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James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Kevin Bacon, Caleb Jones, Rose Byrne ... see more see more... , Jennifer Lawrence , Nicholas Hoult , Oliver Platt , Lucas Till , Alex Gonzalez , January Jones , Edi Gathegi , Jason Flemyng , Zöe Kravitz , Laurence Belcher , Bill Milner , Morgan Lily , Beth Goddard , Corey Johnson , Demitri Goritsas , Glenn Morshower , Don Creech , Matt Craven , James Remar , Ludger Pistor , Wilifried Hochholdinger , Greg Kolpakchi , Andrei Zayats , Rade Sherbedgia , Ray Wise , Michael Medeiros , Olek Krupa , Yuri Naumkin , Gene Farber , David Agranov , Katrine De Candole , James Faulkner , ?va Magyar , Annabelle Wallis , Juan Herrera , Greg Savage , Jarid Faubel , Gregory Cox , Josh Cohen , David Crow , Kieran Patrick Campbell , Sasha Pieterse , Brendan Fehr , Michael Ironside , Jason Beghe , Veniamin Manzyuk , Tony Curran , Randall Batinkoff , Peter Stark , Leonard Redlich , Carlos Besse Peres , Sean Brown , Neil Fingleton , Marios , Georg Nikoloff , Arthur Darbinyan , Alice Eve , Aaron Johnson , Rosamund Pike

X-Men: First Class unveils the epic beginning of the X-Men saga - and a secret history of the Cold War and our world at the brink of nuclear Armageddon. As the first class discovers, harnesses, and co... read more read more...mes to terms with their formidable powers, alliances are formed that will shape the eternal war between the heroes and villains of the X-Men universe. -- (C) Fox

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88% liked it

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87% liked it

239 critics

PG-13, 2 hr. 11 min.

Directed by: Matthew Vaughn

Release Date: June 3, 2011

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DVD Release Date: September 9, 2011

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Flixster Reviews (20,003)

  • jmanard52
    June 4, 2011
    jmanard52
    I was expecting a solid movie. Matthew Vaughn is easily one of my favorite directors. The cast is loaded from top to bottom with a good group of actors even if you have not heard of many of them. After two hours of solid fun I was ready for more. If any movie deserves sequels it... read mores this one. Keep Vaughn and Singer on board and the cast and you will have money. Easily in the top two of all the X-Men films. I am not an X-Men fanboy. I could care less about the five hundred zillion reboots retcons and who knows what else that happens in comics. Sorry. I do like the characters though and they did a wonderful job of bringing this group to the screen.
  • itsjustme2004
    May 27, 2012
    itsjustme2004
    Talk about surprised! I figured this would be one of those "riding on the coat tails of the franchise" movies full of special effects, and not much more. Well, it was much more. In the original X-Men movie, the opening scene was really moving. The fact that this film started the ... read moreexact same way, and then expanded directly from that point in time, was perfect. This was very enjoyable. I loved how they tied things together to show how events in the future came to be...nice touch.
  • drcamyo
    May 26, 2012
    drcamyo
    A well directed, excellently acted, better than I thought it would be movie. Finally a good X-men origin movie. Matthew Vaughn deserves a medal for making the X-Men series good again.
  • garyX
    March 27, 2012
    garyX
    A young post graduate with the power to read minds joins with a holocaust victim with powers of magnetism to found a CIA sponsored training program for newly empowered mutants in the 1960s. X-Men: First Class is really what the first film SHOULD have been. Instead of the clumsy a... read morend constant exposition of the original, it expands on the best scene of the film featuring the first manifestation of Magneto's powers and shows the origins of his relationship with Xavier and how their ideologies and methods diverged. Not only that, but it does it with wit and style and the 60s setting gives it an epic quality that plays out on a world stage in history as well as some very cool old school Bond imagery provided by SFX legend John Dykstra. The only real weakness lies in its being the victim of the franchise's own continuity. The story was crying out for the original team but because most of the central characters have already been "used up", the supporting cast include non-characters like Darwin, and quite how Angel made the cut I'll never know (this fact is thrown into sharp relief by a brilliant cameo by Hugh Jackman). This is also true of the villains; Shaw and Emma Frost are not fully explored but still interesting but Azazel (who?) and erm...the other one, are completely anonymous and I can't remember either of them uttering a word. Still, this film is all about the double act of McAvoy and Fassbender and their interplay is brilliant., setting up a potentially fantastic new direction for the series. Not quite the measure of X2, but a worthy runner up.
  • SirPant
    March 23, 2012
    SirPant
    As an origin movie X-Men: First Class is pretty impressive. Apart from a couple of factual errors regarding dates, it's pretty solid. I liked the fact that they didn't get ahead of time with their technology, it was very fitting with the classic comics of the time. There was also... read more an element of tongue in cheek about it that I think only an Englishmen could deliver, I think it worked rather well here when more than often it doesn't. The cast is ace, McAvoy and Fassbender are brilliant, the only bit of re-casting I would do would be to replace January Jones but only because I can't stand her and the character of Emma Frost deserved better. Twenty something Beast was a bit of a let down too, he looked like one of the monsters that would always be in the back ground in The Muppet Show. Also, and I'm a full on comic nerd so bare with me, if Magneto and Mystique know where the X-Men base is having trained there, how do they spend the best part of the first and second films looking for it? I'm sure all will become clear in the many sequels this films deserves. If you really have to re-boot a franchise, this is how you do it!
  • fb1463751009
    March 19, 2012
    fb1463751009
    By far, the best X-Men movie to come. The first 3 installments to the X-Men Franchise has always drew me away due to a bad screenplay, mediocre direction, amateur cinematography, and poor production value (except for Final Stand), but First Class surpasses in all of these element... read mores.

    Everything was tightly wound together. I was pleasantly surprised by the more gritty tone the movie had and how sharp the script was. Dare I say, this is the best Marvel movie to come, but not just because of the technicalities of a great movie but also because it breathed new and refreshing life into the characters we've come to know from previous installments. Honestly, it's pretty cool to see the Cuban Missile Crisis incorporated into a comic-book context, but unfortunately, these moments are pretty damn cheesy and the pacing drops considerably.
  • mmckellop
    March 6, 2012
    mmckellop
    There's a scene in Matthew Vaughn's X-Men: First Class, where Erik Lensherr (Michael Fassbender) a Holocaust tracks down two former Nazi's who have decamped to 1960's Brazil to while out their twilight years, that kind of ruins the rest of the film. After swaggering into a bar th... read moree pair frequent, Lensherr impresses the two men with his knowledge of fine German beers. He takes a seat at their table and causally reveals the tattoo he was given while spending his youth in a concentration camp. The two men panic. The older of the two attempts to stab Lensherr with his Hitler youth knife but is quickly overpowered him and pined to the table with his own knife. The bartender, also reveled to be Nazi, pulls a gun on Lensherr who forces him to shoot the younger Nazi with his magnetic powers before stabbing the bartender with the Blood and Honor knife. Lensherr then smooths over his hair, finishers his beer and kills the third Nazi. The relish and precision in which Fassbender plays the scene makes it the most compelling in the film. After it, the sloppy speechifying, adolescent sexuality and bizarre plotting that makes up the rest of the film's running time seems incredibly dull by comparison.

    X-Men: First Class tells the origin stories of the two groups of superpower mutants seen in the 2000-2006 series, specifically those of future mutant leaders Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Eric Lensherr. The film also uses the backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis to tell the story of how nefarious mutant supremacist Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon, totally hammy but loads of fun) almost drew that world into nuclear war and the first group of X-Men were gathered together to stop him.

    The film is definitely the most stylish film in the Fox Studios series. It's elegantly costumed and sensuously decorated. It's the more vibrant that any of the Bryan Singer/Brett Ratner films. It's palette seems to be a reflect the film's embrace of its four color origins. Despite its grounding in capital S capital I social issues of the 1960's, its a garish and exuberant film. This approach sometimes works, like when Lensherr finally embraces the cause of mutant supremacy to the detriment of his best and only friend or the clever way in which invades the proto X-Men's HQ. When this more florid approach fails, the extremely awkward bit where Xavier uses his psychic powers to help Lensherr overcome his mental power dampeners and whenever the Beast/Mystique romance is featured, it's almost unbearably flat. Especially when you know another great Fassbinder-being-cruel scene is coming.

    It's more successful than it isn't which makes it the best X-Men film so far. Superhero movies, by their slap together, the release date is set before pre-production had started nature are always a work in progress. The first X-Men was boring because it needed to educate the audience to who the X-Men were and the second was unsatisfying because it was essentially a very exciting prologue to a film that only ever existed in Bryan Singer's head. And X-Men The Last Stand was awful because it was trying to be two different movies that poorly fused together by the guy who made Rush Hour. First Class works because even though its a prequel, its doesn't bare the weight of having to establish its universe. You know mutants exist and that humanity hates and fears them from the earlier films but here you find out why. None of these reveals are exceptionally interesting or even necessary but they carry a dramatic weight from our understanding that, no, things will not work out for the best.

    The film's sense of inevitability sometimes works against it. You know that never before seen mutants like Darwin, Angel and Riptide somehow don't make it the near present of X-Men. This adds a disposability to the characters and seemingly their characterization. Since FC is a big budget action movie built around the contrasting view points held by its two main characters, all of the supporting players exist to support those view points. Beast sides with Xavier because he sees his mutation as a deformity and White Queen with Magneto because of her belief in the inherent superiority of mutant kind. This thematic hammering leaves characters like Darwin (Edi Gathegi) and Angel (Zoe Kravitz) racial suspect due to their flatness. And since you know that Shaw's distinctive helmet is later worn by Magneto, he's probably not going to mess up the above the credits cast to bad.

    Despite Bacon's enjoyable performance, Shaw is an empty villain. Even his second act murder of an X-Man, his character has little menace. The moment he slips on Magneto signature helmet, you understand that he isn't going to be the final's real antagonist. He's just a filling a space until the final boss can take the stage. X2 had the same kind of misdirection but it succeeded because it was understood that Colonel Stryker was more of a means to an end than a character whereas FC tries to present Shaw as an ultra cool Bond villian he never seems believably as being. Such inconsistencies are the nature of films with six credited screenwriters.

    Another glaring problem with the film lies with its sexual politics. Cartoonishly noble CIA agent Moria MacTaggert (Rose Byrne), attractive block of wood Emma Frost (January Jones) and frustrated metamorph Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) all appear in various states of undress and compromise but since First Class is a big Summer tent pole film it can't ever reach the simple catharsis of nudity. This vacant, unempowered sexuality reduces the role of most all of the women in the film to that of gorgeous scenery. This blind adherence to outdated mores is extremely disappointing especially given that one of the film's central creatives, Jane Goldman, should be aware of how degrading this depiction is.

    X-Men: First Class would have been a lot better if it was just X-Men: Origins Magneto. It could have been a Carlos flavored action film that followed it's suave yet ruthless protagonist as he murders his way across the world, first toward revenge and then revolution. But that's not the film we got. First Class is an uneven, at times exciting superhero film that benefits greatly from a stand out performance from man who proves that a great actor can enliven even the weakest material. Matthew Vaughn is good filmmaker, the Brazilian bar sequence and Layer Cake bare this out, but when he's hamstrung by the demands of a PG-13 rating and the superhero genre, he'll never make an X-film that's more than mindlessly entertaining.
  • thmtsang
    February 18, 2012
    thmtsang
    Good movie about the origins of X-men. The story shows the discovery of each other and their powers. Good cast.
  • jamers2011
    February 3, 2012
    jamers2011
    Excellent, I loved it. I was expecting something more like Wolverine, but this was a fantastic movie. Not only a brilliant addition to the X-Men series, but it's the best of the series!

    The reason I say that this is the best of the series is because it delivers in more areas tha... read moren the previous films did...First Class is very deep. For once I felt for the characters, I actually cared about what happened to them and how they interacted with each other. Credit must go to the cast because their performances contributed to this, especially James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender. McAvoy gives a great performance as Professor X, and Fassbender is incredible as Magneto. (You will see Erik/Magneto in a whole new light). My favorite scene in the entire film is actually not an action scene, but the highly emotional diologue between McAvoy and Fassbender with moving the satelitte...also the end of the final action scene. Those two scenes alone add SO much to the film and trilogy. I can't explain it all, but this is truly a great addition to the series.

    And...of course the action was awesome! The visuals were excellent and I was on the edge of my seat the entire time. I love action movie blockbusters and First Class delivered.

    I cannot recommend this film enough! It's my favorite of the year so far. Action + Drama = X-Men First Class = Great Film!
  • fb100001493964409
    January 21, 2012
    fb100001493964409
    Well, this was certainly a surprise. I had heard that "X-Men First Class" was better than "Origins" and "The Last Stand", but then again, that's not that difficult to achieve. What I didn't expect was that it would become my favorite entry into the X-Men film continuity. For star... read moreters, it seems the film is ignoring portions of continuity across all previous films. Some might be unhappy with this, but I'm certainly not. This is the kind of reboot that I'll welcome with open arms. In terms of quality, it's right up there with X2, just barely surpassing that film. The villain (Sebastian Shaw) was a bit too stupidly evil for my tastes at certain points, but MASSIVE SPOILERS at least his demise was satisfying and brutal END MASSIVE SPOILERS. I'm really angry that I missed this one in theaters because it would have been worth every penny.

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Critic Reviews

David Denby
June 27, 2011
David Denby, New Yorker

Looks and feels like a very cheesy Cold War-era B movie... Full Review

Eric D. Snider
June 3, 2011
Eric D. Snider, Film.com

It uses the themes of the previous movies to build an intelligent, fast-paced, and highly entertaining prequel. Full Review

Richard Roeper
June 3, 2011
Richard Roeper, Richard Roeper.com

This blazing "pre-boot" breathes new life into the sagging franchise Full Review

Karina Longworth
June 3, 2011
Karina Longworth, Village Voice

Lacking a single memorable joke or striking image, First Class is as perfunctory and passionless as would-be franchise resurrections get. Full Review

James Berardinelli
June 3, 2011
James Berardinelli, ReelViews

It's a strangely talky motion picture that tries to advance several philosophical themes; these would have been more interesting if we weren't already aware of how they will play out in the "future" X... Full Review

Rick Groen
June 3, 2011
Rick Groen, Globe and Mail

We all love a good creation myth. That's partly why X-Men: First Class is such fanboy fun. Full Review

Lisa Kennedy
June 3, 2011
Lisa Kennedy, Denver Post

The finest comic-book flick since 2008's The Dark Knight. Full Review

Peter Rainer
June 3, 2011
Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor

Erik/Magneto, as played by Michael Fassbender, is, well, magnetic. Full Review

Claudia Puig
June 2, 2011
Claudia Puig, USA Today

Revives the flagging franchise with this globe-trotting iteration, infusing it with new life and dazzling visual effects. Full Review

Chris Vognar
June 2, 2011
Chris Vognar, Dallas Morning News

The X-Men franchise always had a lot on its mind compared to most of its superhero brethren. Full Review

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Facts

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    • Charles Xavier/Professor X: Hetrochromia.
    • Banshee: I want to be... Banshee.
    • Hank McCoy / Beast: Why do you want to be named after a wailing spirit?
    • Banshee: You might want to cover your ears.
    • Charles Xavier/Professor X: One of the most spectacular things is my mutation allows me to read your mind.
    • Erik Lehnsherr / Magneto: Let's just say I'm Frankenstein's monster. And I'm looking for my creator.
    • Professor Charles Xavier: They're just kids...
    • Erik Lehnsherr / Magneto: No, they WERE kids. Shaw has his army, we need ours.
    • Emma Frost: Pathetic.
Submit a Fact | View All

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