In which I revisit old articles from Filmquisition and Unreality.
There are some things that you just can’t help but give second chances to. Despite the innumerable ways that they have disappointed you in the past, you know that somehow, if given enough time, they will prove that you were right to trust them all along. This is how I have felt about the X-Men films since X2.
Despite a strong start to the series, X-Men quickly spiraled into a miasma of false starts, tangled
continuity and disappointing Wolverine spin-offs. And just when First Class offered
a fresh new start to a stagnant series, Days of Future Past loomed ominously in the distance – an
impossibly complicated film that would attempt to merge the franchise’s
parallel timelines into a streamlined retcon. I had never been so worried
about the direction of the franchise, nor have I ever been so pleased to give a
struggling series a second chance.
The future is a bleak and
desolate wasteland. In their blind desperation to secure their survival
as a species, mankind developed Sentinels – robotic drones that can adaptively
incorporate the powers of any mutant that they come into contact with.
Not only have they brought mutants to near extinction, but have even succeeded
at eradicating humans whose genetics would eventually produce mutant
descendants. Faced with the inevitability of their own destruction,
Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr have made common cause against a titanic mutual enemy.
Even at the brink of extinction,
however, there is still hope. Kitty Pryde’s ability to phase through
solid matter has developed to the point where she can phase a person’s
consciousness into their younger body: allowing them to travel backwards
through time and change the course of future events. She succeeds at
sending Wolverine back to 1973, where he must unite a misanthropic Xavier and
an incarcerated Magneto, at a time when the two men couldn’t be further apart,
in order to prevent Mystique from assassinating Sentinel inventor Bolivar Trask
and setting into motion the events that would convince humanity of the need for
Trask’s weapons.
In nearly any other year, X-Men: Days of Future Past would have been an easy choice for the
year’s best action film, let alone the year’s best superhero film. But
with that title already in the hands of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Days of Future Past will
have to settle for simply being the most entertaining film to come out this
year. Its grim future – depicting a genocidal war against a rogue,
mechanized army set in a nocturnal wasteland – combines the best features of
both the Terminator and Matrix franchises, and yet somehow manages to
keep from feeling derivative of either one.
After a brief voice over gives us the pertinent details that have
developed since The Wolverine, the film cuts to a
Sentinel attack on a fugitive band of mutants. In less than five minutes,
we watch Sentinels break into the Russian bunker that they’ve been hiding in,
use their own powers against them and cut down every last one of them –
strangling Sunspot, crushing Colossus’ skull, shattering Iceman’s decapitated
head, impaling Blink and incinerating Warpath, Bishop and Shadowcat – before the
group successfully warns their past selves of the attack and prevents their own
deaths. This is the metric that sets the pace for the rest of the film.
X-Men: Days of Future Past singlehandedly undoes the entire
series’ tangled continuity, leaving only the events of First Class and
itself unaltered. Wolverine’s transformation into Weapon X, X-Men Origins’ radical reimagining of Deadpool,
Rogue’s melodrama with Bobby and Kitty and Jean’s love triangle with Scott and
Wolverine, all wiped clean in a little over two hours: streamlined into a
readily understood series of events that only requires watching two films to be
familiar with, rather than seven. It opens the franchise up to potential
films that would be impossible with the previous timeline, such as X-Men Origins: Storm, Gambit and Nightcrawler. It even manages to pit Mystique
against both Charles and Erik, setting her – and possibly Wolverine – up as a
potent third party in the upcoming X-Men: Apocalypse.
Despite being fundamentally different films, Bryan Singer’s Days of Future Past adopts
the same directorial style as Joss Whedon’s The Avengers. Despite an
unwieldy script that spans two different timelines and features nineteen
centrally important mutants (three pairs of which appear in both timelines),
three humans and two generations of Sentinels, the film still manages to make
narrative sense. The timelines do not become so entangled that you can’t
make sense of the plot. The characters do not become so lost in shuffle
that they fail to warrant their own continued existence.
The film’s climax intercuts
between two battles while never becoming confusing nor losing focus on the
characters’ very personal struggles against one another. The first is a
three-way showdown in 1973 Washington D.C. between Magneto, Mystique and
Charles’ new X-Men while the second is a valiant last stand between an army of
Sentinels and the combined forces of Magneto and Charles. Rather than
competing with one another for importance, the two scenes accentuate one another:
each making the other more, rather than less, exciting.
Without a doubt, it is Mystique
who is at the core of the film. Not only is it her DNA that allows the
Sentinels of the future to become a reality, but it is her decision to kill
Trask that propels the United States government to act in accordance to human,
rather than mutant, interests. The climax of the film isn’t so focused on
whether Charles can stop Erik from assassinating Nixon and his attendants as it
is if he can convince his sister to spare the life of a single man who has done
so much evil against their kind.
In a remarkable turn for her
character, even though she gives in to Charles’ desire to spare Trask, she
continues to reject him for both his politics of mutant assimilation and a lifetime
spent trying to control her. Likewise, she rejects Erik for trying to
kill her in an attempt to rewrite the dystopic future. She instead chooses
her own path toward mutant independence, free from the men who tried to use her
for their own ends.
Days of Future Past’s consistently high quality is
only occasionally brought down by a few, relatively minor issues that I took
with the film. I found the prospect of Magneto using the “Magic Bullet”
to assassinate JFK – undoubtedly for his attempt to kill him and the nascent
X-Men during the Cuban Missile Crisis – far more compelling than Magneto trying
to save him because he was a mutant. Going into the film, I was hoping
for a more antagonistic confrontation between the past and future Xavier: more
starkly pitting the elder’s idealistic altruism against the younger’s
disillusioned apathy.
Additionally, it feels as if this is the third film of a trilogy
without a second installment. I would have loved to see a film depicting
Magneto’s brotherhood’s involvement in the Kennedy assassination parallel to
Xavier’s struggle to deal with his life as an invalid and his failed attempts
to start a school for mutants.
X-Men: Days of Future Past is the darkest, most ambitious and
all-around best X-Men film to date. It tackles an iconic and incredibly
difficult storyline from the franchise’s colorful, fifty-year history with
remarkable skill: not only doing justice to its source material, but to the
film series to which it belongs. It handles the complex issue of civil
rights alongside the personal betrayals of two close friends: Charles’ absence
while mutant activists died at the hands of humans and Erik’s all-consuming
need to prevent the atrocities of his youth from becoming the realities of his present.
Rating: 9.5/10
Buy on BluRay: Definitely
So what's your favorite X-Men movie? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.
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