X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)
Directed by Bryan Singer
The ultimate X-Men ensemble fights a war for the survival of the species across two time periods as they join forces with their younger selves in an epic battle that must change the past – to save our future.
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Humankind’s only hope involves the “just shut up and go with it” use of time travel, here employed in a manner (highly) reminiscent of James Cameron ’s The Terminator.
The plot borrows elements from John Byrne and Chris Claremont’s seminal comic stories, a bit of The Terminator, a dab of The Matrix, with lots of Watergate-era paranoia and funkiness thrown in for kicks.
Sure, the narrative legwork in the early minutes of Days of Future Past can be a bit convoluted and labyrinthine but it’s mostly there to set-up a time-travel story in the vein of Back to the Future or The Terminator.
In the manner of The Terminator , they’ve identified the historical schism that set the world down its current path and need Kitty Pryde to send Wolverine’s mind back to his 1973 body in order to prevent the blue-skinned Mystique (Lawrence) from assassinating Dr Bolivar Trask, a mutant-fearing scientist played by Peter Dinklage (riffing on his Game of Thrones disreputability) whose work will lead to the creation of the Sentinels – but only after Mystique kills him.
The new “X-Men” plays like “The Terminator” crossed with “American Hustle” via “12 Monkeys.”
Beyond its specific callbacks to X-Men and X2 , Future Past is also reminiscent of Singer’s earlier movies in its ungainly plot structure and momentum-killing bouts of exposition, which have only grown more pronounced with passage of time and the appearance of such swifter, nimbler Marvel movie fare as Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man and Jon Favreau’s Iron Man .
It certainly felt ready for retirement at the conclusion of Brett Ratner ’s X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), a sequel so over-amped and underfed that it mothballed the series, allowing 2008’s first Iron Man movie to usher in the era of Marvel-produced spandex spectaculars.
“X-Men: Days of Future Past” (rated PG- 13 for sequences of intense sci-fi violence and action, some suggestive material, nudity and language) offers the best film in the “X-Men” franchise but it is nowhere near the caliber of films Marvel itself is producing with films like the first “Iron Man,” “The Avengers,” and “Captain America: Winter Soldier.”
Bryan Singer started the X-Men franchise back in 2000, establishing the first of the modern era of hero franchise films, pre-dating Iron Man and The Avengers team films by eight years.
In a pre–Batman Begins, pre–Iron Man world, the two Singer films felt like breakthroughs because they weren’t actively offensive and didn’t seem ashamed of their source material.
By exploiting her DNA and plugging it into his drones, Trask is able to evolve “Iron Man”-looking robots of the past into truly destructive, shape-shifting machines in the future who are actually able to kill mutants.
There's even a tantalizing tease to further whet appetites (less savvy viewers will be forgiven for thinking they're watching an outtake of Jaye Davidson in Stargate).
Joe (Joseph-Gordon Levitt) fought with an older version of himself (Bruce Willis) to change the future in "Looper."
But even simpler than Days of Future Past's hero's journey is its quick fix on the time travel problem — you know, the web of logical paradoxes present in every piece of time travel fiction from H.G. Welles to Marty McFly to Looper that draws ire from sci-fi adherents the world over.
Unlike something like Looper which makes no sense even to itself.
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The film's overly computer generated prologue introduces new characters like Bishop (Omar Sy, “The Intouchables”) and Blink (Fan Bingbing), whose teleportation powers are coming in awfully handy during a Sentinel attack.
Joining them are Xavier’s remaining X-Men — Wolverine (Hugh Jackman, The Wolverine ), Storm (Halle Berry, Cloud Atlas ), Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page), Colossus (Daniel Cudmore) and a handful of new members that will thrill longtime X-fans.
And, if James McAvoy (2013's " Trance ") and Michael Fassbender (2013's "The Counselor"), as Charles and Erik, do not exactly resemble elder counterparts Patrick Stewart (2012's "Ted") and Ian McKellen (2013'S " The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug "), at least their performances are compelling enough to overlook this ill-fitted casting.