Movie Review: X Men

By Justin Emedot, :: 08-08-2011

X-Men First Class seems to be a reboot of the X-Men Franchise, with Professor X and Magneto coming  back after an absence of X-Men Origin: Wolverine. McAvoy stars as Charles Xavier, a young telepathic man, smart, charming and from a rich family. Also starring is Erik Lehnsherr- Magneto, a man whose mission in life is to avenge his mother’s death at the hands of the Nazi’s.
    It starts at a  camp in Poland in 1944, scientist Dr. Schmidt observes young Erik Lensherr bend a metal gate with his mind when the child is separated from his parents. In his office, Schmidt orders Lensherr to similarly move a coin on a desk, and kills his mother when the child cannot. In his grief and anger, Lensherr's magnetic power manifests, killing two guards and destroying the room, to Schmidt's delight.    
  Meanwhile at a mansion in Westchester County, a young Xavier meets homeless young shape-shifter Raven. Overjoyed to meet someone else "different" like him, he invites her to live with his family.
   Director Matthew Vaughn has made the elusive great prequel and it’s great from both angles. First Class is a great place to start for newcomers to the franchise because it sets up the characters’ backgrounds and ambitions flawlessly, not only for this film but for the rest of the franchise.
  It’s also great for those who have seen the other films from the series because it brings a fresh  perspective to the franchise, this one isn’t Wolverine-centred (although Wolverine has a small but gratifying cameo) but rather Xavier vs. Magneto centred.
   It adds a new dimension to the characters that quite wasn’t there from the previous films. In both cases, just watching it makes the rest of the series even better.
   But the film isn’t exclusively about mutants; it also has a heavy part that resembles a Cold War thriller: it has war rooms, nukes, spies, Cuba… It plays around with the ideas of nuclear war and mutually assured destruction quite a bit and adds the extra factor of mutants being involved. The politics are, as is almost always the case, in a superhero film, the most entertaining “what if” of the story.
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