X-Men: First Class - First Class Fun!

Details

Category: Film

Published on Tuesday, 28 February 2012 01:10

Written by Janet Walker

X-MEN: FIRST CLASS, a high action, entertaining sci-fi flick from Twentieth Century Fox, Marvel Entertainment and Dune Entertainment, recently screened for members of the press on the FOX STUDIO lot in Century City, CA.

Directed by Matthew Vaugh, X-MEN: FIRST CLASS stars James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Rose Byrne, Jennifer Lawrence, January Jones, Nicholas Hoult, as the band of gifted human mutants with Oliver Platt  as a CIA believer and Kevin Bacon as the insidious Sebastian Shaw/Dr. Schmidt.

X-MEN: FIRST CLASS, the prequel to the incredibly successful franchise, produced by Lauren Shuler Donner, Bryan Singer, Simon Kinberg and Gregory Goodman is an adaptation from the series of MARVEL comic books characters.

The film begins in 1942 with a young Erik (Bill Milner) separated from his parents as they are on their way to the Death Camps. His emotional state causes the exhibition of his gift and he is sent to Dr. Schmidt (modeled after Angel of Death Josef Mengele) who uses the horrifying methods that have reverberated through the decades to humor himself as he extracts the mental gifts from his prisoner.

The child grows into a man (Michael Fassbender) who is determined to avenge the atrocities he and countless others suffered and is bent on finding the sinister Schmidt now Sebastian Shaw.

Simultaneously, a young Xaiver (Lawrence Belcher), believes he has caught a bugler in his home, and through his abilities to read minds, find his mother being impersonated by a morphed mutant stealing food (Morgan Lily), an argument many teenagers would agree is possible.

The two become fast friends, sharing a secret, growing into young adults, attending Oxford studying genetics during the height of The Cold War.

Rose Bryne (Damages) enters as a CIA operative on mutant detail. Needing expert assistance she travels to Europe to find Charles Xavier (Professor X) together with a CIA believer (Oliver Platt) they begin to search for other mutants living among us.

January Jones is Emma Frost, a mutant accessory to Kevin Bacon’s Dr Schmidt/Sebastian Shaw. Bacon portrays his character with sinister malevolence, the butcher of the Balkans mentality, a kind smile, a warm bed side manner with evil, killer, instincts that allow his conscience to rest well long after the horrors of his actions.

The WWII concentration camp scenes remain as gripping and concerning especially as we move further from that time period and The Sixties seem the defining historical reference for the new millennium. We cannot forget those murdered during the Nazi genocide.

The back story resonates with youthful dilemmas including how to handle the need to be accepted, willing to do anything for acceptance, finding someone who loves you exactly the way you are, scales and all, and wanting to be “normal.”

For first time X-MEN fans, X-MEN: FIRST CLASS answers all the background questions that have plagued X-MEN fans for years and acts as an introduction to the now developed characters of the X-MEN brotherhood. 

X-MEN: FIRST CLASS presents an understandable, easy to grasp, plot and blends originality in the storyline with dialogue that was real and enjoyable and as an anglophile pleasant on the ears. The ability to look past the obvious and understand behavioral sciences is really the underlying back story. Seeing a morphed mutant, it was easy to see people in everyday life, understanding how people we love become odd, distant or unlike the person we loved is the change process the mutants face as they show their true colors.

X-MEN: FIRST CLASS is first class fun! See it at a theater near you!