X-Men: Days of
Future Past
2014
D: Bryan Singer
**********
Pros: Some good visuals, Acting, Some good moments of
suspense
Cons: Plot, Seems to try to recreate X2 too much
Recently I’ve
been trained by internet critics to be hypercritical of movies. I’ve watched a few movies which seemed fine until I was apparently told otherwise. So when X-Men:
Days of Future Past did so little for me, I was a bit surprised that
everyone is raving about it, even going so far as to say that it was “at least
as good as X2” (seriously?). I feel like a child that was raised bitter by
his parents as a joke. Oh, well. I guess I have to take out the trash myself
sometimes.
Days of Future Past begins in a dark
future that many have compared to that of The
Terminator. I am aware that it is
inspired by a comic that came out before that movie, but the environment is
familiar by now. Still, I like 80’s
cyberpunk, so I’m not complaining. I
would have liked to see more of this setting.
Even the surprisingly decent Terminator
Salvation toned down the aesthetic.
Mutants and many humans are hunted down and placed in death camps by the
Sentinels, and all hope is lost. We’re
introduced to a small band of mutants that consists of Kitty Pryde (Ellen
Page), Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), Bishop (Omar Sy), and others. They are attacked by a group of futuristic
Sentinels that can instantly adapt to mutants’ powers and are nearly
invincible. The battle is hopeless, but
Kitty uses her powers to send Bishop’s consciousness back in time into his past
self so he can warn everyone else and elude the Sentinels. The group meets up with another one which
includes Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), Magneto (Ian McKellen),
Storm (Halle Berry) and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), who seems to have no problem
getting cigars in a post-apocalyptic setting.
Because of
Wolverine’s powers, it is concluded that Kitty can send his mind further back
to 1973 in order to prevent the assassination of Bolivar Task (Peter Dinklage)
by Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence). While
Mystique did kill the inventor of the Sentinels, she made things worse by
convincing the world the robots were needed.
Also, she was caught during the assassination and her body was harvested
to create the Sentinels we saw in the first scene (This, of course, negates her
presence in the previous movies. If the
series already had continuity problems, this movie turns it into a nightmare). Professor X tells Wolverine that he must
convince his younger self (James McAvoy) to help him. This will be a difficult task since the young
Charles had become a cynical recluse at the time. Magneto tells him he’ll need to talk some
sense into his youger self (Michael Fassbender) as well. Young Erik and young Charles would obviously
need to work out their issues, or else Erik will just try to murder people and slow
things down. Erik could also know where
to find Mystique.
What doesn’t
make sense is that in 1973 Erik is safely in prison, and our heroes’ plan is to
break him out and make their goal harder
by dealing with him afterward. The
reason he’s suddenly in jail in this movie is because he assassinated tried
to prevent the assassination of President Kennedy and got framed for it. Erik implies that he did it because he
somehow knew that Kennedy was a mutant (his superpower was apparently Addison's disease), even though if anyone would know that,
it would be Charles. I’m convinced that
the only reason this was done was in order to mirror, and maybe one-up, Magneto’s
jailbreak in X2. Like many a bad sequel, DFP simply wants to do the same thing the previous movie did, only bigger. The reason I didn't mind that movie was because it was an elseworlds scenario, so it made sense for it to recreate iconic moments with a new twist. DFP was a just sequel doing the same thing a previous movie did. We could have had dramatic tension between
Erik and Charles without the jailbreak, and it would have made sense. All this decision accomplishes is to make the
protagonists look like fools. It also
makes the future Magneto’s motivation more questionable. After all, I’m not totally sure he regrets
his previous beliefs, and that he didn’t just join forces with Charles because
the future was so messed up for mutants that he had no choice. He could just be trying to get his past self
out of trouble, but since his past self ends up just trying to make things
worse for the future, that would be a stupid plan.
When
Wolverine is sent back, he wakes up to find that his claws are bone. He steals a gangster’s Boat-tail Riviera and
goes to the dilapidated Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, where he meets
young Beast (Nicholas Hoult) and Charles.
Both of them are on a treatment which suppresses their mutant powers. Beast injects himself with enough to allow
control his transformation while Charles takes enough to completely negate his
powers (his main reason for taking it) while returning the use of his legs. Charles angrily argues with Wolverine due to
his despair and contempt for Magneto, but he eventually comes around and
Operation: Forced Conflict is soon underway.
 |
| GEE. I'M SO HAPPY WE FREED ERIK. HE'S BEEN SO MUCH HELP. |
Before they
begin their mission, they enlist the help of Pietro Maximoff/Quicksilver (Evan
Peters). He’s a smarmy rascal who agrees
to help them for the fun of breaking into the Pentagon, where Magneto is being
kept. The prison was built out of
concrete in World War II, when metal was rare.
We all know that making concrete without reinforcement is a bad
idea. The minute an earthquake happens,
Magneto is going to find himself crushed by rubble. Actually, that’s a great idea. Most of the heavy lifting in Operation:
Forced Conflict falls on Quicksilver, who steals a guard’s uniform while humorously
restraining him with duct tape. He then
vibrates the glass so it rains over Magneto after giving him the unhelpful
advice to “Mind the glass,” and the whole group is cornered by the guards in
the kitchen. Magneto is powerless
because they all have all-plastic/metal revolvers, which is not physically
possible. Sigh, some clown uses a 3D
printer to make a single-shot .380 that still needs a metal firing pin and cartridge, and it’s the early 90’s all over again. Quicksilver then uses his super speed to
deflect the non-metallic bullets and manipulate the guards into getting knocked
out simultaneously. It’s well-timed
slapstick, but it doesn’t match the tone of the film. This is the type of scene I’d like to see in Guardians of the Galaxy. Oddly enough, he’s listening to a song on
headphones played in real time during a slow-motion sequence that lasts a
fraction of a second. Composer John
Ottman could have stretched one note through the sequence while trying to make
it sound distinctive and appealing, but that would have been stealing an idea
from a much cleverer movie. Maybe
Quicksilver has the power to make electronics operate faster, which explains
why he playing a superfast Pong game at some point. After Magneto is freed, Quicksilver has no
more significance in the movie, even though our heroes could have skipped
Operation: Forced Conflict and had him help them stop the assassination. The movie would be a lot shorter if that had
happened. He’s like a human Time Turner. I also wonder where he is in the future
scenes; even the new Sentinels don’t look like they’d be much of a problem for
him.
Wolverine and
Co. then fly to Paris to prevent Trask’s assassination. On the way over, there’s a good dramatic
scene in which Magneto yells at Charles for hiding and ignoring the mutants’
problems. This is consistent with his
character because Charles and Erik, despite their differences still respect
each other and their passion for what they believe. Wolverine threatens Magneto with his
non-metallic claws as if to say “I’m not made of metal anymore,” a gesture
which is meaningless to 1973 Magneto.
Magneto’s like “whatever” and painfully runs rebar through him near the
end of the movie. While Trask is
attempting to sell his technology to the Vietnamese in a secret meeting, the
mutants come in and foil Mystique’s assassination, but Magneto decides to kill
her, a decision which culminates in her disappearance and a public mutant
fight. Trask recovers some of Mystique’s
blood and is inspired to do research on her.
He also uses the incident to convince a surprisingly neutral depiction
of Richard Nixon (Mark Camacho) to support his Sentinel program. In other words, things are still going down
the toilet. I must say that I’m very
disappointed with the Sentinels’ design.
They look like something out of an animated football interstitial. Hell, that disappointing war room scene in X3 got the design right.
 |
| In X3... |
 |
| ...and DFP. I think Bud Light tried something like this, and it didn't work too well. |
With Magneto running amok, Charles regains his power and
uses Cerebro to track down and reason with Mystique, but she’s determined to
kill Trask because there’s something about “If you do this you ruin everything
for everyone” that she does not understand.
Meanwhile, Trask is preparing to unveil his army of Cleatuses before a
crowd of VIPs, unaware that Magneto had sneakily run metal through them so he
can control them. All the characters
converge on the scene, and Magneto drops a football field around it and
commands the Sentinels to wreak havoc.
He runs rebar through Wolverine and sends him into the Potomac, where he
can only struggle to stay awake long enough for the necessary change in the
timeline can take effect. Mystique stops
him from killing everyone, removes his helmet, and decides not to murder Trask with
a plastic/glass 1911 after Charles talks sense into her. In an idiotic move, Charles lets Magneto go,
figuring that once he murders enough people he’ll get tired of it. I’m all for redemption, but he is simply too
dangerous to let go. Then again, judging
by the internet’s reaction to the ending of Man
of Steel, the right thing to do is to let murderous villains keep murdering
people.
Afterwards,
Trask is arrested for selling military technology all over the place, and
Wolverine is recovered from the river by a young William Stryker (Josh Helman),
but it actually turns out to be Mystique for no reason. This makes Wolverine’s adamantium upgrade
dubious in the new timeline.
Juxtaposed
with the White House faceoff, the future’s mutants have been spotted by the
Sentinels and begin to die quickly at their hands. The problem in the past must be solved by the
time they kill Kitty and Wolverine, or else it’s all for nothing. Singer actually does a great job with the
task of editing two battles at one time, and this sequence effectively gives
the movie a sense of suspense. When the
connection between the two timelines is broken, the dark future ceases to exist
and Wolverine awakens in an alternate new future, in which we see what might
have been the movie’s true agenda: righting all the wrongs in X-Men III: The Last Stand. Not only is everything ok, we even see Jean
Grey (Famke Janssen) and Cyclops (James Marsden) alive and well. It’s artificial as hell, but I’m all for
retconning that travesty. Singer doesn’t
throw out the baby with the bathwater, as he affirms one of that movie’s
redeeming features by including Kelsey Grammer as Beast. I’m still not sure if Wolverine even has his
adamantium skeleton now, and it’s pretty unsettling that he pretty much
displaced an alternate version of himself.
After sitting through the entirety of the opening credits, we see
Apocalypse (Brendan Pedder) building the Pyramids.
X-Men: Days of Future Past has a lot of
good dramatic moments, but it’s not fresh.
This is the seventh movie in the series, and it just feels like I’ve
already seen it. Most of the character arcs are the same thing from previous movies, though I will admit that the conflict between Charles and Erik has never been this catty. The movie particularly
seems determined to recreate the success of X2,
with Magneto’s being broken out of jail and temporarily cooperating with the
heroes until he reveals his own agenda.
Except in that movie, there was more logic and planning behind the
jailbreak on Mystique’s part, and Magneto came off as vile and opportunistic,
whereas in this movie he’s more rash. I
like the laconic and mysterious Mystique (Rebecca Romjin-Stamos) of the first
movies better, and the more chatty version of the new one removes a lot of her appeal. She also seems significantly less
intelligent. The cast is good overall,
though some of the resemblance is off in the younger characters, but that’s a
problem of First Class. A few characters from previous movies show up
in cameos including Toad (sadly not Ray Park). Perhaps
the most awkward choice is Josh Helman as a young William Stryker, who plays
the role with such unflappable smugness that he still acts haughty even during
an event in the third act that should make him surprised. The one fresh character is Trask. I’ve come to love Peter Dinklage, and he does
an excellent job conveying unspoken aspects of the character’s personality,
such as his need for respect despite his appearance. Trask is also interesting in that he sees
mutants as a threat but bears no personal grudge against them. His relative lack of screen time was
disappointing.
The action
makes good use of the mutants’ powers. I
particularly liked the visual style of the future scenes, and I would have
liked to see more of it. However, I wish
the 70’s scenes made more use of retro-futuristic styling. Hardly any fictional device in this time
looked like something from the 70’s.
Maybe I just wanted to see more wood grain trim. I didn’t remember much about Ottman’s score
outside a few moments of the film series’ main motif. Then again, when you set the trailers to the
theme from Sunshine and a mix of "Kashmir," the movie’s actual score is bound to be disappointing. The lack of
fresh story elements and characters, as well as one bafflingly stupid plot
point meant the movie did little for me, and I don’t really recommend it too
much. I have not ready the comic, but it sounds better, darker and more ambiguous.
You may think me cruel for this review, Internet, but be not proud. This is a monster you created.
You may think me cruel for this review, Internet, but be not proud. This is a monster you created.
QUOTES
WOLVERINE: What happened to the school?
BEAST: Are you a parent?
WOLVERINE: I sure as hell hope not.
QUICKSILVER: They say you can manipulate metal. My mom used to know a guy who could do that.
[Magneto looks a little worried]
PROFESSOR X: Just because someone stumbles and loses
their path, doesn’t mean they can’t be saved.
CHARLES: You took the things that meant the most from me.
ERIK: Maybe you should have fought harder for them!
WOLVERINE: Listen to me, you piece of shit! I watched a lot of good people die, and I
came back to stop that from happening!
CHARLES: We all gotta die sometime.
BEAST: I told you.
There’s no professor here.
STRYKER: You must really despise these mutants.
TRASK: On the
contrary, I have the highest respect and admiration for them. For their
abilities, for what they can offer us. Which is an era of peace and progress.
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