X-Men:First Class Early Reviews are Good--Really Good

I will accept your handwave.

The pane of glass wasn't thin. In fact, it didn't even crack even with the commotion behind it. Shaw probably had that room set up to test Eric's powers or to dissect him if he failed. Besides, Shaw had nothing to worry about, it's not like Eric could really hurt him.

I think a young cyclops too. There was a young boy, maybe 8-10 wearing funky looking glasses highlighted in color during that scene.

I'd guess that's because they can't get upset over losing something they never had.

There are changes, and there are CHANGES

Hey, I'm not unreasonable. I can take changes in the continuity between the comics and movies. Heck, I hate the Ultimate-verse more than anything, and all the Marvel movies have borrowed heavily from the Ultimate continuity. But the characters and world still felt like the original comic ones, so it didn't bother me.

The X-Men movies never quite felt the same. It wasn't as noticeable in the first two since you could kinda see it as an extreme condensing of X-history. By X3 it was just a mess and trying to tie the new movie into that continuity killed my interest from the get-go.

Also, it was a prequel. And I'm rarely interested in prequels. That's just a personal thing.

And again, I'm not hating on First Class. From the sound of it the film turned out pretty good and I'm glad people enjoyed it. I just kinda wanted the X-movie-verse to be back under Marvel's control. One, cause their movies feel more faithful to the feel of the comics, and two, cause I wanna see the X-Men show up in Marvel's burdgeoning movie universe. Same with Spiderman.

If you're the insane clown posse...YES. (just look up Miracles or commentary about it and magnets on Youtube.)

Magnets....how the F *do* they work?

The problem is that X-Men was the first big Marvel flagship comic made into a movie. To get people in theaters, they had to alter it so people could accept it more (remember, this happened before the superhero movie craze that we're in now).

If Shaw had his powers at that point, he didn't have much to fear from the knives and the cleavers.

Although Eric didn't know that, so it did seem odd that he didn't even try to fling something (the file cabinet?) at Shaw.

Shaw stated repeatedly how a coin was easier to move than a whole gate. So he knew what Erik could do. Erik seemed to be mostly crushing things: the bell, the helmets, the cabinet... Shaw was laughing with delight when it was all going on. I initially thought that was because he was crazy -- which he turned out to be -- but it turned out to be primarily because he was in no danger from whatever Erik could do.

Kind of seemed like he couldn't yet. Lots of power, no control.

I kind of wanted Spider-man to interact with Iron Man et al, but that's just because he's one of the key characters created at the time of all these others. The X-Men I can take or leave. Mostly leave at this point.

As for the Ultimate comics' influence on the Marvel-made movies, recently we determined in the Thor thread that there are only three real changes they've ported over from UU: Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, Hawkeye as a member of SHIELD and Banner working on the Super Soldier formula. Those are fairly minor changes. Besides, the UU was awesome until it started going horribly wrong when Millar and Loeb starting mucking about with it. The first 90-odd issues of Ultimate Spider-Man is probably the longest run of amazing stories I've ever seen. There are a couple duds in there, but overall it's really great stuff.

Well, I started reading x-books in the seventies, and I liked First Class quite a lot. Its a different spin on the Xavier/Magneto relationship, but I think it captures the central point. The X-mutant books had fun moments to be sure but also very serious ones, and the whole "revel in their power" thing was always tempered with feeling like outcasts. I should point out here that God Loves Man Kills dates from 1982, and the world hates mutants was already a well-established theme by then. For that matter, by then the Xavier/Magneto relationship had also been well-established as rivals rather than pure enemies.

The one moment I think X3 got right, among all everything else they got wrong, is the moment when Pyro tells Magneto "I would have killed the Professor if you would have let me" and Magneto stops him cold and gives him this hard stare and says "Charles Xavier did more for mutants than you will ever know. My single greatest regret is that he had to die for our dream to live" and then walks off. Erik believes Xavier is misguided, and possibly dangerous, but he also considers Xavier a protector of mutant kind and that counts for a lot in Magneto's eyes.

In any case, my recollection is from the late seventies up to the early nineties the X-Men bounced from one soul-crushing adventure to the next, always wondering what was going to jump up and bite them next. The fun moments were interlude more than the norm. In fact, the 80s went from Dark Phoenix to Days of Future Past to the Brood, the Morlocks, the Mutant Massacre - I'm trying to remember a time in the 80s when the X-Men were allowed to be a bunch of kids playing around for more than a minute. In fact, at one time Xavier kicked Kitty Pryde off the team and relegated her to the New Mutants specifically because he claimed the X-Men was not a place for "children." That was before being brainwashed into being a ninja assassin, of course.

Well even though its not like his powers in the comics, if you remember in X-1 Professor X said that he had the ablity to "Control Metal" as in all metal, and create magnetic feilds.

If you also remember in X-1 he could stop bullets, which are lead unless FMJs.

Magneto isn't a magnet or becomes one to exercise his powers. In the comics, the explanation for his powers is that he can control electromagnetic energy, and what comes most easily for him is magnetic fields. But he's been shown to be able to manipulate almost any electromagnetic energy in at least certain ways. This theoretically allows for immense power and ability, limited only by control. If Magneto was simply projecting magnetic fields to do what he's shown doing, he'd affect every magnetic object between him and his target, and probably within the surrounding area.

Controlling electromagnetic fields could allow him to manipulate even normally non-magnetic objects with electromagnetic fields. It would allow him to levitate himself even though his own body is not magnetic, as he does near the end of First Class. It may even be that Xavier was foreshadowing this potential when he said in First Class that if Magneto learned control, he would have access to a power no one would ever match.

1. Sorry but Shaw had no clue as to the scope of Erics powers. So having that much metal so close to Eric was foohardy at best. Many of the items Eric was manipulating while larger than a coin were much smaller than the gates he crushed outside. Common sense dictates that if Eric could crush the gates he could manipulate the metal knives, guns, and other instruments. Edit: For all Shaw knew Eric could violently rip the very iron from his body which probably would have killed him either from having the iron ripeed out of his body or from bleeding because without iron you can't stop bleeding. And the iron in our bodies is much smaller than a coin.

2. Eric wasn't just crushing metal at that point. He tore the drawers of the filing cabinets open before crushing the cabinet itself and he was hurling metal tables and other objects around the room.

Nothing was stopping him from trying to attack the nazi <bleep> that just murdered his mother. He was thinking clearly enough when he turned and killed the guards by crushing their helmets but ignored Shaw who actually pulled the trigger. Pure bull.

Now if he had attacked Shaw and Shaw used his mutant ability to absorb the attack that would have been completely different. Then we could believe/understand if Eric in shock stopped realizing Shaw was just like him.

You are absolutely right, however, I think Erik was not in control of the actions, it was random & wild. I am sure there was some time before Erik was able to willfully direct his power.

However, again, that should have made Shaw even more cautious and worried at being threatened from the chaos... but then again his own power probably made him not care in the least and that is the wild card that ultimately lets me accept the scene in hindsight. At the time, I was also scratching my head.

Very much yes on this interpretation of that era... and it was possible because of what you note with the New Mutants. They had moved the X-Men to adult roles and let the kids take over in the other book and 'relive' the youthful exuberance of the early X-Men. Sadly, the Beyonder brought that to a crashing halt....

I do admit this did seem rather fishy at the time. I fully expected Erik to try and smash him since he had a field day with everything else at hand. It did seem to be a bit of a weak point.

However I found the movie to be quite good overall. It wasn't perfect, but it was certainly one of the best in the X Men series of films.

It was a narrative decision. If they had Eric throw something at Shaw, we would have seen that Shaw (as an old nazi) was a mutant early in the film. The writers preferred to leave that as a surprise, so that we got to know the main cast first and the villain later as a young businessman, which is how he spent most of the movie. The narrative goal there was to not confuse the audience with too many characters too quickly.

In addition there's a character point being made. Shaw dominated Eric for most of his childhood, which is one reason why Eric felt resentment toward him. If they had shown Eric attacking Shaw just after they met then their relationship would have seemed more even and would have had less emotional impact.

The writers handled this absolutely correct. Shaw appeared to be a crazy background character until the story got on its feet. After we get to know him, the early scene makes perfect sense.

The way I interpreted that scene Magneto wasn't in any control of his powers at all at that point: he was just wildly projecting magnetic force fields at all the objects around him in random ways. He didn't specifically crush the soldier's helmets by conscious choice, he crushed them simply because they were hollow metal objects nearby. I'm certain there was no purpose to causing the metal objects in the test lab fly in circles: that's clearly just Magneto's powers going wild.

Shaw probably figured - and probably correctly - that random electromagnetic power flung around by Erik was no serious threat to him, nor were metal objects moving at any conventional speed. An exploding grenade and a hail of bullets meant nothing to him, a bunch of flung metal wouldn't either. Shaw's later actions clearly project a not-conservative person. He couldn't be *sure* of being able to absorb Havok's energy either, but he was infinitely confident in his abilities.

I respect your point of view but I still disagree with it. I just don't find that scene believable.

He says of the comic book movie.

/tongueincheek

[edit] I felt the same way about the scene (why would someone be so casual about potentially being skewered?), but at the time, I didn't realize that it was Shaw. Then it fell into place for me.