The early reviews for Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class certainly make it sound like it will be the superhero film of the summer. Collider.com called it “a huge home run, while Bleeding Cool called it “the spiritual prequel to X2…after I had been bowled over by X2 and its blend of big fun and big ideas, I wanted more. And now, eight years later, I got more.” 

 

Drew McWeeny of Hitfix.com stated that he “was still in a state of shock of at how much it works, and how ambitious it is,” while the reviewer at HeyUGuys complimented "the talented screenwriting duo of Jane Goldman and director Matthew Vaughn" for “a fantastic effort to bring the 60’s age of civil unrest and cold war paranoia successfully into a comic book milieu, and weave what is essentially a period, character-based (a term which doesn’t normally spring to mind in such a genre) espionage thriller with big action spectacle thrills.”

 

A word of caution, these are fan-based sites from the U.K., and expectations for X-Men: First Class, which had to made in a rush and was after all the fifth film in the franchise, were perhaps lower than for the other of this summer’s superhero films, which are new to the screen. But there is such unanimity of praise in these early reviews that X-Men: First Class would at least appear to have the solid support of the comic book fan base, which is not a bad thing for a film that is rebooting a major superhero film franchise.