X-Men: First Class 226
The core the film takes place in the '60s, surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis. This is a mixed bag: the fashion seems pretty spot on, which extends from mini-skirts to the actual character costumes which are generally much closer to their original comic source material than most comic movies these days. The music is pretty nice, but there are some musical cues that aren't period appropriate and it felt wrong to me.
The bulk of the story involves Professor X and Magneto meeting and starting the X-Men with a batch of kids that you mostly don't care about. Jean Grey and Wolverine and Rogue to me are the X-Men. But the X-Men pantheon is huge, and chars like Havoc and Banshee just don't have the same stuff for me. But that's ok because they are minor compared to the Professor, Mystique and Magneto in the scope of the movie.
The story is pretty simple: The psychic and his shapeshifting friend are met by the government official, and build a team to stop a super villain (Kevin Bacon) who is hell-bent on triggering a Nuclear War between the super powers. Mutant Pride! Humans Bad! Let's All Get Along! You know the themes the X-Men play with: they're all here in fairly heavy handed doses.
So here's my thoughts: Emma Frost was weak. I don't know why Mad Men's January Jones missed the mark: she was cold, but boring. It just didn't work for me. When Beast finally gets his ultimate mutation, he looks laughably bad. Watching Magneto make ridiculous faces when he attempts to move whatever giant iron plot device stands in his way gets old. And I don't know what the budget on this one was, but many of the effects were just below what I'd expect from a summer blockbuster.
The good news is that Charles & Magneto's plot is mostly solid and interesting. Watching Prof X hit on chicks as a young man is fun. Magneto's backstory is ground into you, but there are a number of really awesome scenes where he comes off as seriously badass. Mystique is mostly well handled as well. Sadly when all the X-Men pupils are together, things get a little cheesy. But I guess they are supposed to be teenagers. There are also a couple of cute cameos.
My short answer is that I went in with fairly low expectations: The last X-Men was rough — I just wanted a movie better than that. And I really got that and more. I think Thor was a bit more fun. And honestly I'm more excited for Green Lantern right now than either of these.
expecting quality from the movie, you ask too much (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that the source material is pretty dire to begin with.
Comic books are the classic case of remembering things as better than they were. Any commercial entertainment is about making money but the good stuff can also fit art in there. Comics have always been about making money. Yes, you can get art in some of the short run books or occasionally some good runs on major titles but these characters are the bread and butter of the comic companies. This is a business. And you don't risk the franchise by taking risks. So you do boring, predictable storylines. You have giant crossover events that promise everything will change but the biggest constant is your continued disappointment at being jerked around.
I never had the money to get into comics but I've always been a scifi dork. The Battlestar Galactica I half-remembered from my youth is nothing like what actually aired. It was so much better. And Buck Rogers, I never remembered it being so tragically disco. And a lot of Trek is truly, spectacularly awful. My standards were increasing as TNG aired so I never properly appreciated the cringe factor of the early episodes until rewatching them.
It's possible to accidentally make a really good comic book movie. The first Iron Man was good and shouldn't have been. The producers admitted they spent more time on the visuals than the plot. All the best lines were ad-libbed by Downey. And the second one proved how big of a fluke the first one was by being as awful as it deserved to be.
The two Nolan Batman movies were better than we had any right to expect, especially given the direction the series had gone previously. I don't know what dark bargains were struck to keep studio intervention out of the process but damn, those were some good movies.
The problem with a comic book movie is a director's hands are going to be tied more often than not. The movie's getting made because a deal's been inked and there's money to be made. That's as opposed to the reverse of the process where producers are championing an idea and are selling it to the studio on the premise it'll make money. Sometimes the distinction's hard to see but it all boils down to a question of whether the director's doing it for the vision or the paycheck.
While the studio doesn't give a shit about anything other than making money, the real question is whether the creative team does. Witness "Pirates of the Caribbean: It's a Paycheck" or "Transformers 3: Michael Bay Needs Another Diamond-Encrusted Buttplug." You can't tell me anyone on those projects is is feeling the love. Contrast that with Lord of the Rings. Yeah, the studio couldn't give a shit about Tolkien or hobbits but they at least got out of the way of people who did. Then they fucked 'em on the percentage afterwards but at least not before the movies were made.
So yeah, X-Men. How could this have possibly been a good movie? Keep the dream alive because god knows it can't fend for itself.
Best x-men so far (Score:4, Insightful)
The first X-men movie seemed to be stiff and self-conscious. This is often the case in the first film of a franchise. What was unusual was that the second and third films were *more* stiff and self-conscious. Although there were enjoyable bits, overall the first film sorta worked as a "first film", the second mostly didn't work, and the third didn't work at all. I personally think this was due to an inexcusable overuse of Wolverine in what was supposed to be an ensemble cast. Feel free to disagree.
Parenthetically, why do "blockbuster" movie scripts suck so often? If "the last stand" had a tenth of the creativity and pathos of "god loves man kills" it would have been worth watching. As it is we got a bunch of set-piece battles and some big digital effects, but the rest was cliche even for a comic book.
Anyway, First Class had its problems (excellent dialog over here, really laughably bad dialog over there, like the writers were bipolar) (the change of Raven's appearance from appliances and body makeup to some kind of zip-up wetsuit) (Charles' inexplicably inept handling of his relationship with his adopted sister) but in general the story worked. It's the first x-men movie I've wanted to see twice.
Yeah, Alex was really Scott's younger brother, Sean was a contemporary of Charles, yadda yadda. We've had so many different versions of the story in the comics (I prefer "Ultimate x-men") that I can't see how we could complain that the backstory has changed again. The movies really only need to be self-consistent. And worth watching. The last one wasn't. This one was.
Re:Kevin Bacon has played many roles in his career (Score:4, Insightful)