X-Men: First Class
Directed By: Matthew Vaughn
Written By: Matthew Vaughn, Ashley Edward Miller, Zack Stentz, and Jane Goldman, from a story by Sheldon Turner and Bryan Singer. Based on the Marvel Comic by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.
Starring: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Kevin Bacon, Rose Byrne, January Jones, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, Zoe Kravitz, Lucas Till, and Oliver Platt
Director of Photography: John Mathieson, Editors: Lee Smith and Eddie Hamilton, Production Designer: Chris Seagers, Original Music: Henry Jackman
Rated: PG-13 for comic book violence and a clever use of bad language.
When it was first announced that 20th Century Fox, in their attempts to continue a franchise, would do another origin story of the X-Men, many alarms went off. Would this be X-Men: Tiny Tykes with a bunch of kids with powers, or would it even be worse, similar to the Hugh Jackman led Wolverine film? X-Men as a series and as a cash cow for Fox plays a difficult balance, as the universe is simply so grand, and finding the right story to tell within that world is often the issue the writers and creators of X-Men face, as opposed to Superman or Batman, where the main character and dichotomy is always in place.
But besides the apparently badass Wolverine (those claws!), two characters really made the X-Men series the first great comic book film: Charles Xavier, aka the telepathic Professor X, and Erik Lehnsherr, aka the metal controller Magneto. As played by Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, watching these two play off each other like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X became the central core of the film’s first trilogy, with openly gay director Bryan Singer infusing the similarities of gay rights activism toward the comic book franchise, with the appropriate amount of entertaining ass kicking ass well.
