Okay, there are going to be SPOILERS in this post so stop reading if you don’t want to find out anything about this movie.

 

 

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Went and saw X-Men First Class this afternoon and I really enjoyed it.  I liked the fact it was tied to real world events in their alternate history Earth.  I adore James McAvoy so I was a very happy camper.  Michael Fassbender was great as Erik aka Magnito.  In fact these two actors were so good that they pretty much outclassed all the rest of the cast.

I had a few quibbles.  My friend pointed out that after four X-Men movies the theme of “oh the humans hate mutants” is starting to wear a little thin.  I think that’s one thing we did really well in Wild Cards.  We dealt with civil rights issues, but we moved on to a world where the aces and joker/aces have a reality show, and Peregrine was as famous as Oprah, etc.  Societies adjust.

Although it led to a great visual at the end I couldn’t buy the Russian and American fleets firing missiles at the guys who had just prevented WWIII.  That rang false for me.

I was also sorry to see them cripple Xavier this early.  One of the things I loved about this film was seeing Professor X as a virile, cocky, but essentially incredibly decent man.

I thought Kevin Bacon as ’60’s style Bond villain was also great.  Which brings me to the look of the movie which was spot on.  Emma Frost in her leather outfits and GoGo boots, the night clubs, the Bond villain submarine.  I loved it.

It also reminded me of why I love Wild Cards.  Our Aces/superheroes never wore costumes, and that is a really good thing.  I could go along with the black and yellow jumpsuits in the movie because they say they are like kevlar.  But at the very end where Magneto turns up in the cloak and the helmet and the red jacket it just made me giggle.  Which is too bad because before that Fassbender had created a fascinating, brilliant and tortured man.  And then he put on a weirdrobe and undercut the whole thing.