Well with the DVD release this weekend I finally got around to seeing X-Men: First Class. I don’t know why I didn’t bother with it in the theater. Probably a combination of having been burned by X-Men 3 and Wolverine: Origins along with an unwillingness to reward bad behavior in my favorite genres… and by the time I heard it was actually good it was all a matter of inertia.
So now that I’ve seen it I’m happy to say that I liked it a lot. I thought the X-Men worked very well in the period setting (Not surprising as the comic originally came out in 1963.) Of course the downside of this is that a lot of the anachronisms were glaring to the point of being distracting. I’m not just talking the small mistakes in fashion and military ordinance, more obsessive history fans then I have already pointed those out. I’m talking about the way it felt that every actor was acting like someone from now. Apparently this is an alternate universe where Jim Crow never happened. While there was sexism it was the dumb frat-boy variety, not the borderline religion of the time. So taken for granted that even the victims believe it, (and none of the female characters acted like they had lived through this.) Due to my personal prejudices, I suppose I can forgive nobody smoking, but that was pretty obvious too.
Otherwise I enjoyed it a lot. Hardly a masterpiece, but well acted with a tight script that made it feel like there was far more going on than just the main plot while not being loaded down with all of the badges that most superhero films focusing on an origin story have to deal with. The effects were good and convincing but happily, due to the character driven script, for once this was not important.
