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Old 11-01-2017, 06:42 PM
  #46
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January Jones was nominated for an Emmy for her work on Mad Men, Sarah.

First of all, let me say that First Class is what X-Men 2000 should've been. It's very telling that the movie begins exactly where the first film began, with Erik watching his parents being taken away by the SS officers at a concentration camp(Auschwitz?) when his mutant magnetic ability suddenly manifests itself, causing the gate to bend. But instead of jumping decades ahead to where Magneto has become a geriatric, sophomoric, textbook villain, First Class shows how Erik was turned into a weapon by Hellfire Club leader Sebastian Shaw, who was working with the NAZIs at the time, but only to further his own agenda, and then jumping years ahead to when Erik is hunting down all the NAZIs responsible for the murder of his parents, including Shaw himself. It's almost as if the screenwriter is saying, this is how the story should've been told.

Meanwhile, the relationship between Charles Xavier and Raven Darkholme also begins in a far more benign atmosphere in the home of Charles' parents, which I assume is the Xavier mansion in Westchester, New York. It all unfolds with such unforced logic and seamlessness it makes me wonder how Zak Penn, the screenwriter for the first X-Men movie, can even look at himself in the mirror and call himself a screenwriter. If only the first X-Men movie had been structured this way, only with Scott Summers, Jean Grey, Hank McCoy, Warren Worthington, and Bobby Drake as the First Class. Wolverine is actually unnecessary to the story. He'd be better served in his own origin story involving Stryker and the Weapon X program, leading to his joining the X-Men in a sequel. I'll post more later.
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Old 11-02-2017, 01:41 PM
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Jaunary Jones was dreadful in Mad Men. Like I've said, awards and nominations don't usually go to the right people.

Very glad to hear you liked First Class. It has a lovely feeling of a beginning and I think with that it catches some of the feel of the beginning of the X-Men comics, even though the lineup of the team is very different.
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Old 11-05-2017, 05:33 PM
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I agree. Although I do have some issues with the film, which I'll get into later.

But I think that First Class was far better structured than Zak Penn's meandering script in the first X-Men. Should've just been called Wolverine.
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Old 11-09-2017, 01:39 PM
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You need to give more feedback on First Class.
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Old 11-09-2017, 06:28 PM
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Okay.

I liked how patiently the origin story was set up. The thing I disliked about X-Men was how it was basically mutants for dummies. They had Xavier explaining the story of the X-Men and the mutants to Wolverine, as if it were a beginner's guide for movie audiences. I personally think that's a stupid way to handle exposition. I liked how First Class let the audience watch the story unfold with Charles and Raven on one side of the equation, and Erik and Sebastian on the other side. You got to learn about the X-Men universe while the story unfolded instead of it being like a mutant version of a high school instructional film about duck and cover or teen pregnancy.
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Old 11-10-2017, 04:40 AM
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Yeah, it was done well. I particularly liked the way they made it feel like a beginning long ago and tied it in with te Cuban Missile Crisis.
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Old 11-10-2017, 07:59 PM
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I think they could've told the same story in the present day. I never liked them making Charles and Erik so old in the first X-Men movie. I wouldn't have begun with Auschwitz in WWII, I would've started in the 60's during the Berlin wall, and Erik's parents being taken from him by the Communist West Germans instead of the Nazis. The first X-Men film could've followed a similar plotline, only with Scott, Jean, Hank, Bobby, and Warren, along with Raven, Erik, and Charles.
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Old 11-11-2017, 08:46 AM
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No, I don't agree with that at all. The X-Men storyline is permanently linked with the Holocaust, ever since Chris Claremont's stellar run on the comic. To remove that element would diminish the whole franchise. It would remove some of its most resonant elements. And the Holocaust's high-profile genocide speaks much more to X-Men themes than stories of oppression in communist East Germany. I also wouldn't have found First Class half so resonant had it been set in the present day. Setting it back in the '60s is what made it work for me.

Also, I don't want to see an X-Men film with only the original X-Men (the 1963 comic team). I far prefer the later X-Men team that stated in 1975. There's a reason the original team didn't sell and their comic was pretty much cancelled. In the comics, Warren, Bobby and, to a lesser extent, Jean don't really have personalities. Scott is a good character, but he's awfully uptight, and Hank was at his best (quite good) only after he left the X-Men in the mid-'70s. As a group they were rather bland. The later X-Men were far edgier and more interesting. I liked the original X-Men when I first came across them in the mid '80s reprints of 1960s stories and I've enjoyed reading them at times since, but they don't bring out strong feelings in me. They don't move me much. The later versions of the team are what interest me. With characters like Wolverine, Storm, Colossus, Kitty Pryde, Nightcrawler, Rachel Summers, Bishop, Rogue, ec.

And if we had to have a film like you suggest, involving specifically the original 1963 X-Men, then what's Raven doing in it? She wasn't part of the original X-Men story in the comics. She wasn't invented until 15 years later in 1978 and was originally a Ms Marvel villain. Mystique/Raven is a late addition and was never a central part of the X-Men storyline in the comics from 1963 to 2000, in other words the comics that came out before the films.

The main thing I would keep from the original X-Men is the fact that they started in the early 1960s (well, the comic did anyway), and First Class did indeed keep that.

I'm happy with First Class as it is.
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Old 11-11-2017, 06:17 PM
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I get what you're saying, sum1. But my issue is continuity. The farther we get from WWII, the less realistic it gets for Magneto to have survived the Holocaust. The Gifted takes place in the present day, and it's been confirmed that Polaris is Magneto's daughter on the show like in the comics. He'd be reeeeeaaaaalllllly old if he were an Auschwitz survivor. Putting the X-Men in the past with the First Class films prevents Fox from doing any contemporary X-Men films, not to mention it's unrealistic for the characters to not age over thirty years. Havok is a teen in 1963 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, then we see him in Vietnam in 1973, ten years later just before the Paris Peace Accords, and then ten years after that he's taking his brother Scott to the Xavier Institute in 1983. By then Alex should be in his late 30's and pushing 40, but he hardly looks a day over 25. And if the ten year trend continues, Dark Phoenix will take place in 1993, yet Scott and Jean will look the same as they did in 1983.

I mean, this works for Captain America because he was frozen in suspended animation after WWII, and Wonder Woman doesn't age because she's immortal, but with the exception of Mystique and Wolverine, the other X-Men would be middle aged or senior citizens by now.
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Old 11-11-2017, 06:31 PM
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Screw continuity. Marvel comics having been playing fast and loose with continuity for over half a century. If necessary, they can have Magneto artifically made younger the way they did in the comics (he was reduced to childhood and then brought back to adulthood at a younger age than he started out). It doesn't bother me. And the lack of change in the ages of the X-Men characters in those films may be amusing, but it doesn't bother me one bit. I'm used to seeing X-Men in the comics in 1960s clothes, in 1970s flares, in 1980s leg warmers, in 1990s haircuts, etc, and still looking the same age all that time. In other words, I'm already used to the X-Men not aging significantly over half a century. This is nothing new and it doesn't bother me. Yeah, I know the comics pretend it all happened over the past ten years, but that doesn't hold up very well when you can look back at old comics and see the far-gone eras they belong to and when every year is marked by a Christmas issue.
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Old 11-14-2017, 07:05 PM
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Okay. I see I stepped on a land mine with that one.

Well, I think that if Lorna is Magneto's daughter on The Gifted that it's unlikely he's a Holocaust survivor because then he'd be really, really old. I don't know what Fox is gonna do with their X-Men continuity to be honest, so I'm taking it one movie and TV show at a time. But I will say that regardless of timeline inconsistencies, First Class was by far superior to anything Bryan Singer did with the original trilogy. That pervert Brett Ranter likes to think otherwise by pointing out that X-3 did better box office than First Class. But X-3 was horrible and First Class had to fight to win back the audiences after how bad X-3 and Origins were.
And First Class was the most critically acclaimed X-Men film up to that point prior to Days of Future Past, Deadpool, and Logan.
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Old 11-14-2017, 07:11 PM
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Magneto being a Holocaust survivor is set in stone. That isn't going to change for one tv show.
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Old 11-14-2017, 07:15 PM
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Well, I'm just saying that the further we get from WWII, the tougher that's gonna get is all. Unless he was frozen in suspended animation like Captain America.
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Old 11-14-2017, 07:22 PM
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They'll find a way around it. Like they did before.
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Old 11-14-2017, 07:36 PM
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I'll be interested to see how they do it.

I also don't think Emma Frost was that bad in the movie. I do think they cast her wrong and didn't give her much to do except dress like a Victoria's Secret runway model.
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