[...] I thought I remembered the movie pretty well, for my first home video viewing of X-Men: First Class, I chose “X Marks the Spot” mode, which interrupts the film with interview inserts [...]

[...] which show that Green Lantern came in #1, but with under $53 million. That’s less than X-Men: First Class, which cost a heck of a lot less to make! Warner reportedly was expecting $55-65 million, so this [...]

[...] focus here is the comics, not the movie. Reprints are included of X-Men: First Class #1 and #5 (both by Jeff Parker, Roger Cruz, and Victor [...]

I’m kind of conflicted about the female characters. More could have been done with them, but I liked how, for example, they showed MacTaggert being aggressively good at her job in the beginning of the film, only to be sidelined by sexist superiors at various points in the rest of it. They could have done nothing at all, or just had some of the CIA guys make an occasional sexist remark, but they proved MacTaggert’s worth to the audience first instead. I thought that made it harder to dismiss the sexism.

That might just be wishful thinking because I think there might be an ulterior motive behind the change in Moira MacTaggert’s character (maybe). First Class seems to be trying to reconcile the worlds of the X-men movies with the comics, to some extent. That is, they’ve putting all of the movies into one world that is different from the comics, and that backed First Class into some corners.

MacTaggert is an old character from the comics. In them, she’s a brilliant geneticist with a complicated romantic history (which includes both Xavier and Banshee) and, eventually, an incredibly powerful mutant son (not Xavier’s). Now, I don’t know if this is where they’re going, but with MacTaggert situated where she is in First Class – and given that her son’s powers seem similar to William Stryker’s son Jason’s powers in X2 – it’s possible they intend to use her as a sort of bridge character.

One of the problems the Spider-man movies ran into was an overflowing cast of characters, and X-men could easily go the same way. If they can tie characters and movies back together – by saying that Moira was involved with Stryker instead of Joseph MacTaggert and her son “Proteus” or “Mutant X” was Jason (who I think was also referred to as Mutant X in X2) – they might be able to keep the series from falling apart. That’s not to say that I like taking a brilliant geneticist and making her into a dazed schoolgirl, but there was a bit more going on there. If nothing else, they took the time to show her doing things throughout the action scenes, to the point where you can argue that she saved a large group of people in a key battle by fighting someone at an important time, if not beating him herself. (Sorry for the lame phrasing; I don’t want to spoil anything.) Overall, I think they might have included MacTaggert as much to set up her character for future films (where, presumably, she would play an even more important role) as anything else, and I’d be happy if they were taking the time for that.

PS: If you didn’t catch it, there were two cameos, not just the obvious one.

Didn’t that Jack Black “Panda” sequel come out this weekend? Could that be siphoning off some of the audience?

And thanks for the clarification on the red teleporter guy. I’d never heard of him before. I saw him in the trailers and just assumed it was going to be Nightcrawlers dad or something.

And it use to be you could have super duper mind powers and dress in lingerie and that was enough for most people. But now shes got diamond skin as well? ;)

[...] enjoyed watching X-Men: First Class, so I wanted to read comics that would give me the same feeling. Only… what are [...]

Add in that sequels have a tendency to leave a been there, done that type of feeling and that there are so many other superhero movies coming out now as compared to when the first -Men movies came out.

I wonder if not having Wolverine starring hurt it? He was clearly the break through character of the first trilogy, some may just not have an interest without seeing him.