** Warning. Spoilers ahead! Do not read if you haven't seen the movie!**
Now it seems we are to completely ignore the first Wolverine movie which most people have already been doing for years. As much as we'd like to rule out X3, well we'll get to that. Days of Future Past combines the two casts of X-Men First Class and the original trilogy. We start the film of in the future where mutants have been almost hunted to extinction and the humans aren't that much better off. The world is dominated by giant mutant hunting robots known as Setinels, finally making their appearance after a tease in X3 (we keep coming back.) Kitty Pryde somehow has a power to send people's consciousness back in time to their younger body, which is never explained, and their team uses this ability to hide from the sentinels. Charles Xavier and his team including Wolverine, Storm, and Magneto find them and want to use their ability to send someone's mind back to the 70's to stop the sentinels before they begin. While the obvious choice to send back is Xavier, Wolverine is chosen as only his self repairing mind could survive the trip. I'll buy it. So this is where the franchises collide. Now my biggest problem with First Class, was that I was never sure if it was a prequel or a reboot. Well it turns out it was a prequel which wasn't my preferred choice but by the end of this film I was turned around. So Wolverine is now in his younger body and has to convince a now walking drunken Xavier to help him save the future. Now the trailer showed Xavier clearly walking and my need rage was about to go out of control because I couldn't believe the continuity would be so bad that they would ignore the paralysis that happened in just the last movie. However they explain everything and my rage subsided. After Xavier's school fell apart when most of his students were drafted to Vietnam, Hank McCoy developed a serum that would restore his walking but the side effect drained his powers, leaving us with a Xavier that is left to quarrel with the decision to save his legs or recover his powers. This film gives us a side of Xavier that we've never seen before (much like the last movie) and goes along with the much darker tone of this film, which let me tell you. This movie is really dark.
The scenes in the future, though brief, just feel completely hopeless. Due to the time travel to escape the sentinels we get to see main characters killed multiple times only for then to rewrite with Kitty Pryde's ability. These scenes are legitemtly heart breaking to watch the good guys decimated by these relentless machines. The opening of the movie that depicts this carnage is one of the highlights of the film and is the perfect way to grab you. The different mutants powers in tandem is a hell of a show and they have an interestif cast if characters with different powers to showcase. In fact the future scenes are where the get the most mutant variety because the scenes in the past are focused on a small group, mostly out of the main cast. There's a solid cast of mutants in the film which most don't even have a line of dialogue and are just in the future scenes for flashy fight scenes with creative powers. Even Storm, a main character of three previous movies, has only a handful of appearances and even fewer lines, but everyone has a role to play whether its fighting or part of the plot and they all play it well. Especially Quicksilver. Oh how I begged for more Quicksilver! I know a lot of people have been barking up this tree but Quicksilver really stole the show. It makes me doubt the version in the new Avengers movie could hope to compete. The character was well used and the immaturity of this young Quicksilver really played well.
Now while I give the movie a lot of praise, I had some issues with it. There really wasn't a lot if character development in this film compared to the last. Magneto felt like less of fleshed out character this time around and the intelligence of some of his actions don't seem to make sense. First of all, the idea of him controlling the sentinels is a cool idea but doesn't make a lot of sense. Also if he knows the fate of the future why does he go so far out of his way to make everything ten times worse at the end? I understand that Magneto has an agenda of his own, but maybe bide your time and choose a better oppurtunity at a later date, you know, after you've saved everyone's ass from giant killer robots of the future. And speaking of killer robots, it seems that this will be the last we see of sentinels for the X-Men series which is kind of a let down since we didn't get a lot of mutant fighting Sentinel action in the past with the Sentinels that resemble the ones we know and love. Also how many times do we have to keep dipping into that Stryker storyline? Its been three movies now that we've had Stryker in some villain role. We get it, X2 was awesome and Stryker was a cool bad guy. It's over. Move on! Leading up to the movie we had a lot of introductions to characters, via trailers and magazine covers, but some of these characters were just cameo spots. We see Toad for a total of two scenes and even Havok, a character that was a main hero in the first movie, has even less of a cameo. I also wasn't aware of how much of the plot was going to hang on Mystique but that is in a way faithful to the comic and also not really a bad thing since Jennifer Lawrence plays that role as good as Rebecca Romaijn ever did.
Now let's talk about the end. The end is weak in the sense that all it takes is for Mystique to lower a gun to rewrite the whole future but everything else happening is pretty spectacular so I'll go with it. So yay the future is saved and now we come back to find out Cyclops and Jean are back alive and all of the horrible things that happened in X-Men 3 (we just can't escape it) have been corrected and we continue to ignore Origins Wolverine because X2 told that story way better. So now we have our original cast back and we've seen some awesome new mutants so we can only wait and see what happens in the next movie. Personally I hope to see Blink return and we all know Gambit is coming in being played by Mr Tatum himself which I can't wait to see how that turns out! Man people's opinions on him sure have shifted huh? Team Channing all the way!
Overall Days of Future Past is one of the best films in the franchise but I still feel that I liked the last film (First Class and not Wolverine 2) just slightly better. Easily my number two pick (First Class, Days of Future Past, X2.) While it's not a perfect film it goes a long way to straighten out this convoluted film franchise and sets us on the right path for the next X-Men movie which we all know is the Age of Apoaclypse and I can't wait to see what that movie has in store for us. I give X-Men Days of Future Past a four out of five.
