X-Men - First Class

This film did the best job of completely making it impossible for me to be able to properly rate it as a film.   It did a great job at not being an over-the-top special effect reliant comic book movie, but it also didn't do a great job of developing characters and establishing the relationships of them to one another.

Follow up:

I think the biggest flaw was that the film seemed to try and squeeze three and half hours of movie in to two and half hours.   There would be sequences of very short scenes that were trying to develop the interactions between characters that really needed to be longer.  The film was just rushing character development at times, where it needed to slow down.  Of course, slowing down would mean making the film much longer, or requiring a sequel.

The relationship between Magneto and Xavier also seemed rushed.   I'm comic book illiterate, but my understanding is that these two were who started it all, and were side by side for a while.   In the film, they stand side-by-side and share a very short alliance.   It just seemed so rushed.  I would have expected a longer alliance between the two, with cracks showing on the facade.   Here, what could have been a climatic separation in a film or two just became a simple, there you have it, sort of ending.   That seemed to rob the event of the sort of drama it deserved.  Not as bad as Anakin becoming Darth Vadar over nothing in Star Wars III, but are we going to set the bar so low?

The historical angle was nice.  I liked how the film did well to position the film, mutants, with the Cuban Missile Crisis.  It was also nice not to have any spin on the event, with American missiles in Turkey being the catalyst for Soviet Missiles in Cuba, something most Americans probably never knew in the first place.

I didn't like the immediate hatred of the mutants in the film.  While I would expect distrust, what would have been better (if multiple films were in the plan) was to end the first film with DC and the military, in secret, asking themselves what in the heck just happened and who those people were.  A second film could have grown the animosity of the military and politicians against the mutants, but once again, something that could have slowly been built to a climax, just a plot device.   Maybe it was honest with the comic, I don't know.

So as you can tell, I saw flaws in the film verses what it could have been.  But the movie that it actually was, was not bad, it just wasn't great.  X-Men 2 just seemed to line up everything perfectly, because it had the exposition of X-Men backing it up.  This film tries to be X-Men First Class and a X-Men First Class 2 all within the same film, and that is its biggest flaw.   Better than 3, not as good as 2, blows Wolverine out of the water (what doesn't?).

6.9 of 10