X-Men: First Class/YMMV

• Alternate Character Interpretation: In First Class, when Erik killed Shaw with the coin through his head, did he know that he would be causing excruciating pain to Charles who was telepathically connected to Shaw at the time or was Erik so consumed by his anger and need for revenge that he forgot that detail?
  • Or maybe he didn't know that he would end up hurting Charles.
• Broken Aesop: See Unfortunate Implications below. It's a movie, in part, about defying prejudice and embracing the differences between people -- but in the end, the ethnic minorities (those who aren't dead, anyway) still end up with the bad guy, and the good guys are white.
  • Some Double Standard / Hypocrisy action undercuts Erik's "go naked" argument to Raven. He tells her her blue form is just as valid as normal human skin, but is also not worth covering up the way he (and everyone else) covers up his skin. In the same speech he also compares her to an animal (a tiger) and refers to her as a "creature". Erik's Aesop remains consistently broken right up through to X-Men: The Last Stand, when Mystique receives a mutant "cure" meant for Magneto and he drops all pretenses that you should be yourself, immediately rejecting her based on her now-human appearance.
    • Erik did establish in First Class that he preferred her true form.
• Complete Monster: Even Stryker gets blown clean out of the water in terms of unrepentant evil by Sebastian Shaw. He gives new meaning to the word "evil."
• Crowning Music of Awesome: The whole First Class soundtrack is amazing, but special points go to the main theme First Class, Frankenstein's Monster, and Sub Lift. Rage and Serenity counts as this and a Crowning Music of Heartwarming.
• Fashion Victim Villain: Let's face it, the helmet that Shaw wears and Erik takes to block telepathy is a little ridiculous looking. Lampshaded by Shaw when he invades the CIA building where Xavier's team is staying, and on learning Xavier isn't present quips, "Well, at least I can take this silly thing off." And as silly as it looks with Shaw, it's even worse when Erik has it repainted into the same color scheme as the comic book & adds the horns to the front.
• Evil Is Cool: What else did you expect with villains that seem to have just got out of a Bond movie?
• Evil Is Sexy: Emma Frost, Angel and Mystique (the Ms. Fanservice trio). For some, Azazel counts too.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In First Class Xavier brings up Agent Stryker's "son William, whom you were thinking about, which is very nice". Considering how William Stryker treats his own son...
  • When Charles and Erik attempt to recruit the man who would become Wolverine he turns them down. Had he not done this, he may have found haven and thus avoided his memory wipe at the hands of William Stryker. What's even more tragic is that the only people who could remember that incident at all would be Professor X or Magneto, but who can remember some guy they met 40 years ago briefly in a bar?
  • Also, the scenes with Charles happily running with Hank and training with Erik. Those would be the last chances he'd ever have to use his legs...
• Moe: First Class managed to make Mystique seem Moe.
• Memetic Mutation: "__ was never an option."
  • Also, young Magneto is a shark.
• Moral Event Horizon: When Shaw kills Magneto's mother.
• Narm: The Reveal of Erik in full costume as Magneto after his Face Heel Turn. What should be an Awesome Moment of Crowning is made fairly silly by Magneto wearing the same color scheme as the comics - bright red & purple - with the helmet especially looking rather daft in those colors & with the horns Erik has added to the front. The way he's standing, stiff as a board with his arms straight down, isn't helping either. A more dramatic pose could have made all the difference.
  • Jennifer Lawrence may be a good actress, but the way she delivered her "Mutant and Proud" lines oftentimes came off like she was about to burst out laughing at the end of the take.
  • The Instant Death Bullet used on Erik's mother. She literally flings up her hands. It just doesn't work.
• Unfortunate Implications: First Class seems to gets the worst of this. Just look at Angel's Face Heel Turn, Darwin becoming the first casualty within Xavier's new team, Raven joining Erik's team, and even non-mutant Moira being mind-wiped against her will and treated with scorn by her colleagues because of it. By the end of the film, the only heroes left are Charles, Hank, Alex and Sean - all of whom are Caucasian and male, or at least were, in Hank's case. And even among the more diverse antagonists, the Brotherhood of Mutants, who's the leader? Erik - the only one who is male and obviously Caucasian (although being Jewish, he is an ethnic minority), as opposed to Azazel, whose appearance is more inhuman even in movie-verse, and Riptide, who is of indeterminate race in the film and portrayed by a Spanish actor. Not to mention turning both foreign good guys (Moira and Banshee) into Americans.
  • Also, there's only one Communist mutant shown in this movie. He looks like Satan.
• What an Idiot!: One example are the American and Russian fleets. Sorry, it doesn't matter if you're following orders, but firing missiles at a group of individuals that includes someone who can lift a submarine out of the ocean is not a smart move, either tactically or in general.
  • As the trope page for Just Following Orders points out, it's a complicated, morally gray concept. However, Xavier really, really should have known better than to use that phrase to a super-powered Holocaust survivor.
  • What happens afterwards is the worst: Moira tries to stop Magneto's attack on the fleets by shooting at him. With her pistol. While Xavier is in the line of fire. It's one thing to shoot at a target unaware of your surroundings. It's another thing to shoot at someone who can manipulate metal.
• The Woobie: Charles and Raven.
• What the Hell, Casting Agency?: Kevin Bacon as Sebastian Shaw?
  • This crisis was however averted, with Bacon becoming the physical incarnation of Evil Is Cool as Brad Jones can attest to.