This week, I watched the 2011 X-Men: First Class film by Matthew Vaughn. After the miserable Brett Ratner X-Men: The Last Stand travesty from five years ago, this film is an attempt at a reboot of the franchise. Now, let’s agree to never speak of X3 ever again.
As I mentioned above, this film is a reboot. However, I think it’s an interesting reboot. Instead of taking place in the modern era, the film takes place in 1962, around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Well, that’s not entirely true. The film initially begins with a recap (or another take) on Erik Lehnsherr first discovering his mutant abilities while at a Nazi concentration camp. This is basically a slight variation or reshoot of the same scenes from the first X-Men film way back in 2000. It gives additional backstory, then the story gives a similar introduction to the young Charles Xavier, and Mystique. Afterwards, the story fast-forwards to the 1960s when Lehnsherr, Xavier, and the others are presumably grown-up. Lehnsherr is hunting Nazis, including Kevin Bacon’s Schmidtt / Sebastian Shaw character. In time, Xavier and Lehnsherr will build a team of mutants, seen in the poster below.
I thought the film was pretty good. I like how the film’s events were moved to the 1960s, which makes this very unique compared to other superhero genre films. At times near the conclusion, I felt that the story was starting to get away from the writers, i.e. becoming incohesive. I started to get a little incredulous at parts, primarily when they all started giving cool nicknames to each other. I’m not a big fan of cornyness in a serious film. If this is truly a first in a new trilogy, I’m excited.
I watched on blu-ray, and the video and audio quality were good. Everything looked crisp and colorful, and it all looked natural. The disc features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 audio track, which sounds good, especially during the dialogue and the action scenes. However, I found the audio to be very front-heavy, with little activity on the surround speakers. Maybe it’s the nature of the film as there was a lot of dialogue.
X-Men: First Class (2011)