I will start out by saying that this is possibly my favorite movie of the year so far, its back and forth with me between this and The Rise of the Planet of the Apes. This is a really groovy flick. It is highly stylized in the fashion of James Bond and it is a great throwback. It manges to have the look and feel of a retro film while keeping its mainstream appeal and producing some really great looking images. The film also manages to do one of my very favorite things and that is blend in fiction with real life history. In the case of X-Men First Class the real history situation blended in was the Cuban Missile Crisis and that is just perfect to symbolize the boiling point of two sides, USA vs Russia and Eric, Xavier. Another way this film truly exceeds its counter parts is its knowledge of the comics and the homage it pays to its fans and it really ties itself in great with the other movies of the franchise, especially the first one released in 2000. X-Men First Class is easily the best of the entire series. The film is rounded out by a great young cast of up and comers and they do a bang up job here. Michael Fassbender is fantastic as Eric (Magneto) as well as James McAvoy as Xavier. Jennifer Lawrence and Kevin Bacon also stand out with some charismatic performances and January Jones, well......She just looked real pretty. All of these things combined are the makings of a great film and if you missed it in the theatres you defiantly don't want to miss the Blu-Ray release.
The Blu-Ray from a technical standpoint is really pretty solid I give the video quality a 4.5 and the audio 5.0. The Special features a 3.5. The video is really sharp and quite colorful, some scenes more than others but this blu-ray really benefits from the films retro look. Detail is very sharp, the picture has an overall warm look to it but the image is crisp. There is only minor crushing that I saw and that was in the beginning and was only for a brief moment. The blacks levels were solid and there was a very fine level of grain to give it a very film type look. The picture quality is really quite nice. My only complaint and its minor is that there seemed to be an error on the disc involving blu lines, while sometimes you see this as a refraction of natural bright light it looked very out of place on this disc and I had to wonder if it wan error or if it was in the original film. It defiantly looks out of place and though I would have remembered seeing something like that in the theatre but maybe not either way it was only very briefly and in two moments. When Magneto is in the restaurant in the beginning and when Havok is testing out how to control his energy beams. The audio on the other hand is just about as perfect of a DTS 5.1 Master lossless audio track could be. You never lost any of the dialogue and sounds were full and booming. The special features rounds out at about 2 hours. There are some decent deleted scenes at about 14 mins and there is an excellent 1 and 10 minute documentary called Children of the Atom and its well worth a watch of all things behind the scenes. There is also a mode called X marks the spot mode which adds about 20 minutes to the film by cutting away to interviews and such. These can also be viewed by themselves in the special features. Overall this is a rock solid disc from the quality of the movie itself to the tech specs to the special features. This one is a no brainer to almost anyone and get my Highest Recommendation
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