite their differing ideologies.
There’s also more super-powered mutants on both sides than can reasonably fit in one movie, all of them drawn from the nearly 50-year history of X-Men comic books. If the movie has a failing, it’s that many of these characters remain underdeveloped, reduced to a codename, a power set, and just enough personality to make the potential of their dying a bummer. The film drives home the central themes of alienation and acceptance with a “Mutant and proud!” subplot that underlines the supposition that “mutant” is a stand-in for any oppressed minority.
But this is The Charles and Erik Show, and keeping Fassbender and McAvoy front and center works to the film’s advantage. There’s plenty of special effects heroics – skin bristling with armor, energy blasts flying, people swooping through the air – but the Xavier/Magneto dynamic has always been the central conflict (and metaphor) of the series. In the three prior X-Men films it’s rarely been as on-point as its portrayal here.
The credit for keeping the plates spinning and somehow making a decent film under strained circumstances goes to director Matthew Vaughn, who’s had previous comics-to-film experience with Stardust and Kick-Ass and was at one time set to direct The Last Stand. He’s wise to have held out for a better shot. For First Class he brings along frequent collaborator Jane Goldman, his screenwriter for both those previous movies and with whom he re-engineered First Class’s screenplay (which credits six! screenwriters). Vaughn and Goldman are among the comic book faithful, and it shows in their lovingly distorted view of the swinging ‘60s and the political climate surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis. When the X-Men swoop out of their plane in blue-and-yellow jumpsuits to tackle an evil, immaculately coifed Kevin Bacon and his henchmen, Vaughn and Goldman have earned enough of the audience’s trust that it’s compelling, not silly.
Given its unusual provenance, it’s remarkable that First Class holds up as well as it does. There are a few winking nods to the “future” of the X-Men, but those are there for the fans and don’t detract a bit from the convergence and inevitable split of Erik and Charles as we see them become the men that face off, decades later. Ignore whatever confusion might erupt from the series’ strained chronology and enjoy First Class for its own merits, free of the burden of turgid sequels and the creative resuscitation of the characters Fox has probably been hoping for.
3 Stars
