Back to its form

Rating: 8/10 (11 July 2011)

It's hard to talk about 'X-Men: First Class' putting aside the previous ones. In my point of view one thing has always been very clear: no matter how Bryan Singer has made of X-Men (2000) and X-2 (2003) two interesting and entertaining movies, he should never have appropriated the characters to create his own story and most of the time never respecting the original stories and the chronology of each one of the characters because now they are trying to repair that in a cyclical chain of mistakes taking classic characters but reinventing their stories once again, denying in one way or another all the development in the comic books in its more than 40 years of existence. Sequels may come, but how they will develop and give space for the forgotten characters - or for those ones that have already been presented out of their original chronology - is a mystery.
Anyway, 'X-Men: First Class' pleases comic books fans when keeping some characters or bringing back few others, but at the same time it can displease them for not being faithful to the original stories. For people who know little about the mutants it makes no difference and analyzing the movie itself it actually delivers what it promises and brings back the atmosphere of the first two installments that were lost in 'X-Men: The Last Stand' (2006).
The story is solid and consistent placing the mutants as pieces of a chess game in the historical period known as 'Cold War', making that period the zero point of the battle between humans X mutants and between mutants X mutants.
The screenplay conducts the facts ina linear way and the movie is directed for the adult ones more than for the youth, although the young ones will also have great fun with the characters and action scenes that are frequent from the beginning to the end. It's a violent movie, but not explicit, and this is what characterizes it not only as an adult movie, but an intelligent one as well because most of the violence happens more in our imagination than in images. Michael Vaughn sustained the direction more than the expected using the prime elements from the first two movies but also adding his personal characteristics to it, bringing something fresh to the series, something that hasn't happened in the third installment.
The costumes and the art designs are amazing when trying to reproduce the 60's. Some anachronisms exist but will not mess with the experience. Fans will be dazzled by some references and some special appearances. Bringing Michael Fassbender, Kevin Bacon, Rose Byrne and Jennifer Lawrence to the group just added more qualities and the adult tone to the story. Sometimes I felt that the background music was kinda invasive, but forgettable withing so many qualities.
For me the movie loses some of its interests when reaching the end, easing the rebellion of some characters and making the split between Magneto and Xavier something a lot peaceful for those ones who expected a genuine clash of ideologies.
But in general, it is by far the best comic book adaptation of 2011 and fair enough placed between the best comic book adaptations together to the first two installments. As I said above, it is X-Men returning to its form in movies.