Marvel Studios must have a mutant named "Reboot"

It is a little sad that the when the first X Men movie kicked off the big budget comic movie boom in 1999 that it was the one that ended up needing rebooted in most people's eyes.  I actually liked X Men 3 a little bit and could at least see Wolverine as a halfway decent action movie in it's own right.  However, since X Men 3 is the movie that killed everyone's dog and Wolverine peed on the corpse; to the general public a few changes needed to be made.

You know what that means!  YES!  We have to watch THE ORIGIN STORY AGAIN.  Who mutants are, where the house, plane and characters came to be, etc...The movie practically opens on the same shots that the first X Men movie did of the rainy and dreary concentration camp in Poland.  I can't speak for all comic book fans but I saw this once before, I don't need to see this AGAIN.  If Iron Man needs to be rebooted will we have ANOTHER origin of the injured scientist in captivity building his armor and avenging Yinsen in the process?

Thankfully instead of Magneto stealing some waifish child to power a mutating/killing machine-thing, it's Magneto whose looking for the Nazi Doktor Shaw: a mutant himself who murdered his mom.  Shaw created a group called The Hellfire Club with mutants and is manipulating World forces to push for a nuclear conflict which became the Cuban Missile Crisis so that he can take over the world.  Meanwhile Charles Xavier has published a paper on the mutant gene and is discovering more and more people who share special gifts, similar to his own.  Charles and Magneto meet during a conflict involving Shaw and later join together and with the help of the CIA, find and meet other mutants such as themselves to come together and learn more about they're powerful gifts

The bottom line?  I went into this movie wanting to not like this.  AGAIN with the wrong characters from the start in a rebooted series and short of Kevin Bacon I didn't recognize any of the actors.  The mutant characters that are used are also dull.  THANKFULLY the characters once introduced get enough screen time so we can see they're personalities.  Banshee is an showoff kid, Havoc a rebel and Beast is a nerd who gets tough once he lets his powers loose.  Mystique (who had more then enough screen time in the first three movies) is back as a runaway who has lived with Charles most of her life and once Eric (Magneto) enters the picture, starts to embrace her mutant side more and more when Charles for some reason seems to shun her a little when she would perfer to look her normal blue skinned look.  Emma Frost as a diamond skinned telepath in lingerie was someone I forgot about for a while and after I saw January Jones in the role, I wish they left her alone.  She doesn't ruin the movie but she sure doesn't help with her near pout acting.

The big draw in this movie is hands down Charles and Eric.  As men who should be side by side in they're duty to find mutants and to bring them to a place where they cannot be harmed and work toward the goal of bridging the gap between humanity and mutants, the scenes they have through the movie work wonderfully and especially stirring is where Charles teaches Eric how he doesn't need hate to make his powers work to move metallic objects which up until then he had been.  We know that Charles knows that peace will come with humans and mutants, but it might take some time, but Eric is far less optimistic of Charles's naivety as he has seen an uglier side of humanity and has a hard time letting go of his hate.  Times in the movie where Eric calls the actions of the humans, hes right and you damn near want to side with him just by seeing how many times he is right.

The pieces are all in place for a sequel to this movie which I dare say IS the best of the X Men movies.  It's plot is better then the first movie and didn't drag like the second and as much as I'll stick up for the third movie, it's no contest here.  With this movie taking place in the early 60's, will they skip ahead and make the next one in the 70's?  Will Magneto cause the attack on the Olympics in Munich or even be the cause of the Energy Crisis?  Maybe we can meet Dazzler or even better take a page from Giant Size X Men and get Colossus and Wolverine!  Or will he just tell Professor X to f**k off again?