X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) ****/*****
There have been so many X-Men movies at this point, to try to explain what they are to someone who doesn’t already know would be insanely frustrating. To put it simply though, they’re adaptations of a long-running Marvel comic that explains away its characters’ super powers by saying that they derive from mutations. Mutants pop up and do incredible things, regular people get scared, and then there’s conflict. The whole thing is basically an allegory used to explore intolerance in society. The head of the good guys is Professor X, who is kind of the mutant Martin Luther King, the head of the bad guys is Magneto, who’s kind of the mutant Malcolm X, and caught in between them is our hearts and minds.
The bad news about the latest film in the series, X-Men: Days of Future Past, is that director Matthew Vaughn, who made the recent X-Men prequel that was a soft reboot of the series, X-Men: First Class, and who added a much-needed sense of style to the franchise, didn’t come back for this sequel. The good news though is that Bryan Singer, who made the first two X-Men movies and who set the tone for the series, came back to replace him, so you basically know what you’re going to get here. The story starts in a dystopian future where robot “Sentinels” built to hunt and kill mutants have taken over the world and have turned it into a smoldering wasteland. Only a few mutants remain in this hellscape, so a plan is hatched where old Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and old Magneto (Ian McKellan) send old Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back in time to recruit their younger selves (James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender) so that they can help stop the mutant shapeshifter Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from committing an illegal act that gets the production of the Sentinels put into motion in the first place — which proves to be something of a problem, because the young Professor X and Magneto are still very much at odds with each other. Yeah, this is a time travel movie, and yeah, it’s kind of confusing.
Which is the main problem with the film — its writing. The story here is convoluted enough for X-Men aficionados to have trouble keeping up, so it has to be murder for anyone who’s just a casual fan. And it’s not just because there are so many characters to keep track of, histories between them to remember, and logic traps to be had thanks to the time travel element. It’s also that the story is full of contradictions, continuity problems, and general messiness. The plan here was for this movie to work as a bridge between the Vaughn-directed reboot and the Singer-launched original series of films, but there are just so many problems that goal creates that you kind of have to push all of the inconsistencies out of your head and go with it. With this film the X-Men movies have essentially become as complicated as the multi-timelined, multi-realitied comic books, which is kind of poetic in a way, and may even be novel to fans of the comics’ lengthy histories and intricate mythologies, but it’s the sort of thing that has kept comic book reading a niche novelty in comparison to what big business the more simplified superhero movies have become. When you spend this much of your time while you’re watching a movie trying to keep straight who’s alive, who’s dead, why, which interactions they’ve had with each other, which have been erased, and how everyone’s ages line up when we’ve seen them appear in multiple conflicting time periods that span about fifty years, there’s a real problem.
The writing isn’t bad across the board though. With all of the characters that have been introduced in the X-Men movies so far, as well as the handful of new mutants that show up for the first time in this one, there are just too many characters to devote adequate time to — so the screenplay doesn’t try to. Instead, it lasers its focus on a small handful of characters and uses everyone else as background set dressing for the fight scenes. Even more than that though, it also has the good sense to focus on the most interesting characters who are played by the most interesting actors. Essentially, the core group who gets the focus are Jackman’s Wolverine, McAvoy’s Professor X, Lawrence’s Mystique, Nicholas Hoult as The Beast, and Peter Dinklage as the creator of the robot Sentinels, Bolivar Trask. There isn’t a mediocre actor among that bunch, so they’re able to make the material they’re working with sing as much as humanly possible.
The absolute best bits are the scenes where McAvoy and Fassbender are put face to face and get to trade dialogue though. They’re both so good, and when they get together they seem to feed off of each other’s energy. Casting them was probably the best decision the Vaughn-directed movie made, so it’s nice to see Singer’s new film honor it so well. The philosophical difference between their two characters has essentially been the driving conflict throughout this entire franchise, and if you didn’t have two excellent actors doing everything they can to drive that point home, this probably would have just been a movie about time travel and fighting robots. Which, can be fun, but isn’t necessarily something you’d want to spend over two hours on.
One character who has suffered over the course of this series is Jackman’s Wolverine though. It’s not that Jackman isn’t good in the role. In fact, he may be too good, because the Wolverine character has become so popular that he’s essentially become the center protagonist of every X-Men film, and it’s neutered him. Wolverine initially became popular because he was the edgy loner — the dangerous one — but at this point he’s such a kind-hearted and generically heroic protagonist figure that the character is all but unrecognizable. Essentially it’s only Jackman’s star quality that allows him to remain at all engaging in this story. Wolverine as the level-headed mediator between two opposing parties — who would have ever thought we would see the day?
When you get down to the essentials of it, Days of Future Past is mostly a middle of the road movie that has plusses and minuses in equal measure. It’s not going to blow anybody’s hair back or be something they remember for years to come. What it does have going for it are a whole boatload of charismatic performances, a whole truck load of thrilling action sequences, and a whole crap load of built-in audience affection thanks to how popular the X-Men characters have been ever since the 70s though, which is enough to bump it up to being a movie worth watching. Perhaps more than anything, Days of Future Past succeeds because it has strong villains, which is a place where the rest of the superhero genre has struggled. Not only is Magneto the best villain that comic book movies have brought to life yet, but the future Sentinels here actually manage to be very effective at putting the protagonists into strong peril, which makes them fairly terrifying. These things are ultra-efficient mutant killing machines, and watching them take on and destroy a group of our favorite super powered outcasts is exactly the sort of thing that summer movies were made for.
