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According to the credits, it took four people to put together the screenplay for X-MEN: FIRST CLASS. With that tidbit in mind after having seen the film, here's the mental picture that I instantly get: those four people sitting at a table skimming over X-Men comic books, skipping through a scene or two of the three films that were released during the 2000s, and perhaps most important of all, putting check marks on a list of all the "requirements" that you need to make a standard-order superhero origin story. And that's the exact result we get here. X-MEN: FIRST CLASS is a serviceable summer movie, all right, but that's as far as it goes. There's no pizzazz here, no desire to push the envelope in any way, no motivation to show us anything other than familiar characters making use of the "cool" powers they've been blessed with, and no interest in at least giving a fresh spin to a story we've seen told several times.
For those who think that it's pointless for originality to be found in a film like this one due to the fact that it's an origin story, I suggest you go back one month and remember what Kenneth Branagh gave us with THOR: the film was an origin story, to be sure, but there was certainly no lack of fresh character development, strong acting and witty dialogue. It's too bad that the same can't be said for the latest entry into the X-MEN canon. If that were all, I may have still relented and given it a thumbs up and told you that "it's still an entertaining enough summer movie," but there's another aspect of it that irks me on a more personal level. The film is interested in celebrating what it means to be different, to be a geek, a dork, an outsider. But holy crap, does it try hard to jam its ideas about this issue hard into the audience members' heads and hearts. Have you ever had someone try so hard to convince you of something, and reiterate their arguments over and over to the point that you stop believing them? That's what happens here. The following lines are all scattered throughout the script of X-MEN: FIRST CLASS, and I have no doubt I may have even missed a few others:
"You're not alone!"
"You want society to accept you, but you can't even accept yourself!"
"We shouldn't be trying to fit in to society!"
The above lines have the effect of minimizing the film's celebration of being offbeat into a cliche rather than giving it the subtle dramatic effectiveness it deserved. Those lines are designed to be enjoyed by the mainstream audience of non-outsiders who will be watching the film and need points to be driven hard into their heads in order to understand them ("Oooh, I get it! They're weird and wanna be accepted!"). These lines aren't designed to emotionally connect with us offbeat people, because the falsity and the conventionality render that connection impossible. Somehow, I have a hard time believing that any of these four screenwriters was ever taunted by the popular kids in high school. As a card-carrying member of the "geeks and outsiders" club, I find the film to border on the offensive because of the horribly simplistic way in which it goes about dealing with this subject.
The film does get off to a good start, though. As an origin story, X-MEN: FIRST CLASS gives us a prologue in which we literally get to see the origins of both Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender), who will later, of course, be known as Professor X and Magneto, respectively. The film does do a terrific job at tying the story's fictional elements with historical events related to World War II in the prologue and then later with events connected to the Cuban Missile Crisis. The historical context is drawn organically and never feels forced or off-putting.
Charles and Erik certainly benefit from the powers that their mutant status have blessed them with, and it also helps that they have the help of Raven (Jennifer Lawrence), who has the ability to change shapes, but the complications of the plot lead them to need to start recruiting, which is why they set out to find other mutants around the world. After finding them, an "intense" training period begins. I say "intense" in quotation marks, though, because the training montage in X-MEN: FIRST CLASS is mediocre at best. We've seen plenty of training montages in other films, so to see one that is so workmanlike is nothing short of dispiriting.
But there's an even more serious issue with the whole aspect of the recruited mutants. The film tries to be as politically correct as possible by including two racial minorities in the group (one male and one female, of course), and to make matters worse, the screenwriters reveal their, um, true colors, when they have to decide which two of the recruits to get rid of, and it turns out that it's the two racial minorities (one dies, and the other turns over to the dark side). So, before we're even slightly close to the climax, our group of good guys is entirely composed of nice and appealing white folks. Once again, this film may try to make you think that it's a celebration of being offbeat and different, but it's nothing more than a vehicle to satisfy the cravings of mainstream audiences and to give them exactly what they're comfortable seeing and nothing that even slightly differs from that. Oh, and any argument of "But wait, that's how it happened in the comic books!" is not valid, because a filmmaker who does this type of movie has not only the freedom to decide which elements of the comic books to use and not use, but he/she also has the responsibility to pick and adapt the elements that will make the story as effective and interesting as possible.
All moral qualms aside, I'll admit that a more effective climax may have still saved the movie. But no such luck. The special effects in X-MEN: FIRST CLASS are so generic, its action sequences so lackluster, and its "final battle" scenes so lacking in high-octane excitement, that one honestly just watches it because it's a requirement to get through those scenes in order for the film to finally come to its satisfying close. The more severe sin that the film commits during its final moments is that it does a poor job of developing the moral conflict that the character of Erik experiences as he waffles with the decision over which side to choose. Sure, some may argue that "everyone already knows" the path that Magneto ultimately takes, but that's no excuse for a film's dramatic core not to exploit one of its most emotionally significant elements. Considering how good Michael Fassbender's performance is, this is a real shame. Fassbender is, without a doubt, the star of X-MEN: FIRST CLASS, perfectly capturing all dimensions of Erik's personality and effortlessly displaying that line "between anger and serenity" that the film's plot requires of him. Give him a better film or even a masterful one (as was the case with INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS), and he would've shone greatly.
The rest of the cast is largely disappointing. James McAvoy can do great things when asked to play vulnerable and emotionally feeble characters. I think it has something to do with the fact that there's a hint of nervousness in his voice when he talks and with the fact that he has a general look of fragility. That produced great results when he played the subordinate in THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND and when he played the apprentice in WANTED, but when asked to take on a leadership role as is the case in X-MEN: FIRST CLASS, there's an inevitable feeling that he's miscast. This reeks of "let's cast this guy because he's a known name and good-looking" and it's really too bad. Jennifer Lawrence is severely hampered by the script's limitations, especially because the forced plot element of supposedly cherishing "being different" centers mostly around her character, and she's asked to deliver a couple of eyebrow-raising lines. There's little to say about the supporting players. In the role of Alex Summers, Lucas Till does a lot of standing around trying to look as Captain America-like as possible, while Kevin Bacon plays the same snarky villain that he has already played in oodles of films (he does it effectively enough, but it's one of those things where you can't help but feel like he's just revisiting a persona that he's already played before).
X-MEN: FIRST CLASS is the type of cinematic effort for which the cast and crew got nice paychecks, and its makers will likely be satisfied with the box office returns; any sense of passion or of an interest in making something better than average or of working harder than necessary to make something special is completely out of consideration here. I said that THOR had set the bar high for the rest of the summer movies, because the film had such a great combination of action, character development and good sense of humor, but wow, the least that the people behind X-MEN: FIRST CLASS could've done is go the extra mile and give us at least a solid new beginning to this franchise. Instead, they just checked off all the requirements on the "superhero origin story" list, took their money, and moved on. I didn't want to use the same quip that many other critics have used ("First class? More like coach"), but it's entirely applicable. The film's excellent interlacing of true historical events with the plot, combined with the strength of Fassbender's performance, keep me from giving it a lower grade, but never does this come across as a work of first-class cinematic quality.
5/10
