After the craptastic showing that was X-Men 3 (how that piece of shite got a 58% on Rotten Tomatoes I will never know, should be in the negatives...) I had zero hopes that even X-Men: First Class would be good, but lo and behold it was.
So, it was with a bit of trepidation we sat down as a family to watch X-Men: Days of Future Past on Blu-ray after Santa dropped it off over the holidays. I have to say I think it is the strongest X-Men movie since X-Men 2: X-Men United. That is saying a lot as X2 is a damn fine movie. Then Marvel pumps out Guardians of the Galaxy (I am a fan of the classic team but I digress).
Before I go into the movie however it is important to cover the actual story it is based on. Days of Future Past follows (roughly) the same mini-arc of X-Men 140-141. Days of Future Past came on the heels of the epic Dark Phoenix Saga (widely regarded as one of the best comic book arcs of all time) and in some ways is well remembered, but overshadowed by such a monumental previous story line. Issues 140-141 has an adult Kitty Pryde reaching out to her younger self from a dystopian future where mechanical Sentinels rule North America and are relentlessly hounding mutants to extinction.
Kitty is able to avert the assassination of Senator Robert Kelly and thus avert the events of the future timeline, namely the Mutant Registration Act. In a way its outcome is mirrored by the T-850 in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines: "You only postponed it. Judgment Day is inevitable." Since Rachel Summers also comes from that future timeline about 30 issues later, perhaps "Days of Future Past" is inevitable. (NOTE: there are the Days of Future Present and other arcs but these are not the focus of this post).
On to the movie itself: as with most of my objections with the X-Men movies, this one of course focuses on Wolverine as the main character. At this stage I am majorly over Logan. Unfortunately the movie studio is not, so they keep milking it for all it is worth. It is as if they figure a 6 foot 2 actor really portrays a 5 foot 4 mutant well... more likely they figure actor Hugh Jackman will get women to go see this as well... Great we get it, he is the anti-hero... next!
So... with all that said the true star of this movie is the younger Charles Xavier played by James McAvoy who conveys the Professor in an outstanding manner and one can easily see him as the later Patrick Stewart version. From the very first scene as the younger professor he is stealing the show. At first he is walking... which is a bit disconcerting for continuity in the previous movie, but they explain it quick enough. I will not spoil why but they had to do this in order for the story to work given the Professor's prodigious mutant abilities.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is the amazing portrayal of Bolivar Trask by Peter Dinklage who is the creator of the Sentinels, 20-foot high mutant hunting robots. It is the Sentinels who hound the mutants into near extinction in the dystopian future that Wolverine is sent from. Peter plays a very methodical villain and is a believable one. Then of course after Kevin Bacon as Sebastian Shaw in
I will not spoil the main premise of the rise of the Sentinels but let's just say they did a great job with the hows and whys and tying it back to a certain mutant.
They did a great job with continuity in the film tying back to X2, for instance a young William Stryker is in Vietnam just like he alluded to in United and the timeline flows well. The clothes, the furniture, etc. Someone however was paying attention to this and did a very, very good job with avoiding continuity errors.
The final battle was well done. When watching it I did notice the rise of tension, the fact that you are left thinking that any minute it is going to go south. The visuals in some respects were jarring, I think it was the weaponry the Sentinels were using that made me notice this. This is probably due to me knowing them first through the comics in the late 1980s then just seeing them for the first time. The Sentinels of the future likewise are "off" to me. The image I could not get out of my mind was that of the machines in The Matrix, bug-like, rather than large lumbering metal giants.
Given the nature of my blog it is not a movie review site, I often look at ways to incorporate it into gaming. I think a mutant campaign would be overdone at this stage of the game, but a dystopian future one would work better. Perhaps a world where every hero is hunted, not just mutants? After all if you are the authorities you never can be too careful right? If going down the road of a Marvel Super Heroes game, I prefer FASERIP, a setting like this would work well.
There you have it, I give it 4 out of 5 stars. Great story, but it would have been better had they used Kitty Pryde as the heroine and had flashback scenes a bit different and grittier with Wolverine in the future timeline.
