First mission

Rating: 7/10 (11 January 2014)

The X Men trilogy seems to have been nicely wrapped up. Of course 20th Century Fox do not want the film rights to revert to Marvel films.
So they have to continue the series either with the Wolverine spinoff's or in this case with the prequels.
X-Men First Class should not had worked but be seen as a cheap knock off prequel. However director Matthew Vaughn has injected a lot of love and verve here.
Like X-Men 1, the film starts in a concentration camp during World War 2 where Dr Schmidt/Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) is experimenting on Jews and Mutants including a young boy called Erik Lensherr.
In New York City, a telepathic boy, Charles Xavier meets a young shape-shifter called Raven (Jennifer Lawrence), whose natural form is a scaly blue-skin.
Xavier invites her to live with his family as a sort of foster sister.
After graduation from Oxford University, Xavier later meets the more volatile Lensherr who discovers that Shaw is also a powerful mutant and wants to take him down for what he did to him in World War 2.
Yet at the same time there is something about Shaw's outlook that attracts Lensherr and this causes friction with Xavier.
Here is an origins story that really meshes with the X-Men films as we see the forming of the friendship with Professor X (James McAvoy) and Erik Lensherr/Magneto (Michael Fassbender.)
Both actors excel in their roles. You root for both of these characters even though the seeds for their rivalry has already been sown.
The film has great production design and costumes. It shows as the film is set in the past and uses historical events such as the Cold War and the Cuban missile crisis to drive the story along.
The performances from Kevin Bacon as the villain is instrumental in making the film work. He is a despicable villain and amoral.
He is the one that points Magneto the dark side that not matter what good the mutants do, humans will never accept them.
I was sceptical of how good the film would be when it was announced, thinking this as a cynical milking of the franchise.
Instead it has breathed new life to the X-Men films in more ways than the Wolverine spin off did.