Not the Dark Knight, but not Wolverine

Rating: 7/10 (4 June 2011)

As we all know the genre of interest in the past decade has been superhero movies. They're probably the biggest most popular group of action blockbusters and if recent trends are any example we're about to get more of them than ever. So kick up your britches because if my personal expectations are accurate X-Men: First Class might be the last good superhero movie we get, before producers with money in their eyes take over everything.
X-Men: First Class (as if you need me to tell you) is about Professor Xavier and Magneto and how they united as the X-Men for the first time before the stories in the previous trilogy took place. Mystique is the only other X-Men that really gets a developed back story, and the others in the mutant cast are there almost as replacement for the more popular mainstream teams from the trilogy. It all takes place amid the mounting frustrations between the U.S. and Russia (because Watchmen proved that's the best sort of place for a superhero movie to take place, too bad the developers of this movie didn't quite understand why that was such a great setting) during and up to the Cuban Missile Crisis where the film takes its climax.
Let's cut to the chase, X-Men is good because it offers great action lets perhaps the most interesting X-Men in the original movies (come on who cares about Wolverine, am I right??) Professor Xavier and Magneto take the spotlight. Powers are shown off in nice cool ways, and they even had another bad guy step in to take Magneto's place, a role in which Kevin Bacon does very well. All the actors did great with their roles, especially the two main characters. If you liked the X-Men trilogy (or at least the first two) then you'll find more to love with this movie.
But this is by no means the next Dark Knight (as I've heard multiple people saying now) this movie is not an origin story, this movie is a prequel, and it quite visibly suffers from things that all prequels suffered from. First off, why does X-Men need a prequel? Because the third movie offered a crappy end to the first two movies? In a world where Spider-Man and Batman are already getting reboots to their story lines, why can't we just remake the third X-Men movie and actually make it good? Enough gripe about that though, this movie suffers from Prequel syndrome. While the story is centered around Charles Xavier and Magneto it doesn't do anything that's unexpected with the characters. Mystique even gets her storyline rehashed and set at an earlier date with little to no explanation of a background or anything. Its simply a movie about characters that already have detailed and finished story lines and this movie by no means attempts to mess up that cycle. This movie delivers all the character to the points they start at by the time the first X-Men movie roles around, and that, frankly, is incredibly disappointing.
I'd like to say that the character in the movie are so extravagant and well played that that doesn't matter, but for a two hour long movie almost none of the characters get as much development as they deserve, they're like the little electronic cars that some of us to play with as kids, they're predestined to circle around the track right to where we expected them to be. This isn't like the Dark Knight this is like someone made a prequel to the Batman Begins explaining exactly how Bruce's parents made him and why they were destined to got shot in that alleyway. There's almost nothing there to tell that hasn't already been said, and everything else they try to do with them are just curves in the track making sure the warm-up is all said and done before the actual plot begins with the first movie made way back when.
Look, as much as I want to like this movie, its simply just another X-Men movie. If you are fine with that than so be it, but don't fall into the trap that so many people are. Just because they made two bad movies before this one doesn't mean that this mediocre rehash is the next gold bar on the pile.
I give it 7.5/10