'X-Men First Class' Has It's First Trailer

The "X-Men" franchise kicked off the box office dominance of super hero movies back in 2000. The first sequel showed that when done properly later entries in these series can be even better than the originals. Then the thrid film happened... then the Wolverine movie which felt like a shameless cash-grab with little interest in the integrity of the X-men universe. Fox Studios is hoping to bring the series back on track with this summer's "X-Men First Class." The story goes back to the early days of the Xavier School for the Gifted when future enemies Magneto and Professor X were close friends working towards a common goal. "Kick-Ass" director Matthew Vaughn (who was actually supposed to direct the third "X-men" movie but had to drop out) takes the reigns on this new entry.

The trailer premiered yesterday on facebook and offers quite a bit of insight into what the makers are trying to pull off. The first thing viewers will notice is that it does everything possible to evoke the first two films. It actually begins with some text and then images (albeit from behind) taken from the first film of Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan as Professor X and Magneto. The viewer is then shown the new actors playing the same roles: James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender respectively. There isn't a clear cut break down of the overall plot of the film, however what's shown in the trailer is definitely more thoughtfully constructed than just flashes of action and characters (though there is that too.)

The trailer pulls a very clever trick to establish the timeline of the film by having the characters watch President Kennedy's address regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis. This allows the trailer to set the time frame of the film in the 1960s without having to be so blunt as to actually put the year up on the screen in text. It's a much more subtle and intelligent way to convey the same information, and if that type of approach is something that's being applied to the film itself then this could bode very well. And more than just setting up the time period the images overlayed for specific parts of the Kennedy speech are very cleverly done. Such as a image of the defiant shape-shifter Mystique being shown as the President is saying "There is one path we will never choose, and that is the path of surrender."

What the trailer gives more than anything is an overall feel to the film, and impression that is left is very much in line with the first two "X-men" movies. Not a great deal of plot is divulged and very little dialogue is heard, which does make it difficult to judge how well McAvoy and Fassbender have been able to channel Stewart and McKellan. There are also flashes shown of some of the other mutants that are to be featured, and they seem to linger much more on the ones that audiences have already seen. There's the aforementioned Mystique, and there is also some shots of Beast as well (one of the best things about the heavily flawed "X-men: The Last Stand.") A few others are shown briefly, such as Emma Frost just starting to convert her body to diamond and the red skinned Azazel pulling the same teleportation tricks as Nightcrawler did in "X2: X-Men United" (which is fitting since Azazel is Nightcrawler's father.) There's even some comforting shots of the X-jet thrown in for good measure.

Notably absent from the trailer is Kevin Bacon, who plays the mutant Sebastian Shaw and serves as the film's villain and appears in only one shot where he isn't even the focus. That's probably a side of the film that will be focused on more once trailers that actually get into the meat of the story a little start to come out. For now it's about setting the mood, not outlining the plot. The point of this first trailer is to remind viewers of how much fun they had at the first two "X-Men" outings and to reassure them that this will be more like those. And frankly it does that job rather well. The lingering "money shot" of Magneto lifting a submarine out of the water is admittedly overplayed a little bit as audiences are already well aware of what he can do.

This first trailer is to help audiences realize that the heart of the "X-men" franchise is coming back to the screen and to start to get them fired up. Future trailers will likely get into the plot a bit more and will hopefully give us a bit more of an idea of how these characters are actually going to be played. However for an initial trailer this does exactly what it sets out to do, and it does it well. Fans of the series should be comfortable enough now to start getting excited about this latest entry.