Though I (deliberately) missed all the previous X-Men films, X-Men: First Class is a prequel/origin story, and thus, those who (like myself) came late to the saga of the mutants don’t need to read up on the topic.  There are a few in-jokes (a guest appearance by a surly Wolverine and a young Professor X saying “at least I didn’t lose my hair”—oh, just wait, X!) but otherwise no specific knowledge of the X-Men canon is needed to understand this movie.

            Actually, I used to read the “X-Men” comic in my adolescence, but of course the character lineup was considerably different.  I recall Cyclops (who isn’t in this film), the Beast (who didn’t have blue fur back then, just big hands and feet), and Professor X and…hmm…I thought I remembered Medusa, who had long, red, animated hair, but it turns out she was a villain in the “Fantastic Four” comics, so I suppose my memory of 40-year-old superheroes isn’t that accurate.  My only exposure to the more recent X-Men comes from pop culture references, movie trailers, and so forth, since I no longer read comic books (or even graphic novels), and (as noted), I’ve seen none of the previous film versions.  But honestly, I didn’t feel lost here, as I have with some other film series where I missed the first or second entry.

            One interesting aspect of X-Men: First Class is its grounding in history: the opening sequences take place during World War II, with the bulk of the story unfolding during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.   The period setting isn’t evoked especially well in terms of costumes, technology, hairstyles, etc., but no obvious anachronisms stand out, and the historical events (WWII, the Holocaust, the Cold War) are integral to the plot rather than being utilised simply as background noise.  [Compare this to The Ward, which is also set in the 1960s, but for no apparent reason.]

            The film deals with an evil mastermind’s scheme to trick the Russians and Americans into nuclear war, thus eradicating most of the human race and facilitating a takeover by the mutants, led by the aforementioned mastermind, sinister Sebastian Shaw and his main squeeze, Emma Frost.  The CIA reluctantly sponsors a competing team of good mutants under the direction of telepath Charles Xavier, including his foster sister Raven (aka Mystique), Holocaust survivor Erik (the future Magneto), geeky Hank (soon to be the Beast), and a few other expendables.  The relationship between Xavier and Erik is one major sub-plot, as is a romantic triangle between Raven, Hank and Erik.  

The film also discusses weighty philosophical topics such as “be yourself.”  There are veiled but obvious allusions in the script to sexual orientation, religious intolerance, gender politics, regular politics, and racism, but since the mutants are a fictional amalgam of every possible type of “difference” (rather than simply all having blue skin or something), the message tends towards the more generic “everyone is a special little snowflake and should be respected.”

            I found X-Men: First Class solidly-made and entertaining, even surprisingly so, given my overall ambivalence towards comic-book adaptations and “series” entries.  The main characters are reasonably well developed, the performances are sturdy enough, and the effects are rather good.  Despite its length (over 2 hours), the film doesn’t drag, although I can easily identify at least 30 minutes which could have been trimmed with no adverse effect on the final product—the abortive assault on the Russian mansion, for instance, which only serves as an excuse to show more of Emma Frost in lingerie; an admirable goal to be sure, but hardly crucial to the plot.

            One minor fault with X-Men: First Class is inherent in its “prequel” status: we already know where the plot is going, it’s only a matter of how the film gets there.  In other words, we know Charles Xavier will wind up in a wheelchair, Magneto will become the X-Men’s arch-enemy, that certain characters will survive (because they show up “later”) and others will not.  Some deviation from the “Marvel Universe” (and even the X-Men film universe) is acceptable, but not much: if the overall narrative is not consistent, then what’s the point of calling this an “X-Men” movie at all?  Still, the necessity of staying “within the lines” removes a certain amount of suspense: in a non-series film, a hero or heroine or villain might very well die at the conclusion, but not here (especially if that character has already “returned” in movies made previously but set subsequently, and/or if other films in the series are possibilities). 

            I could also carp about the familiar “anti-government” attitude of the movie, but it turns out all governments and their representatives are more or less equally excoriated in X-Men: First Class (although the U.S. government is quantitatively harder hit than the Nazis or the Russians, because more footage is devoted to the CIA and U.S. military).  It’s not enough that big government is depicted as xenophobic and primarily (so it appears) interested in self-perpetuation, X-Men: First Class and many other films portray “government” as actually quite evil.  Now I’m not the biggest fan of politicians, and I definitely do not blindly trust everyone in authority—I admit it, I have iconoclastic tendencies—but I’m not an anarchist either, and I don’t automatically think the worst of the government, corporations, the military, the media, and so forth. So it just seems a bit odd to see films (the product of media corporations) containing such negative images.  There seems to be a conflict here, unless the villainous stereotype of greedy, prejudiced, ruthless oligarchs is deliberately included to give the cynical members of Generation Y an easy target for their scorn.

            So there is a fair amount of ideological content in X-Men: First Class, both overt and (slightly) hidden, and a correspondingly lower amount of “action” than one might expect in a comic-book adaptation.  There are two major set-pieces, Shaw’s attack on the secret CIA mutant headquarters and the final confrontation between the U.S. Navy, Russian Navy, X-Men and bad mutants.  These sequences are effective but still relatively “light,” as action sequences go.  The raid on the mutants’ training facility is deliberately staged to illustrate the immaturity of the young X-Men, while the latter takes place on a larger canvas but doesn’t feature a lot of one-on-one physical action.  To a certain extent this is deliberate, since the film is character-driven, but it’s also difficult to convincingly depict fights between individuals with widely divergent abilities: it’s apples and oranges, skill-wise, as if John Wayne was battling Bruce Lee (furthermore, Shaw’s hench-mutants have vaguely-defined powers and this makes things even more confusing).  Still, the CGI isn’t unpleasant and there is a nicely logical, narrative link between the earlier scenes of the X-Men learning to use their “gifts” properly and the subsequent employment of these abilities in the final combat.

            Overall, X-Men: First Class is a decently entertaining film which turned out to be slightly more “serious” and thoughtful, and slightly less geeky and reliant on special effects than I expected. I always appreciate pleasant surprises like that.