Review: X-MEN: FIRST CLASS Blu-Ray

In a Summer fairly crowded with Superhero movies, for me the two that rose above were Captain America: The First Avenger and the film under discussion here. While neither film was what you would call perfect (Cap seemed to hurry by a little too quickly just when it started to get good, as it were), both delivered a straight dose of the kind of glossy action we've come to associate with the season while once or twice taking occasion to be smarter than some of their contemporaries.

First Class, in particular, has a fairly smart first act in a transparent, fairly thrilling and funny homage to Connery-era Bond before falling apart by the last act as it start to resemble, well, Roger Moore-era Bond. Succumbing to the demands of the worst of the genre, we get a gigantic special effects setpiece, more villains than are absolutely necessary, and a coda that more or less gets us to a place where the first X-Men film makes sense in the rejiggered continuity. This is a real shame, too, because director/co-writer Matthew Vaughn sets up several interesting relationships, between leads James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender, which carry through the rest of the film but have to make way for a plot by the megalomaniacal villain (Kevin Bacon's Sebastian Shaw, whose incredibly fun scenery chewing would have been perfect in a broader movie). As the Nazi-hunting pre-Magneto, Fassbender is perhaps the most magnetic thing about the film (eek, forgive me, please) in a performance that runs both hot and cold (barely contained rage and icy deliberation). I wish the franchise would have given us one more movie as a potential teacher and mentor to the first mutants, but instead the movie gets him to where he needs to be for the continuity to line up.

The politics of the movie are also a little wonky, particularly with the grafting on of the mutant struggle with the civil rights movement and then the prompt killing of one of the film's two black characters and then immediate heel turn of the other. Over at Comics Alliance, writer David Brooks articulates some of these issues expertly, but in brief, it's a little shady that in a manner of minutes, the movie calls out slavery, offs one black character to give the villain more heat (in a way that's kind of nonsensical when you've been told how the hero's powers work), then has the other black character run off with the villain after he's just murdered one of her new friends in front of her.

Still, it's miles better than the completely misguided, unfunny, and frankly dull Thor, and by all accounts more coherent than Green Lantern (what, you expect the resident comics fan to see every comic book movie?). And again, that first act, establishing character relationships, reveling in the 60's period details (mostly successfully) is more than enough justification to check the movie out.

Audio and Video 

First Class comes home to Blu-ray with the standard issue, big budget transfer--if anything, it looks slightly glossier than when I saw it earlier this summer. The one drawback to this is that some of the effects (Emma Frost's diamond form, a floating anchor early in the film) look distractingly like effects.

The audio is a Dolby track, so you'll get plenty of boom out of your sound system.

Special Features

The eight-part featurette is a fairly lengthy look at the process of getting the film made. The opening piece details the selection of Matthew Vaughan to helm the project after Bryan Singer became unavailable, and the stitching together of the various visions to get the movie to the screen. Vaughan is fairly candid about his trepidation approaching the material, particularly after the possible hurt feelings that might have still lingered after he abruptly exited the production of X3.

If, like me, you're curious about the creation of some of the practical makeup effects, there's also a healthy amount of info there as well, detailing the Mystique, Beast, and Azazel makeup.

Theatrical Feature Blu-ray
X Marks The Spot
Composer's Isolated Score
Cerebro: Mutant Tracker
Children of the Atom - 8 Part Featurette Series
Deleted Scenes
Digital Copy

X-Men: First Class is available on VOD, DVD, and Blu-ray now. Don't forget, we're also running a contest to win a copy of the DVD and a collection of Diamond Select Minimates through September 14.