Movie Review: X-Men: Days of Future Past

X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)


The X-Men send Wolverine to the past in a desperate effort to change history and prevent an event that results in doom for both humans and mutants.  Short synopsis of X-Men: Days of Future Past taken from IMDb.com

"Days of Future Past."  What a clever title.  Wish I'd thought of it.

I am, as is so very often the case, of two minds on this film.  Yes, I am often of two minds on a lot of things I review.  Ironic too, as the mind is a major plot point of Future Past.  Specifically, Wolverine's mind is used as the conduit to go back in time to a pivotal moment to stop a lone assassin from killing a key military-industrial complex leader, who, due to his death at her hands, sparks an arms build-up of weapons called "Sentinels" that can hunt mutants and, using the power of the mutant who was the assassin in question (the blue-skinned Mystique, played aptly by Jennifer Lawrence), change themselves into whatever they need to in order to kill off all those of non-standard bloodline.  It's a cool premise in many ways.  If you followed my description, that is.


The reason I am of two minds for this film is that I both liked it in some ways, and at the same time, it annoyed me.  On the good side, I liked the premise behind it, and I happen to like the retro motif that recent X-Men films visit (such as X-Men: First Class, which also visits the roots of the X-Men franchise by going back to the 1960s).  I liked the idea that the mutants have to fight off these super-machines that are specifically designed to hunt them down, and that such a battle evolves into a world-destroying scenario.  The Earth is a mess due to the conflict that erupts out of the need for the Sentinel robots to sift the mutants from the regular homo sapiens.  That was cool.

I also liked the comicbook feel of many sections of the film, such as the battles between the Sentinels and the mutants (as seen in the film's beginning, and then again at the climax).  But here is where I begin to look at the other side of the coin.  The comicbook feel of the film was kind of asymmetrical, as the parts of Future Past set in the 1970s lack much of the comicbook style.  It seems like the filmmakers were enamored with being able to recreate or invent these differing time periods, and so the two just didn't gel well to me.  Maybe I am alone in this observation, but it almost seemed as if they were trying to homage things and tie things in and it got a bit overboard.

I thought the prototype Sentinels of the 1970s era were a bit far-fetched, personally.  They seem too advanced for that time period.  You have to remember, this was the era when fighter planes firing guided missiles often had a success rate of around 25%, and yet the United States and the Soviet Union had both pushed their air forces to adopt airborne weapons platforms that relied only on those unreliable missiles.  Also, when the Sentinels first appear at the beginning of the movie... well call me crazy, but I sort of hoped they were aliens from outer space, and the X-Men were fighting a world-ending scenario in which regular humanity had been taken over and only the mutants were able to defend the planet.  That'd be cool, I think.  Cliche yes, but everybody is doing the end-of-the-world-and-only-we-can-stop-it thing.  Why not? / Source: jonathanmoya.net

I found the need to use Wolverine as the conduit to the past to be a bit annoying too.  As I take it, Wolverine is a major favorite of the films and comic series, and so it is natural to utilize him since fans might object to putting someone else in such a key role.  At the same time, it seems overly convenient to me that Wolverine is such a big player in all these X-Men films.  Maybe that was why I liked First Class so much.  It truly took a break from "old claw hands" and let the viewer get some time with some of the other mutants of the X-Men franchise.

Plus, there is a scene in which Wolverine temporarily loses control and his future self gets all swingy-clawy and in the process hurts the young female mutant who is sending his mind to the past.  At the same time back in that past, Wolverine temporarily experiences amnesiac symptoms and almost goes nuts before young Professor X tells him he's on bad acid, before he regains himself after a moment.  I thought this part was fraught with potential, but it seemed like it was just sort of tacked in as a "look what could have happened" moment.  When Wolverine is sent back mentally to his young self, they make a big deal of how dangerous this all is, but except for that one hiccup, everything is hunky-dorry.  Personally, I see a whole range of fun that could have been had, if they'd had the courage to deal with that a bit more and spent less time on the whole "X-Men are threatened by humanities rabid fear of them"-thing.

This gets back to my point on Wolverine.  Because the film doesn't capitalize highly on his role, it is almost as if anyone could have gone back in time.  Or anyone who could stand the mental strain, that is.  Heck, even older Professor X does it for a second.  And speaking of the Prof, there is something that annoyed me too.  We give this gimmick, which feels overly comicbook-y to me too, that younger him has this serum he can use to allow him to walk again, but the price is that he can't use his super-duper mental powers while on the drug.  I found this annoying and pointless.  Why rejuvenate Professor X back to "normal" again?  That was the whole point of how he lost his ability to walk.  With his physical mobility gone, he truly becomes the tragic hero and leader.  Reversing it for the sake of the film's plot felt wrong to me.  Unnecessary.

SPOILER ALERT: Magneto was in prison because he tired to save John F. Kennedy from being assassinated, because Kennedy was a mutant?  O......K.....  I guess that solves the question as to who shot JFK, but once again, it annoys me that humans are always portrayed as being so anti-mutant as a society.  It seems to me to feed to the idea that people who like X-Men must be outsiders and loners, so as to identify with the series.  That is highly incongruent with a mass-marketed film product, I think.  Hmmmm.... / Source: geeksaresexy.net

Then there was Magneto.  Magneto is a villain who is a good guy, but wait, he's a bad guy!  But wait, he's a good guy!  No, no, he's really bad.  Will the real Magneto please raise his hand?  Yes, I understand that Magneto is a conflicted character, but the whiplash from him flipping sides gets a bit silly at times for me.  Almost predictable, that is.

And brings us to Mystique. I thought Jennifer Lawrence's portrayal was good.  But it's more of the same, sadly.  Mystique has been built up into this tragic character-turned-villain by circumstance through the past few films, and it is losing some traction with me. 

Seeing as I am not a follower of the comic series, perhaps I am off base, but it seems to me that there are plenty of interesting possibilities among the X-Men stable.  And yet we keep resonating off these same characters and their same old plights.  Are the filmmakers just too scared to go a bit further afield, or is the studio just not brave enough to greenlight an "X-Men: Cyclops" movie?  Or "X-Men: Storm?"  Or somebody else.  There's got to be someone in the X-Men universe who is as interesting as Professor X, Wolverine, Mystique, or Magneto.  Sure, one movie of the original X-Men film trilogy covered Jean Grey in some detail, and that was OK or not so much, depending on who you talk to (I've heard both lines of thought myself, and don't have a strong opinion either way).  But really, there's got to be somebody else whom audiences would pay to see an "origins" treatment of.


The use of "Time in a Bottle" by Jim Croce for the now well-used hyperspeed sequence in which mutant Quicksilver goes about the kitchen of the prison facility in the middle of the Pentagon, after freeing Magneto, is a nice touch.  Thanks to The Matrix, you expect a scene like this one to be laced with a punchy music track, but the period piece really worked here, for me. (The clip above probably will be taken down, since it probably violates copyright, so if it's gone... thanks to whoever put it up, just the same)

Speaking of Jean Grey, the ending of Future Past also threw me a bit.  You recall 2009's reboot of the Star Trek franchise, with J.J. Abrams at the helm, and how they changed history and so wiped the whole Trekkie clock clean back to the beginning?  Well Future Past does something vaguely similar at its end too, meaning...  I don't know.  They can do anything now, I guess.  This could be good.  On the other hand, I am not sure I like it.  Seems too dues ex machina to me.  But that's what you get for a time travel or time changing film. 

On the whole, I thought X-Men: Days of Future Past was pretty good, despite my complaints.  I enjoyed watching it, but I couldn't shake the feeling that it could have been better.  Sadly, I've had that feeling before in X-Men movies.  I guess it is hit-or-miss with this franchise.  If I looked at this as a stand-alone movie experience, I would probably be sometimes confused while watching it, and wouldn't enjoy it much more than as just a clever action movie.  I'd say that Future Past is recommended if you are a fan of the series and can live with the film's occasional lapses, or if you are a die-hard X-Men fan, in which case you've seen it already and can argue any point I've made under the table.  And that's just fine.  I only call 'em like I see 'em.



The parting comment:


This is gonna spoil the whole movie if you watch it.  On the other hand... yeah, I totally wondered how Charles Xavier could "evolve" from hairy young guy in this film to weird plastic man in Wolverine: Origins.