Saturday, June 4, 2011

'X-Men First Class' Review: A Return to Form for a Broken Series


It's been eight years since I've truly loved an X-Men movie. I'm a fan of the comics and I've been burned many times over the past few years by the series. So going into this, I was expecting the worst. The ads have been awful, the behind the scenes sounded disastrous, and the movie just seemed rushed. It wasn't since Bryan Singer's X-Men 2: X-Men United came out in 2003 that I really loved an X-Men film. Singer got the universe and the characters and took the series to new levels after the first movie, paving the way for a great third and final movie, but when 2006 came around Singer was gone and the series nearly imploded on itself with X-Men: The Last Stand. Fox decided to try and take the series in a new direction with X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which was also poorly received by fans and critics a like. It seems Fox realized what it was missing in the series without Singer and brought him back as a producer and got Matthew Vaughn, the director of Kick-Ass, behind the camera for this movie. The movie these two have crafted is really, really well done. Between the cast, story, and score, the film truly brings like to what I thought was a dying series. So much so that X-Men First Class has made me fall in love with the X-Men universe all over again, and may be the best movie in the series.