X Men First Class

Hey kids,
Went to see X-Men First Class with my wife and a friend and I have to say on a whole the movie was entertaining but I do have some problems with it.

The first of these problems being plot. Just like with recent sequels such as Pirates 4 and even Fast Five there seemed to be a lot the director was trying to push into a 90 minute film. One second you're with the X-men as children and then suddenly they're in college and WHAM you are thrown in to the Cuban Missile Crisis which in turn turned out to be the end of the world scheme by another mutant. My advise to this director would be slow down. There will be other movies, like it or not, and there doesn't have to be a complete history/story/motive/big bang in one movie. Pace yourself here, we're thinking long term franchise and he's making the movie as if it will be the very last movie ever made.

The second big problem is continuity. Continuity is how well a story told through not one movie but many, meaning is this the story that we were being told in the first X-Men movie? Nope. The movie starts out at a familiar point but through the progress of the film new points are drawn, new characters introduced and new ideas that completely contradict the original ideas given in past films. This not only confuses the dedicated fan, but leads new fans astray from the original story. Now some would argue that this points are only important to fanboys and not really to the causal movie goers. Well that may be partly true, but it is also partly false. When building a franchise of films you have to have a story that flows easily from movie to movie and once you have established a history in past films betraying that history, or in X-Men's case, completely rewriting it only ruins the past films for the new fans. What's the moral of this story? No one liked the second Highlander, it made no sense and once you got down to it , it was just really silly. Please X-Men, let's not follow down that path.

But seriously, the film was filled with oohs and awes and it gave a decent amount of action for the price of seven twenty five for the ticket, but in the end it lacked on story and attempted to compensate for that by adding Kevin Bacon to the mix. I would like to say it worked, but then at the same time I didn't leave the movie with that happy little feeling I had when I first saw the original X-Men. Beef it up guys, or your franchise is in danger of falling in the wake of the Avengers' film which is building speed with the coming release of Captain America.

Just my opinion.
J.


P.S. Posts to follow, hopefully, Thor, Green Lantern, Captain America, and Super 8