RANT: X-Men: First Class

EDITOR’S NOTE: Heavy Spoilers. You’ve been warned.

So after all these months of the BSR Podcast Bots talking shit about the new X-Men movie, it finally hits theaters. I hear numerous reports (even from fellow Bots) that this movie has exceeded expectations. Really?! Can’t wait!

Friday night, June 4th, 2011 at 9:30 pm, we make our way to the movie theatre. The lights go down and the film starts. I can’t help but think to myself, “Wow, the direction this movie is going seems like a second movie in the planned X-Men: First Class trilogy could outshine this one. It will be The Empire Strikes Back of the X-Men movies.” That’s right. I just compared the new X-Men to Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope and this makes the original X-Men trilogy the Star Wars prequels. Dare I hope that the X-Men: First Class is the new trilogy of this generation! Duh duh duh!

Turns out that my hope for the future of this movie and the franchise died a few minutes after the very first scene. It hurt, it hurt so much! I sat through a 2 hour and 10 Goddamn minute, horribly under budgeted, over acted comic book movie. Seriously, it is up there with Ang Lee’s Hulk.

The movie starts with footage a young Eric Lehnsherr (Magneto) in a concentration camp. Look familiar … well it should because it is the same footage from the first X-Men movie edited to add scenes with the young new actor. Cheap, real cheap. Then we go to meet Charles Xavier, the next Harry Potter. We see him late at night as he meets his mother in the kitchen, but it turns out it is Mystique, around age 12. It was actually rather creepy to watch them morph the “mother” into a young, short, blue child with no clothes. But wait, back to young Magneto at the concentration camp. He is standing in Sebastian Shaw’s (Kevin Bacon) office and told to move a coin or his mother dies. The over acting was painful and the odd camera angle showing Eric’s shaking hands didn’t help. Then Shaw shoots his mom and Eric’s reaction … wait for it … the overdone hands in the air, the painful overacted scream of torment, and he goes berserk in a very lame way. He kills everyone but the man that killed his mom. I mean, I know he is a young kid faced against an adult, but he literally moved every metal object in the vicinity and did not strike Shaw once. Hell, he moved everything except the freakn’ coin, which Shaw then gives him when his big tantrum is over AND Eric doesn’t let something fly to the back of Shaw’s head when Shaw turns his back to him and walks out of his office leaving Eric alone with his dead mom. It is sad to say that during these first few minutes the only thing I was comparing this moment to was the wonderful acting of Jake Lloyd in The Phantom Menace.

I remember two specific points in this movie where I wanted to laugh or just flat out leave (take it from me, I should have left after the Wolverine cameo ended and got on with my life). First, there was a scene where the mutants recruited by Xavier and Magneto have a very Jurassic Park moment. They are sitting in the rec room discussing how horrible people look at them and they start to hear this pounding noise. “Wait, somethin’ ain’t right” says Darwin and they all head to the window. At this point I was hoping that when the blinds were pulled open T-Rex would be waiting or at least a sentinel to come wipe out everyone so I could go home. No such luck.

The second laugh-out-loud moment was a montage. Following the T-Rex scene, they showed a montage of the “new mutants” training. I was on the edge of my seat waiting for Eye of the Tiger music to kick in. I mean, we got the horrible training montage with no Stallone cameo whatsoever! After what feels like MONTHS of training we find that it’s only been a week and they are combat ready! Ivan Draco, you don’t stand a chance!

Now on to bash the special effects. The effects of this movie, specifically the flying effects, reminded me of when I was young and would get up early to watch Saturday morning cartoons. Although I never watched a full episode, I would compare the effects in this movie to those seen in the episodes of Power Rangers. I believe this bold statement sums up my feelings on the effects.

Continuity was painful. Don’t get me wrong, I have no doubt that creative team working on this movie had the potential to produce a great, entire reboot of the series. However, that is not the case as I suspect that 20th Century Fox refused to do a full reboot of the X-Men franchise. Instead of starting anew from comic continuity they decided to back track and stick with the horrible movie continuity thus shooting themselves in the foot. They couldn’t even get timelines down. A good example of this is Emma Frost, horribly acted by January Jones (by far the worst thing in the movie). If we are to go along with movie continuity then the character of Emma Frost would not have been born yet because we have already seen her as a young girl being freed from the Weapon X program by Wolverine in the movie X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Furthermore, at the end of Wolverine we see a very bald, pre-crippled Xavier saving the children that Wolvie has set free. Yet in X-Men: First Class Emma Frost is a full grown woman and Shaw’s second in command of the Hellfire Club while Xavier is a young, non-crippled Harry Potter.

On to characters. Kevin Bacon as Sebastian Shaw was a great casting choice, but he just didn’t bring the character to its full potential. The character of Darwin is killed off effortlessly where as in the comic books he is almost immortal like Wolverine or Deadpool. As the movie heads into the final battle I learned that Banshee can hold his breath a very long time. He goes into the water, but by God, he doesn’t come out for a little over 8 minutes (he pinged the sub and went for lunch). Beast, Mystique and Emma Frost in diamond form looked very CGI; just plain bad. The character Angel (pretty much Pixie) had a fight scene that was so bad, that when I found the clip on you tube to show my wife, she started laughing, really, really hard and kept pausing to look for wires.

One of the many confusing ideas I tried to wrap my mind around in this movie is the final battle between Magneto and Sebastian. Magneto works to get Sebastian’s guard down long enough to allow Xavier to telepathically freeze him. Magneto gets Shaw’s helmet (the helmet used to block telepaths) and puts it on. Magneto’s plan is to wear the helmet while killing Shaw so that Xavier cannot stop him with telepathy. What I don’t get is why Xavier doesn’t let Shaw free of his telepathic freeze so he can at least fight Magneto on fair terms. Instead he wastes his time trying to get into Magneto’s head to stop him from going to the dark side.

At the end of the movie bullets fly and a stray bullet cripples Xavier, Holy crip he’s a crapple! Total bummer. The film ends with each mutant taking sides. Good or bad, I don’t think it mattered in this movie because everyone kinda sucked in their own way. Oh, I also learned that CIA is no place for a woman.

The movie did have a few strong moments. The much talked about Wolverine cameo was the best 12 seconds of the whole movie. Also, the over the top violence in this movie was what was missing from the Bryan Singer directed chapters of the franchise. For example, Azazel slaughters countless guards by teleporting them into the air and letting them drop to their deaths. It was something we would never see in the original trilogy. The times they are a changin’.

As I stated in the beginning, I wanted this movie to be so much more and I believe it could have been given the right circumstances. But instead we are left with … this… X-Men: First Class. Now if you will excuse me, I need to go watch X-Men Origins: Wolverine to burn this horrible movie out of my mind.