X-men First Class Details - Officially Shit

Well after months of speculation, some details about the upcoming X-men First Class movie have finally emerged. It's been a fucked up couple of weeks with new cast members being used that seem like someone opened up a Marvel Dictionary, got a secretary piss faced drunk, spun her around on a chair, and then had her randomly point out characters to use. That list now includes C and D-listers like Darwin, Banshee, Havok, Angel Salvador, and Azazel (Nightcrawlers father) along with more established names like Magneto, Mystique, and Professor Xavier. All the while there has been intense speculation on who will play Cyclops, Jean Grey, and Storm. Because seriously, you can't have a movie called X-men First Class with the characters most associated with the First Class right?

WRONG SHITHEAD!

Those are Singer's (implied) words, not mine. With filming set to begin next month, Singer finally spilled on the details and some of them may disgust fans about half as much as X3 while requiring the others who actually see this movie to have a blood-alcohol content of no less than .15 in order to make it through. Here are some tidbits from an interview by Screenrant.

• X-Men: First Class is not like the “X-Men: First Class” comics, hence the significant character differences.
• It takes place in the 1960s where Kennedy is still president.
• Equality and racism are key issues with Martin Luther King and Malcolm X dominating mainstream media with the Civil Rights movement (foreshadowing (even mirroring) the mutant situation to come).
• Director Matthew Vaughn is very interested in the setting and what Singer describes as the “James Bond tech of the time”, as Harry puts it.
• Shooting will begin with Charles Xavier attending Oxford University.
• We’ll get to see classic X-Men costumes, much more similar to the comics than we’ve seen in previous movies.
• The movie will be the franchise’s most international yet, with shooting taking place in the U.S. and England, and the story also involving at least The Soviet Union as well.
• We’ll get a first look at some X-Men: First Class costumes within a month.
• Cyclops and Jean Grey are NOT in the movie. Havok definitely is and Lucas Till will be playing him.
• January Jones is Emma Frost and there’s no truth to Rosamund Pike’s involvement.
• Singer is excited about them getting Nicholas Hoult as Beast because of a fortunate delay in start date for Mad Max: Fury Road.
• Kevin Bacon’s villain is in fact, Sebastian Shaw. Yes, that means Hellfire Club is in X-Men: First Class.
• Singer explains the 1960s setting is perfect for the Hellfire Club, from the characters to costumes.
• There are other characters that will be in the film that they’re keeping secret. Could it be more mutant X-Men or more likely, other members of the Hellfire Club?

So here are a few highlights. This movie takes place in the sixties and Emma Frost is part of the Hellfire Club with Sebastian Shaw. Yet as some will recall, Emma showed up in the Wolverine Origins movie as one of the prisoners. And that movie took place in the 70s or 80s (it's hard to tell because the movie was so fucked up). Also, anybody who knows anything about the X-men characters knows that Havok, Alex Summers, is the younger brother of Cyclops, Scott Summers. Unless someone does a retcon of the Wolverine movie (which nobody will really give a shit if they do), something's gotta get fucked up here.

It's not that these ideas are inherently bad, but why the fuck would anyone call this movie First Class if it's an Origins movie? First Class implies that the story involves the First Class. That's Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Angel, Beast, and Iceman. No way around it. There was a whole fucking comic series about it for over a year! I get that movies take a lot of liberties from books, but you don't call the Godfather books Willy Wonka and get away with telling a completely different story.

Bryan Singer set his comic movies apart by essentially not paying much attention to the source material. This worked to some extent with the first two movies because he set it up to make it novel and fresh for both comic fans and non-comic fans alike. However, that kind of shit has a very low margin for error. It takes only one X3 to render this entire movie universe completely fucked. Add Wolverine Origins into the mix and it's essentially super-fucked if that were an appropriate term. What's the point of another origins story if every movie that comes after it is basically going to end up sucking anyways? Add to that, the assholes making it have the audacity to call it First Class when they could have just as easily called it X-men Origins and nobody would be bitching about it the way I am right now.

Even without Cyclops and Jean Grey in it, there's still a big problem with telling the story of Charles Xavier's origin with Magneto. In X3 Xavier is going to get fucking killed! So again, everything he does in this movie or whatever other prequels Fox shits out mean precisely dick. Because in the end, he's going to get killed by Jean Grey in a way that has no drama, no punch, no impact, and no redeeming qualities. It's not like the death of Darth Vader in Star Wars in that at least his death was a major turning point in the Star Wars movies. Xavier's death, like that of Cyclops and Jean Grey, is muddled in the fucked up horrors that is X3. Until that movie is expunged from existence, all subsequent X-men movies are shit.

There are only a few faint glimmers of hope with this movie. Director, Matthew Vaughn, stated a while back that this movie could draw parallels to the Star Trek movie that came out last year. That movie was not a reboot. It was in continuity with the other films, but the time line was essentially reset because characters from the future came back and essentially altered the past forever in what some call a quasi-reboot. If First Class has something similar then that may open the door for X3 at least being partially forgotten, but the fact it will still have happened requires that this and every subsequent movie be awesome on such great levels that it may have to date rape the forces of the impossible to stand a chance.

Perhaps I'm still overly bitter about X3, but as an X-men fan it's seriously disheartening when the X-men movie franchise feels like the most fucked franchise in all of comic movies. Hulk got a reboot after only one movie and now Superman and Spider-Man are getting reboots without the studios trying to salvage the shitty movies that came before them with prequels. Why is it that the X-men franchise has to go through four movies that imploded with two more in the pipeline (X-men First Class and Wolverine Origins II) to endure? It's like trying to cut your losses at a blackjack table by continuing to bet more and more despite losing with every possible hand.

The only hope for the X-men movies at this point is a reboot, but so long as the studio is obsessed with making prequels it may be years if not decades until that finally happens. By then I'll probably be dead from alcohol poisoning or I'll have long since been committed. And any fans who were hoping for redemption after X3 would have long since stopped giving a fuck. So I think it's safe to say that there's a 95 percent chance that the X-men movie franchise is completely and utterly fucked for the next decade. Nuff said.