Just got back from watchin' X-Men: First Class, and I thought that it was a very well put together movie. I liked that the storyline riffed on both the Connery Era Bond movies as well as the superhero genre, but I'm always a sucker for retroscience fiction stories.
I thought that James MacAvoy, Michael Fassbender and Kevin Bacon were all great in their roles as Charles, Eric and Shaw respectively, but the real points I feel should go out to Jennifer Lawrence for her protrayal of Mystique, who managed to lift a rather one-note character from the previous films into something a bit more special.
The plot skipped along at a fairly good pace, though I especially liked the sections at the beginning which involved Eric in his Nazi hunting days. I have to admit that I may have seen too many movies at this point, but the fact that Charles' manor was the same mansion that they used for Wayne Manor in Batman Begins really amused me. As did a Soviet general having a summer home that was used in a Bond movie, Living Daylights I think it was, as a Mi6 safehouse.
I liked a number of the little touches in the movie, like a couple of cameos from the previous X-men movies (one of which was damn hilarious), as well as little things like how James MacAvoy's Xavier isn't really the wise and allknowing leader he'd be by the time he'd aged into Patrick Stewart. For example, his means of attempting to calm Eric down, considering Magneto's history, was really, REALLY a poor decision on his part.
If I have any complaints though, and they'll be pretty minor ones at that, is if they wanted this to be a straight-up reboot of the franchise instead of the prequel that they intended, they really should have checked it a bit more for inconsistencies. Like the difference between the ages of Emma Frost in this movie and Emma in her cameo in that crap Wolverine flick.
Oh, and Beast's facial make-up was awful.
All in all, I'd recommend this movie, if only because the team of Michael Vaughn and Jane Goldman have done a stellar job in turning what was rapidly becoming the Hugh Jackman Show, featuring some other mutants, into more of an effective team superhero movie.
Kind of saddened that due to Fox owning the rights to the X-Men movies we won't have a Michael Fassbender/Ian MacKellan Magneto versus Hugo Weaving's Red Skull fight, but c'est la vie.
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