X-Men: First Class

(the following may contain spoilers if you can read between the lines, but nothing is spelled right out)
Saturday afternoon took a drive to the movie theater settled into my chair, leaned back with my feet up on the empty seats in front of me that I hoped would not be filled by fellow patrons.  The theater darkened and then commenced the numerous flash of trailers for this summers super hero, or super hero esque movies, including Real Steel, which my brother unfortunately leaned over and asked to be taken to, which now i'll have to, and Transformers 3, Green Lantern and Captain America.   And then the movie began and the well known Twentieth Century Fox logo and fanfare began to trumpet through the stadium like seated theater.  And so began X-Men First Class.
The only reason I waste my time writing out that beginning and mundane paragraph is to set up just how much this movie surprised me, you settle in, the usual stuff shows up and your prepared to possibly be disappointed, X-men aren't my favorite group of superheroes, even though the movies were very entertaining, the 2nd part of the original trilogy really the only memorable one the first origin story of Wolverine was an extremely poor film.  Maybe however the reason Wolverine was jsuch a weak movie was that the character behind it, while fun, and cool, and slickly played by Hugh Jackman just lacks a personality to carry a film, and was the spotlighted hero in the original trilogy so, maybe i was more or less tired of him for one thing, and then back to that poorly constructed film.
And then comes this origin story, which exceeded my expectations but is still not a great film, but a very good one nonetheless.  I'd like to say that a Magneto solo origin story probably would have worked very very well, given the early scenes in which he's hunting the nazi's responsible for his parents death, and that is some hefty dramatic stuff, a whole movie dedicated to that, a Nazi hunting movie surely has been done numerous times, but not with mutants.  Those early scenes are some of the best work.  And it seems that Michael Fassbender was really given all the emotional weight of the movie, like one review said, he is the Wolverine like character of the film.
Xavier is not really given as good a treatment dramatically as Erik Lensherr aka Magneto, but James McAvoy plays him to death with naive convictions, which is suitable, just not altogether thrilling.  Though their differentiating attitudes would have probably made a sequel much more interesting, the studio most likely forced on a neatly wrapped up ending to link it directly to the other films.  And that ending does not feel right, we are given a very very interesting and great emotional climax, a perfect scene setting up the moral conundrum between Professor X, and Magneto, that would create a rift between them, and its perfect and simple, there is already big fight scenes minutes before this point, this was the high dramatic climax, the movie should have found a way to end at Magneto's victory, and X's loss, but it doesn't, it continues on, and even Michael Fassbender or the editing boys seemed to know that the ending coming wasn't what they wanted.  Because Fassbenders irish voice begins to sneak in, and you'd think given that the rest of the film didn't have a hint of it, they could have used better takes or something.  Anyways, the climax after the climax was just tacked on and lame.  i can't get into a great many details without ruining it, but if you've seen the movie you probably know what i'm talking about
As for other issues I had the CGI was unpolished in quite a few areas, but not Wolverine horrible however.  And it looked pretty good given that the movie production only wrapped months ago.  So the fact that the movie was very very good, is a testament to the actors, and filmmakers.  Beast looked kind of goofy as though they couldn't didn't want to take the time to do really great make up and prosthetics.  The Angel mutant with the fairy wings, and such was a lame one as well, mostly because she spit fireballs out of her mouth.  Other than that the movie was very well put together.
I loved the Azazel and Beast Fight, it was a little to brief for my taste.  I would like to learn more about Azazel's character.  And as i've stated before the actors all do a top notch job in the movie, they all believe in what the characters their playing are, and it shows.  And the violence is actually pretty intense for a pg-13 super hero movie, pushing it a little bit, especially when Azazel dispatches of some people in the light of the moon, but that's not a strike for me, just a side note that this one doesn't play as simple fun. 
So bottom line very good movie, superbly acted, some minor CGI flaws, and a forced ending.  Go see this movie, its box office isn't doing well, I want the studios to keep making their summer movies of this caliber, or at least the x-men movies, and not like the higher grossing Wolverine movie.