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Fox has snagged Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass, Layer Cake) to direct X-Men: First Class. Now, at least there is one silver lining to the shitstorm cloud that has become the X-men film franchise.

X-Men:
First Class will tell the story of Professor Xavier's original team of mutants and how they came into being. That sounds like a great idea...in a world where the previous X-Men films hadn't fucked up the chronological continuity of the story.

In the
X-Men comics, the original team consisted of Cyclops, Jean Grey, Angel, Beast, and Iceman. But, since movie makers have decided to tweak the stories in various ways, many of the characters are completely out of place chronologically. For instance, Bobby Drake a.k.a. Iceman is introduced as a teenager in X1, and Angel is introduced in X3 (serving no purpose other than to further muck up X-Men canon). So, now they have to take other characters out of their chronological place in the X-Men universe to fill the place of Iceman and Angel.

It may seem dumb to complain about tweaking the timeline to the average moviegoer who isn't familiar with the X-Men comics storyline, but it really does effect the quality of the films. The X-Men comics became popular because the characters and their relationships were compelling and interesting, and many of the characters were written into stories and developed together. Like in any good story with an ensemble cast of characters, they were written to play off of each other. The je ne sais quoi of the series has been compromised.

I give it about two or three more installments before the original storyline is unrecognizable, thus rendering decades of great source material useless.

But hey, I almost forgot. Kick-Ass director, Matthew Vaughn, is at the helm for this one, and Bryan Singer, director of X-Men and X2, is producing, so even if the storyline is messed up, at least the film itself has a good shot at being satisfying (If you want to know what I thought of Vaughn's last project, check out my review of Kick-Ass).

The most frustrating aspect of this to me is the apparent lack of respect for the work of the writers of the original material. Their stories worked when they were created; they will work now. When an aspect of the story is changed unnecessarily, it just reeks of studio interference; “Make sure to include characters that will sell...and make sure you include Wolverine in there somehow.”

Have faith, movie studios. Leave the creativity to the professionals.

I would be extremely happy if Fox stopped making X-Men films for the next five years and then pulled a Spider-man and rebooted the franchise.

What do you think about X-Men: First Class? Matthew Vaughn? Am I whining too much about nothing?

-Andrew

Source: Screenrant, Mtvnews







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