X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)
Director: Bryan Singer
Cast: James MacCavy, Hugh Jackman, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Ellen Page, Patrick Stewart, Ian Mckellan
Rotten Tomatoes: 90% at 178 reviews and counting
Grade: B
X-Men: Days of Future Past, the 7th film in the X-Men franchise and the third directed by Bryan Singer, starts off in a dystopian future (2020 ?) where robots (hereafter: sentinels) designed to protect humanity in a war against the mutants have turned against all of humanity upon deciding that they were the enemy, just like in
The Terminator, The Matrix, special episodes of
Star Trek Voyager and
The Outer Limits, and myriad sci-fi stories elsewhere. In order to fight this awful future, Kitty Pride (Ellen Page) sends Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back in time to prevent it from ever happening, by preventing an assassination. The movie then becomes about Wolverine stealing young Wolverine's body for a few days, putting together a team in the past to prevent an assassination, change the future, and to do so fast enough such that Wolverine's body in the future is not killed by sentinels prior to changing the future. Specifically, they need to prevent Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from assassinating Bolivar Trask, and thus this is a Hugh Jackman adventure movie where the struggle is over the soul of Jennifer Lawrence, the two biggest stars in the cast are front and centre.
This movie is high octane, the camera never focuses on anything for more than a few seconds unless it's a pretty person's face, and we get countless, brief action scenes across both timelines whose subsequent resulting repairs would no doubt lead to an unprecedented boon in infrastructure spending. The movie's well-shot, and fun in places. The sentinels from the future are really badass warriors, in a way they're too badass as their comprehensive invincibility ends up removing all dramatic tension and replacing it with a relaxed resignation of impending doom.
I've got mixed feelings on this. I kind of like the period piece (but not, more later), it reminded me of the magnificent
X-Men First Class (2011), which I consider the last really good comic book movie. Whereas
First Class took place before and during the Cuban missile crisis and indeed was a story that could take place in no other time period,
Days of Future Past largely takes place in the aftermath of the Vietnam war and the Paris peace conference. However, in this case, unlike for the previous movie, there is absolutely no reason for that to be the time period. There's nothing about the plot that dictates that the assassination of Bolivar Trask take place in 1973, Bryan Singer simply took a moment in history well-remembered by Americans and one that was after 1962 in order to establish a setting for this movie, its artificial and indeed it feels artificial. Other than the hairdos and glasses and some of the clothing, it doesn't feel like a period piece the way
First Class did. I quote from Devin Fararci's otherwise positive review of X-Men: DoFP.
Devin Faraci said:
X-Men: First Class reveled in its period; Days of Future Past feels constrained by it. Where Matthew Vaughn went full Mad Men in his depiction of the world - with some era-appropriate comic book scifi flourishes - Singer is bored by tube TVs and combination safes. Bolivar Trask displays his Sentinel designs on an LCD flatscreen, while Cerebro is now housed in that same 90s brushed metal basement it was in the first film. The Sentinels themselves have nothing of the space age about them and rather look like Steve Jobs designed them. Singer’s inability to give in to the aesthetic of the time - which results in some mildly anachronistic feelings that younger audiences won’t even notice - reflects his whole take on the X-films in general. He’s doing whatever he feels like doing, not what’s right or what fits.
http://badassdigest.com/2014/05/22/x-men-days-of-future-past-movie-review/
After the initial setup, we have Wolverine back in the 1970s, he needs to stop Mystique from assassinating Trask, the movie progresses in a predictable and formulaic manner. His first attempt to stop an assassination succeeds, but makes things worse because the entire world sees the mutants engaging, this scares the public and emboldens and empowers Trask. The first-generation sentinels are then activated, and we learn that Mystique's magic blood is the missing ingredient needed to turn these sentinels into the scary sentinels we see in the future. This then leads to a latter confrontation near the white house.
The movie closes with an awful, cross-cut climax that makes very little sense. In the dark future, sentinels are attacking the X-Men, only this time the sentinels are less invincible and can actually be damaged or seemingly destroyed, they have gotten weaker even though Xavier said previously that the future has probably been made worse by the first failed assassination attempt. In the past, Magneto decides to attack the president, so he lifts up a baseball stadium, and surrounds the white house with it so that nobody can get in. When I saw the shot of the stadium surrounding the white house, I just burst out laughing in the theatre, it was such a ridiculous and ultimately impotent attempt to one-up the disaster porn and the stakes-raising we've seen in the climax of other recent blockbuster movies. We then have a fight with some sentinels (that Magneto somehow controls?) that are far too advanced for 1973. Magneto proceeds to attack the president (a Richard Nixon that is inferior to the one seen in Zack Snyder's
Watchmen) but is stopped by Mystique. Mystique then considers killing Trask, but Xavier convinces her not to on the basis that killing will make her a bad person. She doesn't kill Trask, in a change of heart that is not earned by the story's development but is simply a result of Xavier nagging her until she changes her mind, and because of that the world moves on peacefully and abandons its anti-mutant program in spite of the fact that Magneto just killed tens of thousands of people in Washington DC.
Young Magneto is actually shoehorned onto the plot, which is a huge problem. We're told at the beginning that he will be needed to stop the future, but everything we're shown tells that he only worsens the problems, he slows down the progress of the heroes, and at no point is he needed. He could have been needed if he had contributed to Mystique's change of heart, but there is none of that. Magneto doesn't really fit into the story at all except to create action scenes. At the end, he's blown up Washington DC (which will look cool to young kids) yet somehow the audience is supposed to accept that the world will move on quite happily, holding hands from that point forward with the anti-mutant defens program stopped. This movie manages to do an inferior job of the post-destruction repercussions than
Man of Steel and
Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
As an aside, I have no idea what went on with Bolivar Trask in this movie. He is the brains behind the Sentinel program, yet somehow not assassinating him is what prevents the sentinels from advancing. It's stated by the plot, but it's not demonstrated or earned in a logical manner. He gives a two sentence speech about two thirds of the way into the movie, where he says that he doesn't hate mutants, he admires them and wants to work with them. Somehow this means that saving his life will save the future, but this is also the same guy who is designing anti-mutant weapons and has experimented on live mutants and killed them.
Ultimately, this movie's convoluted and nonsensical plot and weak character arcs are held up by a musical score that effectively forces the emotions the director wants us to feel, good acting, passable cinematography, and average-to-above-average action sequences. It's not going to be a classic, but it's fun in the moment, in parts.
Grade: B
.
