Originally Posted by
Panic
For me, First Class is a mixed bag where the good outweighs the bad, but there is a lot of bad, or at least 'meh'. McAvoy and Fassbender are great, and their chemistry is through the roof; January Jones is bad, and they stick her in that embarrassing costume that doesn't work, imo; the training scenes with the new recruits are fun; Edi Gathegi is a superb actor wasted, and killing him and turning the only other person of colour evil made me wince in the cinema; there are terrific scenes (eg' Erik killing Nazis); there are some awful scenes and dialogue ('mutant and proud' I just find ham-fisted). Really the film jumps from great moments to bad, and just keeps up that pattern. For me, perhaps the biggest mistake as far as being a first movie in a new series of X-films was having Erik turn on the group at the end, as well as crippling Xavier - bearing in mind that arguably the biggest strength of First Class was the chemistry between the two leads and watching them work together, splitting Erik off from Charles meant that subsequent films had to bring them back together, only to turn Magneto evil again. It was stupid, and it just got worse with each film. It would have been much better to keep Erik good for at least another film, though occasionally at loggerheads with Charles over the methods they should use.
Overall it has huge amounts of talent involved and bags of potential, but squanders a lot of it.