This review contains spoilers.
I'm going to say this right now... I absolutely adore X-Men: First Class - the reboot that was helmed by Matthew Vaughn and which introduced a much younger cast of actors to assume the roles previously occupied by fan favourites Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. On this occasion, and in First Class, we were introduced to James McAvoy (as Professor Xavier) and Michael Fassbender (as Magneto) - both of which made an already great movie even more memorable via their powerful on-screen performances and chemistry. It also helped that the movie had an incredibly nuanced and powerful score (provided by Henry Jackman), as this leant credible weight to the more complex story-arcs that pervaded the film and which ensured that the viewer would more easily relate to the X-Men as characters that were motivated by more basic humanistic and emotional desires.
Thus we got to experience the full psychological devastation that was wrought upon Magento whilst he was still a child and as he witnessed his mother being assassinated in the Nazi concentration camps. And through Michael Fassbender's incredibly multi-layered performance, we felt the same level of rage and helplessness that he experienced as he relives those a...