Decent watch, might watch again, and can recommend.

This is not a good "comic book movie", but as a stand alone story, it's decent if derivative.

Just pretend I did a whole rant about how this isn't like the comics, we're both better off this way.

There are a lot good points like balancing the characters and stars in a way that was lauded way more in Avengers later on because everyone liked those characters better and there was some definite "oomph" to the Avengers franchise that the X-Men franchise was missing from the start, but no one had done it right yet so it was unclear what we didn't know at the time.

Fox clearly put enough money into this on the basis of the cast paychecks alone, and there are several good visual effects throughout the movie. Comic consistencies aside, they really shoehorned some of the things in and there character writing is clearly misdirected.

The writing has a good skeleton to it, but there are too many places where they wrote "and something cool happens to distract the audience". X-Men is a drama story, and they carried that into the movie, but it would seem they were aiming to be an action movie with a deep plot and just landed inbetween.

The action is all between characters that (and I fully believed the actors did all they could) are limited to being awkward, goofy, stiff, or empty.