Magazine Analysis: X Men First Class

This Empire magazine cover is the X Men first class edition. Just for the fans, this is the fifth X Men film and was set before any of the other's. The first thing that grabs my attention as a media student and as the audience is the X-MEN first class title which is white and centred in the middle of the magazine. Another thing that grabs my attention straight away is the colour of the magazine. We all know that red is associated with bad and evil. From this we can get that the 3 characters in the magazine are evil and that the character with his back half turned is the main protagonist as he is centred right in the middle. Because his back is turned you get a sense off double identity, and a sense that maybe the turning of his back indicates he has turned in some sort of way maybe from good to bad. The magazine uses captions also known as hyperbolic wording to capture the audience's attention by advertising new films coming out and interviews on celebrities. To the left there's a picture of the other magazine that goes with the film and says 2 covers to collect. This is a good way to make more money as audiences will want to know about the 2 magazines. This is clever because fans of the comic books and of the films will want to read about both rather than just one because they want to know as much information as they can about both set of characters. The background of the magazine has the big X symbol which grabs the attention of all comic book and film fans as this is the main franchise symbol of the film just like the 'bat signal'. The colour of the magazine breaks conventions with the features of red and white. Red associates with evil and evil associates with bad. Bad and evil elements are usually shown in red and dark colours such as black. This gets me thinking that the use of white is not only to grab the audiences attention but to show that these characters may have some sort of good in them and turned bad from something that may have happened in the past. The use of small yellow writing to stand out and grab the readers attention to buy the magazine because of the extras that are included. The use off different colours and the angle has been really thought about because it breakes conventions between the bad evil and little hints of good.

This is the second part of the magazine and after analysing the first one you can tell straight away that the colour blue and white is showing us that this poster is about the good side. The 3 main protagonists are again centred with the main character in the middle and the other 2 characters are similarly angled like in the first magazine. The main protagonist however is differently positioned in comparison with the other magazine. This character is looking straight at the camera without no hesitation or covering up his identity in any sort of way. This shows that he is pure good and that no evil will come out of him. However for the audience who have watched the film will realise that the character towards the left also known as 'mystique' chooses the bad side. This breaks a convention and makes you think why didn't they show any sort of double identity in the front cover. Maybe they feel sorry for the character and maybe she never had a double identity she was just lost in finding who she really was. Both magazines are very similar just have colour differences to outline the contrast between the 'good' and the 'evil' and to show the different main protagonists in the film. Me and Kiyans film has the same both evil and good characters and hopefully we can make two magazine covers for our production and use certain colours and ideas from these two X Men magazines to make ours brilliant.