Oliver Platt, Rose Byrne and Jason Flemyng are enrolling in First Class along with the other 1.2 billion people cast so far.
Because cramming in too many characters and sacrificing individual character moments totally wasn’t the problem in the previous X-Men movies (hint: that was sarcasm), Fox has cast three more roles in X-Men: First Class. Flemyng will play Azazel (read: Nightcrawler’s father), Byrne will play Dr. Moira MacTaggert (read: Professor X’s girlfriend) and Platt will play the man in black (read: I dunno…some guy who dresses in black?).
You know, I’m a bit confused on the whole role this movie will have in the established X-Men film universe. We have a young X-Men team with the originals of Cyclops, Jean, Storm and Beast, yet we also have Nightcrawler’s dad coming in? That plus a young Mystique might mean something if Nightcrawler weren’t already the same age or older than the rest of the X-Men in X2, as in the comics Mystique is Nightcrawler’s mom. And how does Azazel even figure into the story of the young X-Men? Or Moira MacTaggert? How in all of this will Moira even have time to do anything significant? And who is this man in black? Some mysterious agent working for the government under Senator Kelly perhaps? Maybe Bolivar Trask? Might we have Sentinels too on top of everything? How in the hell will we have room to put a story into all of this? Add too this Kevin Bacon as some sort of mysterious new bad guy (come on Mister Sinister) and the storyline of the fallout between Xavier and Magneto, and the establishing of the X-Men, and the love triangle between Cyclops and Jean and Emma Frost, and oh God, my head is exploding.
Now in a way I’m looking forward to this as, with Matthew Vaughn directing, it might was the stink of X-Men Origins: Wolverine off my still tainted body. On the other hand, they just keep piling on mutants, which was the problem with the previous movies. Too many characters leading to no development for anyone beyond Wolverine. As much as I love ol’ sniktbub, I just want to see these characters develop beyond what their powers are. Well, with Wolvie out of this movie there might be a chance for that. Might being the key word because, again, there’s a crap ton of characters here. You know, I’d feel much better if this were a plain ol’ reboot under the banner of Marvel Studios. Well, whatever this is, it will be coming out next year, so we should be getting some more solid news soon.
