X-Men: Days of Future Past was quite the spectacle, and was a rather enjoyable foray into sci-fi escapism that easily washes away how boring X2 was and how awful Last Stand was.
The fight scenes were enjoyable, well paced, and, unlike Man of Steel, did not seem as though they existed to pad out an incredibly sparse script.
It was an interesting choice to set Days of Future Past into the First Class continuity. It allowed them to retcon the abysmally awful Last Stand, whose only real redeeming quality was that Cyclops died. It also gave them an out so they didn’t have to have super old Patrick Stewart and super old Ian McKellen in young makeup and slugging it out like men 40 years younger in an action flick (though grizzled old Magneto fighting Sentinels was probably one of the best parts of the movie; I totally wanted Ian McKellen to say “You shall not pass!”). One of the reasons why the choice to set it in the past is interesting, however, is that originally the storyline took place in the X-men’s present. The horrid dystopian future they were trying to prevent was in 2013. So, for the film, the dystopian future is either our future or an alternative present (given everyone’s age, might make as much sense as anything, given the events of the original Xmen trilogy and Kitty Pride’s age) and the past is not the past of Last Stand, nor even our own present, but the past of First class.
There were a few problems with putting it in the first class timeline. Of course, there’s the issue that Kitty Pride would not be old enough to go back in time to the First Class period, though she would have been old enough to if the present/past had been immediately after X3. Or they could’ve just sent Kitty back in time using a different, more plausible method (yeah, I know, it was kind of a mutant power thing in the comic, but there was no reason that an adult Shadow Cat couldn’t get sent back in time). All told, I’m glad they didn’t, and I’ll explain why in a minute. The big problem for me was what happened to the First Class X-Men. All killed in a line of dialogue. That’s even worse that the Araki style getting punched so hard that you get flash-backed into your origin story just before you die. Not that I really liked any of the First Class X-Men that much, but still. Damn.
There are a lot of purists who argue about the choice to send Wolverine back in time. I never read the comic, though, so my familiarity with the Days of Future Past came from the Cartoon, in which Bishop came back in time to save the future. And it made perfect sense, because so far as I could tell, Bishop’s mutant power was being a black dude who travelled through time to save the future. Since he used a gun and didn’t really do anything else but travel back in time to save the future, how was I supposed to know that wasn’t his power? So why am I glad that they didn’t send Shadow Cat back in time? I have never really seen any Ellen Page movies (I’m not counting X3), and after what little dialogue she had, I can say that I don’t think I could’ve watched an entire movie where she was talking all the time. I mean, if someone else was playing Shadow Cat and didn’t have a crackly kind of voice that sounds like she’s about to start crying all the time (like Claire Danes, for instance), I’d be all about having her go back in time by whatever means to save the day. Just because Ellen Page was in X3 didn’t mean she had to be in other movies. But, she was and she, unarguably, has name recognition and star power.
Which brings me to my next observation. I don’t think I’ve seen a movie that had so many big name female actors who were, by and large, marginalized. Sure, we get a lot of Jennifer Lawrence, who is the current in an incredibly long line of holders of that short lived title “America’s Sweetheart”, but consider for a moment that this movie also has the Oscar Winning Halle Berry (apparently marginalized by her pregnancy, something no male actor would every have to worry about; really, though, her cache has fallen significantly since the early 00s, due in no small part to the dismal failure of Catwoman; finally, of note, Storm’s character was the only X-Men who Wolverine mentioned that Xavier should look for who he did not call by real name), Oscar winning Anna Paquin (who was all but cut from the movie; while I’m not a fan of Paquin, somewhat unfairly because I hated how Rogue was written, not her fault at all, I was happy to see that at least at the end of things, Rogue is still a mutant and hasn’t martyred herself for physical intimacy), and All Sorts of Crap winning Ellen Page (who again, I’m kind of glad wasn’t actually in more of the film) who are all very much pushed into the background while Magneto and Prof-X, with a little help from Wolverine and Beast, fight for the heart and mind of a confused and angry woman.
All that said, Days of Future Past is wildly entertaining, and probably one of the best movies in the franchise. The choreography and visual acting of the future mutants, especially Bishop and Blink, are all phenomenal. Fan Bingbing (or at least the effects used to bring her mutant powers as Blink to life on the screen) steals every scene she’s in, and Omar Sy’s intensity as Bishop makes me cross my fingers that he’ll be a key player in the next film in which Apocalypse finally arrives. Oops, did I spoil something?
Cirsova 