MindFood: 'X-Men: 1st Class' Surprises
Jumat, 03 Juni 2011 by Android Blackberry
Each summer there are a handful of movies which you can’t aid but preemptively geek out over. Balls-out blockbusters like Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Captain America are the kind of huge screen beacons we have to have throughout the cold and dry very first few months of the year when the only kind of escapist action movies out are dreck like Priest, Season of the Witch and Sucker Punch. And each summer those balls-out blockbusters wind up disappointing in one way or one more, so every single year we’ve got to trim down the number of movies we think are actually going to stand the test of time. Of this summer’s box office crop, X-Men: First Class fell into the category of blockbusters I’d entirely written off.
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| 'X-Men: 1st Class' Surprises |
Oh how wrong I was.
Not counting films on the festival circuit, X-Men: First Class is the very first movie this year that I’d truly consider a must-see movie. Oh, I do not believe it is flawless. It is a little cheesy at times, it’s a bit lengthy, and January Jones can be a real bore as Emma Frost, but those 3 complaints are minor compared to the film at significant, which is actually a truly character-driven, kick-ass reboot of a downhill franchise that reminds we what it is like to enjoy a superhero movie once more. So should you, like I had, have written off X-Men: First Class, here’s why you must see it this weekend.
The Actors
1 of essentially the most consistent compliments I heard about Thor was how much it showcased Chris Hemsworth as an A-list leading man. And while I don’t disagree with that - the man is pure charisma - Michael Fassbender as Magneto makes Hemsworth look like a fan auditioning for the role of a superhero. This isn’t a case of somebody fitting the role quite well, this is actually a case of an individual being the role totally. Fassbender isn’t playing a mutant holocaust survivor our for revenge, he can be a mutant holocaust survivor. It’s one of those rare performances that is so perfect you simply can't picture any individual else performing it justice. I can picture other people today as Thor or Batman or Harry Potter, but Fassbender’s performance here is so singular that no one else can compete. If there is certainly any 1 reason to see this movie, it’s Fassbender.
But what makes X-Men: Initial Class even better is that, though Fassbender may well steal the show at each turn, it hardly falls flat without him. James McAvoy is good as a young, groovy version of Professor X that is really, quite different from Patrick Stewart’s take. Jennifer Lawrence is solid and alluring as Mystique and Kevin Bacon is killer as the film’s villain, Sebastian Shaw. The only weak point acting-wise is January Jones, an actress who has so small on-screen personality a conspiracy theorist may possibly assume that Fassbender is some sort of acting vampire that sucked her life dry just before every single take. But she’s hardly a main character, so it is no big loss. Plus, a batch of extremely cool character actors pop up throughout the flick, each bringing an always-welcome “Woah, I had no thought that guy was in this movie!” feeling
The Setting
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| MindFood: 'X-Men: 1st Class' Surprises |
I do not know why I wasn’t immediately excited about a period piece X-Men movie. I undoubtedly will need to have been, but there was just something about it that seemed like it came having a hidden asterisk on account of memories of other period piece hero flicks like The Phantom plus the Shadow, but damned if Vaughn and organization don’t pull it off perfectly here. The setting isn’t played purely for nostalgia or anything like that, it’s entirely contextual. It has to do having a time of persecution, of feeling isolated and diverse; a time when the scientific breakthroughs were as major as our government’s covert operations. It’s a perfect fit for the X-Men.
It is also an admirable decision just because it is such a risky move for Fox. The current generation of 13 year-old's aren’t going to bear in mind a lot about the ‘60s. Their movies and Television shows aren’t still obsessed with the cold war the same way they were twenty years ago. So for Fox to make an effort to make that time period relevant again in a massive way is fairly damned cool in my book.
The Action
One of the reasons I wasn’t so excited for X-Men: Very first Class was because of how disappointed I was with director Matthew Vaughn’s last crack at making a comic book movie, Kick-Ass. My failing there was that I will need to have remembered that the movie overall may have been a let down, but at the very least the action was awesome. I’m happy to say that Vaughn keeps refining his action chops with every single subsequent film.
What makes the action sequences here so good is that they strike an ideal balance between how the characters would behave and what’s going to make audiences go nuts. The inability to strike that balance is where loads of movies suffer. Whenever you just attempt to devise things which are going to make for huge spectacle, you get movies like Transformers plus the last couple of Pirates movies. And as cool and elaborate as some of those set pieces could be, most of that action is hollow and meaningless mainly because it all feels so inorganic. That’s not the case with Very first Class, which normally stays on top of its game when it comes to delivering bad-ass moments that do not really feel forced at all
