Faced with an apparent bookend to the X-Men series, and with Origins: Wolverine not getting the reception they had hoped, Fox sought a new angle with the licence, opting for a ‘young X-Men’ style prequel following the initial meeting of Xavier and Lehnsherr and the beginning of their relationship. With Singer still committed to other projects, writing duties fell to Matthew Vaughan and writing partner Jane Goldman, with Vaughan also directing after his abortive attempt at directing The Last Stand. But Greg D. Smith has to ask: was the world ready for more X-Men so soon after the last iteration, and could a new cast hope to live up to the long shadows cast by the previous incumbents?

The world stands on the brink of nuclear war between America and Russia, encouraged on both sides by powerful mutant Sebastian Shaw, who seeks to wipe out humanity and leave mutants – who he believes will be unharmed by the radiation – to rule the world. But Shaw’s past is set to catch up with him in the form of Erik Lehnsherr, a man he knew in a previous life, and Erik’s new friends, including one Charles Xavier.

So we come to one of what genre fans think of as the ‘good ones’ in the X-Men cinematic franchise. After the lacklustre The Last Stand and the frankly terrible Origins: Wolverine, a full reboot seemed like a decent enough idea, though the question remained as to whether it was too soon, and whether audiences would respond well to seeing characters they associated with big name actors being played by new faces on the big screen. Perhaps a new writing team and a new director could inject some further new life into the franchise for the studio?

Well, yes, it does, though in hindsight the film seldom hits the heady heights of the average MCU entry, instead turning in a story and performances that are all adequate and satisfactory rather than knocking the socks off this viewer.

Starting off exactly where the first movie did, with young Erik Lehnsherr being separated from his parents at the gates of a Nazi camp and then knocked unconscious as he tries to resist with his powers, the film then expands on what came next, showing us young Erik’s suffering at the hands of Klaus Schmidt, a Nazi scientist interested in his powers and unafraid to use brutal methods to encourage them to manifest. It’s here that the film shows great promise, as we imagine that young Erik will use his power to avenge his mother’s murder on the man before him and then run away, but the film chooses a different route, having Erik allow himself to be meekly led away by Schmidt to continue being experimented upon.

Cutting forward to an older Erik as he pursues the trail to find Schmidt around the world again shows great promise – a confrontation with a Swiss banker who deals in Nazi gold, another confrontation with a pair of ex-Nazis living quiet lives in Argentina, and then back to America to finally track down his quarry. Each stage seems like the perfect opportunity to really try to delve into the psychology of the man Lehnsherr has become – a look at the proto-Magneto, if you will, driven purely by feelings of personal revenge along a path that will eventually, unwittingly turn him into that which he loathes and which created him in the first place. But the film shies away from ever delving that deeply at all. The initial revelation that rage powers his ability is swiftly and disappointingly overridden by Charles telling him that his true power lies between rage and serenity (which honestly – what does that even mean?) and his final confrontation with Schmidt/Shaw boiling down to the latter delivering a big speech about how he wants the world swept clean of humans for mutants to be free and Magneto actually telling him that he totally agrees with everything he said but also he killed his mother so he has to die.

It feels like a hugely missed opportunity. Michael Fassbender – whose accent emerges more and more strongly as the film reaches the end of the third act – actually does some of his best work early on, making the character always a little unsettling, someone of whom the audience and his comrades can never be entirely sure. But where is the point in building that subtlety and misdirection if you aren’t going to use it? In the third act, it all goes to waste as Magneto first decides to utterly disregard Charles, then gets a bit upset when he causes his supposed best friend to get shot in the spine and then essentially shrugs it off again and elects to wander off with whoever wants to come with him to form his band of mutant freedom fighters.

This being said, the other major missed opportunity lies in the friendship of Charles and Erik, which never really feels as if it is even genuine, much less the relationship alluded to in the previous movies. It doesn’t help that James McAvoy and Fassbender simply don’t share the same chemistry onscreen that was enjoyed by Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, but the issue goes deeper than that, into a screenplay that’s in too much of a rush to get where it’s going, and sacrifices the time needed to really build that bond in order to get there.

Prequels are tricky of course – you’re attempting to construct something that fits in with the narrative the audience has already seen while at the same time constructing an interesting enough story around those fixed points to keep interest. First Class largely seems not to bother, figuring that anyone who notices differences won’t care. So for example here we see a hirsute Charles get the shot in the spine that confines him to a wheelchair, apparently forgetting that we saw balding, Stewart version Xavier walk onto set to rescue all those kiddies at the end of Origins: Wolverine (and yes I know they then further retconned everything so that he’s walking in Days of Future Past but that’s using a drug that costs him his powers so he can do so and if we all recall he was psychically guiding those kids along). It also casts Mystique and Xavier as friends from childhood, which is something I’m pretty sure might have come up in any of the X-Men’s briefings during the original trilogy as useful information – to say nothing of the lingering teenage crush between Mystique and Beast here which also seems to have been utterly forgotten by the time the latter sees the former detained at a US government facility having lost her powers. Prequels are indeed tricky, but re-engineering large and important pieces of the canon and hoping that your shiny set pieces will distract the audience is not really playing the game.

On the subject of Raven, a young Jennifer Lawrence shows what made her a star with a genuinely emotional performance of everyone’s favourite blue villain, right up until around halfway through the second act where – having got all pouty at Beast for telling her that her natural blue form doesn’t look beautiful in the real world – she waits in bed to seduce Erik, a man she’s known five minutes and who happens to have said to her a couple of times that she shouldn’t have to hide. You can sort of follow the logic except that she’s waiting in bed for him disguised as a ‘normal’ human, which rather undermines the whole chain of reasoning that puts her there.

Still, Lawrence does her best with the material she has to hand and the film does at least allow a bit of character development and insight into Mystique which the previous trilogy had signally failed to do. It’s just a shame that she largely ends up being Charles’ ward, then Beast’s crush and finally Erik’s… acquaintance? Though they kiss once, and she goes off with him at the end after spending an appropriate five or so seconds looking sad at the crippled state of the man who has essentially looked after her since she was a small child, the film never really seems comfortable in committing to what the relationship between the two actually is.

And as for Charles – the original trilogy fell down because it spent two movies canonising the man, then half of one unexpectedly making him a bit of a dick before going back to everyone ignoring that he’d been a dick to their actual faces and canonising him for real after he died (before he hijacked another body right at the very end). This film just gives extremely mixed messages, the narrative asking us to trust in Charles as a good man who wants to do right even as the dialogue and McAvoy’s performance just give us, well, a bit of a dick. When he’s not ignoring the obvious feelings of his adopted ‘sister’ and using the exact same chat up routine on every pretty woman he meets, he’s basically swaggering around as if he owns the place. There’s almost an inkling here that the story wants us to believe Charles to be a good man because he thinks war is bad and he has the mental power to make anyone do whatever he wants but doesn’t, but that’s not enough, especially when almost all of the rest of his behaviour suggests a narcissistic control freak with more than a touch of a saviour complex about him. His final interaction with Raven – rummaging in her head to discern that she does want to go with Erik despite their longstanding pact that he would never use his powers on her – sort of sums up the character as a whole. Whether the script is actually shooting for this to make Charles more ‘flawed’ is unclear, but the dissonance between narrative and dialogue leaves the character in an odd, unlikeable limbo.

What the film does manage to do is give us a bunch of mutants with at least some development in terms of who they are and what they can do. The training montage which rounds out the second act as all our heroes learn to control and embrace their powers is actually a decent conceit and well-shot. However, it does start to get a bit repetitive as each shows their failing and then Charles gives them a little pep talk and then they can magically do the thing. When one character actually clarifies in a line of dialogue that the time elapsed in this training has been a week it just adds to the slightly unreal feeling of all the progress the characters have managed to make. Still, they have an interesting grab bag of powers between them and the screenplay works to construct interesting and engaging set pieces with them using these powers, except for Mystique and Beast who get to look concerned and fly the plane, respectively.

Kevin Bacon as Schmidt/Shaw does his best too, and as a fan of the actor I can always appreciate seeing him onscreen. The issue is (again) that opportunity is created with the character and then never explored. The revelation in the second act that he’s a mutant comes from nowhere, but at least explains how and why he was so interested in mutant powers during the war. But given his philosophy, why was he working for the Nazis at all, and if he was working for the Nazis why did they not win the war? Why did he serve as a scientist when he has the power to absorb any energy and then direct it back at a target? Why, indeed, is his elaborate game of cat and mouse between the US and Russia, attempting to provoke nuclear war, even necessary? This is driven home particularly in the movie’s end game as, having failed to provoke the two sides to hostility, he attempts to manually start a nuclear explosion between them using his submarine’s nuclear reactor. It feels like a much more interesting story was there to tell about the character, especially his relationship with Erik, but the film forgoes it in favour of an overly convoluted plan that doesn’t stand scrutiny on its own logic.

If it sounds like I dislike the film, I don’t. It has an excellent sense of the period in which it is set. It has visual FX which stand up well eight years later, and well-composed and exciting action scenes. It also wrings great performances from all its leads, even as it lets them down with some substandard plotting, and it manages to have female characters who experience actual plot arcs and development, which marks a huge step forward for the franchise at that point.

The truth is, examining any superhero franchise against the standard set by the current crop will reveal flaws. For its time, First Class was one of the best entries in the genre, and whereas it suffers from several shortfalls, overall it’s still a solid action-adventure romp today.