An Honest Review

Rating: 7/10 (19 November 2016)

I wasn't the biggest fan. I'm not going to say that it is the absolute greatest, or even the greatest X-Men film on earth.
Honestly, if you were to ask me, they should have just killed the franchise after the travesty that was X-Men The Last Stand. And killed it in the same way that you put down a beloved yet rabid dog.
But clearly they didn't and instead they gave us the oddest reboot I've ever seen.
I can't really complain about this one like I do so many others. And I'm inclined to give them some very serious props for how they did it. They effectively killed absolutely every argument I have against reboots and remakes.
Most of the time, with reboots and remakes, the complaint is that they are doing it because the originals were popular and made money and want to bank on that success, however they tend to redo it in a way that takes out all the charm that made the first ones so beloved, rewrite the history that fans love in such a way it's insulting, and dumb it down to appeal to the masses whilst upping the special effects in the hopes that no one notices.
Usually it's all done with the explanation that "Millennials don't understand satire and/or dark humor." At least that is how it went with Robocop, The Evil Dead, Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, The Amazing Spider-Man, and so on and so forth.
X-Men: First Class seems to break the remake/reboot laws. Rather than re-writing the history (because the first two were really good) and destroying everything that made them so loved...they rebooted the series in the past, recast the actors, and largely left the future chronology in place.
And, to reassure audiences that they weren't destroying everything they loved, they added the opening scene of the very first X-Men movie and made sure to add as much Googie architecture as possible while siting well remembered past events to assure us that, yes, what we loved is still alive and present.
It shut people like me up. I can't hate on it for being a reboot because it addressed my concerns and moved on nicely.
Plus the cast was great. Michael Fassbender was awesome, January Jones, Caleb Landry Jones, and Rose Byrne were outstanding and to add a cherry on top they threw in Kevin Bacon as the Big Bad.
Was it because Bacon is awesome or just to give people my age a link to Jennifer Lawrence so we can still play 6 Degrees? Who know? The only problem is that, by rebooting it, they left a lot of the source history completely jumbled. The characters were largely left hanging and, though it worked for a while, the jumbled characters made the reboot franchise kind of fall apart in X-Men: Apocalypse.
So 7 of 10 IMDb stars. It was a solid movie and I loved that they took the time to reboot it in a way that would kill all my instant reboot hatred...but had they written it a little tighter, it could have lasted long as a killer franchise.