X-Men First Class Touted as Marvel’s Casino Royale

Watching all the early teasers, trailers and clips for X-Men: First Class, we’ve often remarked that the film feels different; special in some way. It takes a period of history from which much of today’s culture, fashion, art and architecture has begun to borrow — the 1960s — and sets its story in that era. Even more interestingly, at the most politically-charged moment in that era’s history: the Cuban Missile Crisis.
So what happens when you mix X-Men with a little of Gerry Anderson’s Fab Future, a bit of Carnaby Street…and throw in some crazy Khrushchev for good measure? According to an increasing number of critics: a helluva film.
According to THR critic Todd McCarthy:“roughly the first half of this massive and very well-cast origins extravaganza is arguably the best hour of Marvel Comics-derived filmmaking among the torrent of it that’s cascaded across screens in recent years.” McCarthy even goes as far as to draw a comparison to Casino Royale, suggesting that X-Men: First Class has done for the Marvel franchise what the reborn Bond film did for the 007 franchise back in 2006.
He’s not the only one. Garth over at Dark Horizons calls the film “not just the best of the series but the best adaptation of a Marvel title yet.”
Variety, meanwhile, says the movie reclaims “much of the pop-operatic grandeur and insouciant wit so evident in the series’ first two installments”, extolling director Matthew Vaughn’s skills at blending style and substance into a ‘mainstream movie’: “…[Vaughn] manages to invest this unabashedly commercial product with a unique stylistic identity…”
CinemaSpy’s review of X-Men: First Class will appear on Thursday. Meanwhile, if you missed it — and even if you didn’t — give the official international trailer below a viewing.