Wiiiiiiiiiin in the End!
This may surprise you - but I'm a bit of a nerd. Furthermore, I'm a bit of a comic book nerd. I'll give you some time to make peace with this startling new information. I went to see X-Men: First Class this weekend and overall found it OK - some good performances, some terrible ones, and a young beast that looked like the Smurf version of Teen Wolf (Smurf Wolf!).
And while I could be the pedantic geek that pecks at each element of the movie that dramatically departed from the source material - I'm not going to do that. As long as the movie is good - and the spirit of the comic book is honored - then I don't care how "faithful" an adaptation the movie. Because no matter what the movies, TV shows, or even newer books do - they won't necessarily change the original books that I loved so much. That doesn't mean I don't have knee jerk fanboy reactions to things in these movies or even just regular nerd reactions - of course I do (why does Emma Frost's clothes turn to diamonds when she turns to a diamond? it...it doesn't make any sense). But it means that as long as everything makes sense in the context of the world it's presenting and doesn't betray any of the fundamental aspects of the franchise just for cheap plot device, I'm pretty much OK with these changes. Organic webshooters? Different - but that certainly makes more sense than a teenage technology genius that does nothing else with his scientific gift, so I'll allow it.
But the part of my nerd brain that doesn't allow for such mutations in tradition is the filmgoer side. It's that side that had a real problem with X-Men: First Class, not the comic book nerd that secretly yearns for Speedball to have his own movie. The problem with X-Men: First Class, just like Singer's Superman Returns, is that it tries to serve two masters but ends up just making a mess. These films are positioned as their own entities - "reboots" to reignite interest in the property and for a new group/generation of people to enjoy. Rather than creating something wholly new and fresh using the same sandbox of characters but with a new direction/interpretation, Singer and his writers shoehorn their reboots into the established continuity of previous films - making the movies a complete mess and trying to understand the continuity becomes a Sisyphean act of desperation. If you are going to reboot a franchise, having the story take place in the past/as a prequel, then you do not have to fit in with pre-established continuity. In fact - it would be better if you don't.
(Some very minor spoilers for X-Men: First Class may follow)
By awkwardly manipulating aspects of the movie to fit in with the previous X-Men films, X-Men: First Class ends up making the original 3 films make even less sense while straining its own believability. Take, for example, the fact that Mystique and Charles Xavier are now old friends who have been together since childhood. It's an interesting take that exposes an underlying naivete in Xavier's character as he doesn't understand the persecution that the more obviously different (i.e., physically freakish) mutants feel. Xavier "passes" and thus doesn't truly appreciate the frustration and resentment that grows in Mystique's heart towards people that force her to constantly project her appearance as the (unbelievably gorgeous) Jennifer Lawrence. Again, this works well in this movie, but since we know that it's part of the larger X-Men film narrative - it doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
The original dynamic of Magneto/Xavier pairs the two by having mutual respect and a deep friendship that persists despite their conflicting ideologies; they are the two friends separated by a school of thought. X-Men: First Class tries to have this dynamic exist between Xavier and Magneto also, as they play chess and lead their team of misfits. But it doesn't make any sense - why would older Xavier not be closer to Mystique, the person he's known for at least 17 years? Why is his good friend now Magneto, the rage-filled spy he's known for (at maximum) 6 months? So now Xavier has two foils - Mystique and Magneto - who are both his very good friends but oppose him and his dream; if the writers had just gone with a clean slate and had Mystique play the foil, that would have worked. Or if Xavier and Magneto had met years earlier and Mystique was not a childhood chum, that would have worked too. The writers took an original approach (the Mystique friendship) but then made it subservient to the already established approach (Xavier and Magneto were best of friends). By having the exact same story and function assigned to these two characters, it makes the whole thing very confusing and cheapens both relationships.
This is made apparent in other little elements - like when Hank "Beast" McCoy reveals Cerebro to Xavier and Magneto, the mutant finding machine that, in the first film, Xavier said he had built with Magneto. So is Xavier a glory hog? Or just wrong? Then there's Moira Mactaggert who is introduced (in the dumbest cameo in a long time) in X-Men: The Last Stand as a doctor; in this film, she's a CIA agent who ends up getting mindwiped. What? Why?
Similar problems beset Superman Returns, a movie that was firmly established to take place in Donner's Superman movie universe (with Marlon Brando's technoghost, and the exact set of Fortress of Solitude, etc.). But because Singer wanted to pay homage to Donner's work, he ended up making the movie stupid and Superman a deadbeat dad who skipped out on his bastard son. These plot acrobatics end up cheapening the relationships in the movies and making the older movies retroactively either wrong or foolish at best.
WWGLD?Look at the two most successful reboots in recent movies - Batman Begins and Casino Royale (or, really, any James Bond film with a new actor). Both were unapologetic new entries for a new series of films. They didn't cheekily reference films that would later happen or shoehorn in some aspect of that property's lore. I didn't like Batman Begins, but I did like that it wasn't trying to set up the Batman movies of Burton/Schumacher. Audiences can understand that it's something new - you have new actors in a new set playing established characters, we can understand that. But when you try and say "it's new, but don't worry we're not invalidating the stuff that came before it" - then you're taking something that should be easy to enjoy and making it needlessly complex.
A good rule of thumb for all reboots and prequels: if it's reminiscent of anything that happened in the Star Wars prequels - jokes about characters' fates that are revealed in later movies, or awkwardly throwing in characters from the later movies - then it's probably a safe bet that you'll want to avoid it in your movie.