"X-Men: First Class" Blu-Ray/Digital Combo Review
If you think of the X-Men movies as being grounded by two rival “old guys”, Patrick Stewart as Professor X and Sir Ian McKellen as bad guy Magneto then you need to see how it all started when these dudes were young and discovering their powers.
After being thrown together to prevent a nuclear disaster in the real-life Cuban Missile
Crisis of the 1960’s, young Charles Xavier (James McAvoy), Erik Lehnsherr (the future Magneto played by Michael Fassbender) and their high school mutant charges Raven/Mystique (Hunger Games’ Jennifer Lawrence), Nicholas Hoult as Hank McCoy/Beast, Caleb Landry Jones as Sean Cassidy/Banshee, Zoe Kravitz as Angel, Edi Gathegi as Armando Muñoz/Darwin and Lucas Till as Alex Summers/Havok have to overcome personal differences to prevent WWIII. When it’s over, some are gone forever and some will choose the “dark side”, joining Magneto’s Brotherhood vs. Professor X’s X-Men.
Special Features: Lots of good ones! You get a digital copy to show on your various devices and quite a few cool featurettes.
“X-Marks the Spot”: You can learn more about several scenes with some interesting short cast interviews. There is some early development, pre-visualization stuff etc. Good “making of” piece.
“Isolated Film Score”: Think music is everything? Then you can watch the film with just the music by composer Henry Jackman playing. Kinda cool. You certainly see how much a good music score ads to the enjoyment of a film. A little comment by the composer on choosing Magneto’s theme.
“Cerebro Mutant Tracker” is a version of the telepathy machine you see in the films. Spend more time with your fave mutant as you get profiles of all the mutants in the franchise with clips from all of the movies and how they connect. Very cool for X-Men fans.
“Children of the Atom” is the bigger “making of” doc that covers interviews and tech aspects of the film. You get pre-production design, special effects and learn that the inspiration for the cool 1960’s style of the sets and clothes comes from those early ‘60’s James Bond movies with Sean Connery! Yes, Ms. Frost does look like an early Bond girl! Now we know why. You get 20 minutes of behind-the-scenes footage included in the “X Marks the Spot” viewing mode.
On BD Live you can download a short featurette that continues the “Dogfight” scene shown in “Children of the Atom”.
You get a cool “10 Marvel “X-Men” Digital Comics” with a comic devoted to the “First Class” backstory the film tells. Nice addition.
“Deleted Scenes” are pretty cool. They are all fun or very visual scenes both funny and dramatic and were probably cut for time.
Wrapping Up: I really enjoyed this backstory movie. James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender are excellent as younger versions of lead mutants Professor X and Magneto. The high school-age mutants have very relatable human problems and the film is character-driven, has a great plot connected to real history and a very cool “look” and great special effects. This Blu-Ray/Digital combo pack is loaded with interesting and fun extras. Definitely the way to go for X-Men fans or fans of the various excellent actors like Jennifer Lawrence who we’ll soon see as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games.
