X-Men: First Class

I'm going to start off by saying this was easily the best movie of the summer (so far) and the best X-Men movie to date. X-Men First Class does for the X-Men series what Batman Begins did for Batman. Pre- First Class, the X-Men franchise was in trouble. After over a decade of casting ideas, story ideas, directors, and scripts Bryan Singer finally brought X-Men to the screen and while the first one had a small budget, it was huge for comic book nerds and mainstream movie goers alike. The second X-Men movie was arguably just as good or better with a bigger cast, better action sequences, and a manageable number more mutants. The end gave hope for an incredible future for X-Men movies. And then Brett Ratner (Rush Hour) got his hands on the Marvel franchise and single handily (with Fox's help) killed X-Men. Fans feared the worst had come when X-Men 3 destroyed the story Bryan Singer had so carefully crafted. But then Wolverine came and made X-Men 3 look like an Oscar worthy picture. Wolverine began destroying the very timeline that the first 3 movies had created. Characters and stories no longer made sense, the action sequences were not complete and looked fake, the movie was a disaster.
And then- First Class. As the movie started development fans (including myself) were skeptical and downright hateful towards this movie. While Xavier and Magneto were well cast, the rest of the cast was a disaster. These were not the original mutants considered to be "first class". In fact Cyclops' younger brother Havok was cast which destroyed that whole timeline since Cyclops' was a teenager in the 80's according to the Wolverine movie. There were many other complaints but this is supposed to be a positive review.
The moment the movie started my doubts disappeared. This movie was incredible!! Forget the original 5 X-Men- this was great! This movie took all the best elements of comic book movies- the action, the amazing story line, the realistic nature of it, the acting, and then even included costumes that oddly enough did not look that ridiculous. From start to finish the movie was entertaining. The cameos fit in perfectly with the story without seeming forced.
The only thing I did not like was towards the end (Spoiler free) Magneto starts up his Australian accent out of nowhere.
Thats it...Everything else was X-traordinary!! Hopefully this spawns a successful trilogy managed by Matt Vaughn and him alone. I give this movie 5 stars out of 5. Looking forward to seeing it again!