This week’s turning out to be quite a week for comic book ‘origin’ movies, as last night I went to see ‘X-Men First Class‘, the new film from director Matthew Vaughn (the producer of ‘Kick-Ass‘).
This movie fills in the complete back-story on the major characters found in the X-Men movies, taking us from their early childhoods up to their twenties and the formation of the original X-Men, and contains a whole mass of fleeting references to later films. There’s no way you’ll catch them all unless you’re a really dedicated fan but I rather enjoyed looking for them as the film progressed. One scene which you definitely won’t miss, and which might have you out of your seat and punching the air, features a certain hirsute, cigar-chomping character that you’ll be familiar with… The audience I sat with actually whooped at that point!
All in all, I think ‘X-Men First Class’ is really well put together – the script has been written in such a way that all of the major characters come across as being well-rounded, and there’s lots of gentle comedy and some convincing moments of real tragedy that lift it above its contemporaries. The director is even brave enough to introduce the idea that Magneto might not be a cardboard-cutout villain after all, but in fact a rather noble and compassionate character… What Michael Fassbender (Magneto) was doing with his voice in the final scenes is beyond me however – an Irish country bumpkin accent, really??
I’ll close with an interesting bit of trivia – this is only the second time that Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy (Professor Xavier) have appeared on screen together – the first was in HBO’s Band of Brothers back in 2001 when they both played American GIs.