The thing to remember about X-Men: First Class is that Fox has the rights to the X-Men franchise in perpetuity...unless they stop making X-Men movies. With Disney having bought out Marvel, losing the rights to the X-Men no longer means having another rival bid a ton of cash to get the rights themselves, it means letting Disney start making their own X-Men movies, or perhaps worse, integrating the X-Men into the Avengers movies. So Fox slammed together First Class on the cheap and in a hurry, just to keep their hands on the license. That also meant that they didn't particularly expect First Class to do all that well, and so didn't interfere with the production process all that much, allowing director Micheal Vaughn to do pretty much whatever he wanted. Which is good, because the script passed through something like seven people's hands before it was done, including blending in the abandoned X-Men Origins: Magneto script that had been dumped after X-Men Origins: Wolverine flopped. Given that some of the early X-Men: First Class scenes about Magneto were my favorite parts of the movie, it's a shame that the Magneto movie never got off the ground.
It is also a shame that the film is so rushed. Not only in its actual production, which saw Vaughn only barely getting the film out at all, but in the way the story develops. For all that this is a good movie that I did enjoy, I can't help but feel that a redistribution of priorities, which I'll discuss in detail in the spoiler section below, could have made X-Men: First Class a great film.
As it is, however, it remains one of the better superhero movies overall, and probably the best of the ones that came out in 2011. Presuming you're a fan of the superhero action movie, you should probably seek this one out on disc or through your preferred method of digital distribution and give it a try.
SPOILERS follow!
I can't read your mind. If you want to avoid SPOILERS, you have to act for yourself.
There's a reason that I picked the poster I did for my spoiler break. There are, after all, a number of different posters available that highlight all the X-Men, as well as ones that show all the good guys and bad guys together, all looking cool. But those images all miss the point, which, alas, X-Men: First Class does as well. X-Men: First Class is at its best when dealing with the relationship between Charles Xavier and Eric Lensherr. If the movie had been mostly, perhaps even exclusively, about how those two met, worked together, became friends, then grew apart, that would have been the great movie I mentioned above. Unfortunately, we don't get as much of that as we would like, because the movie's too busy rushing around introducing the other mutants and setting up the "Thirteen Days...but with Mutants" plot.
(Speaking of which, you should probably go see Thirteen Days if you haven't already. They never say so explicitly in the film, as far as I remember, but every time the screen goes from color to black & white, you're seeing the actors play out actual taped dialogue from the Kennedy Tapes. It's an excellent blend of history and fiction that works very well. Granted, Costner's character gets more focus on him than I would like, but overall the film does a fine job recreating the tension of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I recommend it.)
The shame of it is, as my brother pointed out in our post-film debrief, that they didn't need to rush Magneto from ally to villain so quickly. They could have kept the team intact at the end of First Class, then shown his descent into darkness in the sequel, and had it blow up into a full on Mutant on Mutant war in the third film. Unfortunately it feels like Vaughn didn't think he was going to get two more movies, despite having the major cast locked up for three films, so he rushed to the obvious conclusion in First Class, and the film suffers for it.
But we have to take the film as it exists, not as how we wish it existed. And under those terms, it remains a decent film that has some okay superheroic action, and an interesting story that mixes with the Cuban Missile Crisis. It has some great scenes with Michael Fassbender's Magneto, both alone and with David McAvoy's Charles Xavier, and it's fun.
While I could wish for more, I have to admit I enjoyed what we did get, and as such, I recommend X-Men: First Class.
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