X-Men - First Class*

* - not a review

I expect we've all been waiting for a film which establishes why Professor X and Magneto are at odds with each other, despite once have been friends. No? Oh, you were quite happy to accept the few lines of exposition, and self-evident conflict of ideas between the two men? So you feel this movie's a bit superfluous then? Oh well. Here it is anyway. Seemingly unable to break away from the formula of the Superhero Origin Movie, this is the prequel origin movie to the original X-Men origin movie, which establishes the origins of Professor X, Magneto, Mystique, and a few others who don't actually appear in the subsequent continuity, and Beast, who is missing for two of the movies then pops up in the third without so much as a sicknote to explain his absence from the previous two.

So, the setup. We saw Erik Lehnsherr, who's going to be Magneto some day, in the first X-Men movie use his magnetic powers to attempt to open the gates of a concentration camp, until he was subdued by guards. It seems that this was witnessed by Sebastian Shaw, a mutant who was then working with the Nazis in a Mengele-like capacity, with his own agenda of creating a mutant master race. He takes young Erik as a protege/experimental subject, and attempts to unlock his powers by essentially inflicting physical and emotional pain on him. We then cut to twenty years later, the war is over, and Erik Lehnsherr has become an absolutely kick-ass Nazi hunter, obsessed with hunting Shaw down.

Shaw himself has been busy in the interim, forming a group of mutants called the Hellfire Club, with whom he is attempting to influence the US and Russian militaries regarding strategic placement of nuclear missiles. The CIA are interested in him, and he's being investigated by CIA Agent Moira McTaggart, who discovers he's some kind of genetic mutant thing, and so seeks the advice of world expert on the subject, the newly qualified Prof. Charles Xavier of Oxford University.

This leads to the formation of a mutant group under CIA auspices to hunt down Shaw, and soon they cross paths with, and recruit Erik. Together they recruit more mutants, with Charles' idealist and Erik's suspicion of authority working well to moderate each other. And the hunt for Shaw is on in earnest.

Now, despite my reservations that this is an origin movie, it's actually a pretty good one. Significant liberties are taken with the Marvel Comics continuity, but that's all to the good in my eyes. In the comics, the Hellfire Club were a bunch of self-sabotaging pillocks who dressed in fake 18th Century costumes, and who were basically a ripoff of that one episode of The Avengers than Chris Claremont saw once. Here, instead, we have Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) as a properly psycho Bond villain with all the trappings; secret base under a go-go-dancing nightclub, big yacht which doubles as a submarine, he's got the lot. His Hellfire club, then, rather than the bunch of squabbling doofuses you find in the comics, are a more or less random assortment of mutant henchmen, most of whom have the sense to shut the fuck up and let Shaw do the talking. The only bit of miscasting there, and I think of it as Near-Miss casting is January Jones from Mad Men as Emma Frost. Now fair enough, she looks the part, and should have no more trouble inspiring the kind of nocturnal tributes from comic geeks than previous versions of Emma Frost, but she's also supposed to be really witty and urbane, which isn't working here. However, had they just looked one name further in the Mad Men cast list, they'd have seen Christina Hendricks, who would have been perfect. Ah well, near miss.

The will-be X-Men are pretty good. Michael Fassbender's awesome as Erik, playing him as a basically decent man who's never going to put up with the slightest oppression from anyone, ever again. McAvoy's good, playing Xavier as a naive idealist whose cushy background causes him to have an almost condescending misunderstanding of the situations other mutants have found themselves on. There's excellent support from Nicolas Hoult as Beast, and Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique; a pair of really classy performances which really fill the movie out, and prevent it being all about the headlining characters.

Ultimately, though, the script prevents this being a really good film, as it's no more than the usual tick-box list of plot points that prequels have to establish before the end, and that doesn't actually amount to a story.