Movie Monday - X-Men: Days of Future Past

As is becoming a habit, today's Movie Monday will be about X-Men: Days of Future Past, even though it's a Marvel film. It just feels wrong to have a comics discussion tumblr and NOT talk about a massive film like this.

THERE WILL BE SPOILERS




Director: Bryan Singer

Writer: Simon Kinberg

Starring: Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, Ellen Page, Peter Dinklage, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart

Release: 2014

Many years in the future, mutantkind have been hunted close to extinction. The giant robots known as Sentinels have wiped out all the mutants that we know and (mostly) love. Only small pockets of resistance remain. One of these is the X-Men, and they have a plan. Through the use of Kitty Pryde's power, they can send the consciousness of a person back in time. If they can stop the chain of events that leads to the creation and deployment of the Sentinels, perhaps they can prevent billions of deaths from ever occurring. Unfortunately, the only mutant who could survive having their consciousness forced back that far is Wolverine. He must find a way to bring Professor Xavier and Erik Lensherr back together to stop Mystique from assassinating the creator of the Sentinels at the Paris Peace Accords in 1973. But the chasm between Magneto and Professor X has grown wide since their parting in 1962 – can they bring they trust each other again? Or are the differences too great?


THE SQUEE

• Erik and Charles, their's is a forever love. Well, forever friendship. Part of this is because Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen are two of the most adorable old men ever. McAvoy and Fassbender do a great job of emphasising their friendship and how much it hurts them both to see the other person standing against them.
• It wasn't the 'Wolverine has a lot of angst' show. This was really the flaw in X-Men: The Last Stand and The Wolverine (and to a lesser extent Wolverine: Origins). Wolverine is a character in this film, not THE character. Also, he's a gigantic jerk, which is a completely accurate portrayal.
• Well adapted from the source material. The source material of Days of Future Past consists of exactly two issues. Un. Dos. And it's not Wolverine who heads back in time, but Kitty Pryde. Now, that couldn't work in this because Kitty Pryde is too young to have been alive in the 1970s, so it sort of has to be Wolverine. They keep the idea of someone frantically trying to keep a timelink stable as their friends die around them, sacrificing themselves for just a few more moments that could potentially lead to a better future. It's what the story is all about, really. And there are some great other moments in there too. Towards the end, there's a scene almost directly out of Ultimate X-Men, with Magneto attacking the White House and turning the video cameras around to let the world watch as he schools the president of the United States. It felt so close in fact, that I thought it was going to end the same way, and it sort of did. No surprise really, since Mark Millar (Marvel advisor to Fox) was the writer of that run.
• Yay Mystique! I was always going to love Jennifer Lawrence in this. That was a given. However, both performance and character were superb throughout the film. Much like the comics version of Mystique, she was a wildcard, part protagonist, part antagonist. When Lawrence was first in the role for X-Men: First Class, most of the scenes had her without the blue make-up which allowed her impressive acting talent to be clearly seen. In this film, she's in the make-up for most of the film – and she doesn't falter at all. You can see the talent just shining through. It's perfect for a character such as Mystique who is just as vital to the series as Magneto or Xavier or Wolverine.
• Fun Easter eggs. While not as many Easter Eggs as in Captain America, there were still some fun hints. Seeing the Good Future at the end of the film was perfect (partly because it deleted everything that happened in X-Men: The Last Stand).

THE SUCK

• Why have Quicksilver if you're not going use him in the rest of the film? The scenes with Quicksilver were one of the main highlights of the film, not just visually but some of the funniest too. And yet he vanished before the halfway point. There are other characters they could have used to break Magneto out of prison (or not have him in prison at all). It seemed like he was there so Fox could stake their claim on the character, knowing that he was also going to appear in Avengers: Age of Ultron, and that's a little disappointing.
• As you probably read above, I loved Mystique in this film. However, it did feel like they were shoehorning her importance into the plot. Making her shape-changing ability the most vital part of the turn towards the Dark Future seemed like just a way to not use Rogue. It was pure MacGuffinism. It almost paid off, since rather than being a simple plot device her final scenes were about choosing her own destiny.
• Over exposure of the 'everyone dies' trope meant the 'future' ending lacked emotional resonance. This isn't really a complaint about the film, but more that pop culture has been saturated with this trope since its first use. If there's a Bad Future running parallel to the main character's travelling in time, you can usually expect horrible deaths to occur to all the people they know. It happened in Buffy in 'The Wish', it happened in Galaxy Quest and quite a few others, so it's almost expected now. An excellent element of the original comic was that there was still a chance that the world could end up like the Dark Future, and it would take the X-Men working continuously with humanity to prevent it. By having a scene with Wolverine in the Good Future, that was sort of done away with, implying to will all be hunky-dory from here on out. I guess they REALLY wanted to get rid of X-Men: The Last Stand.