As I said last post, I saw both Days of Future Past and The Wolverine, so now it's time to talk about Days of Future Past.Going into the film, I was pretty excited. The trailers I had seen hyped me up for the film, and between First Class, the returning cast and appreciation I gained for The Wolverine, I was totally excited for this new installment. I also remember the X-Men 90's cartoon I loved dearly taking on the Days of Future Past storyline as well, so I was hoping that at the very least this movie could hold up as well to me as that cartoon did.
First things first, this movie is the most comic book movie I have ever seen, aside from The Avengers. As much as I love and enjoy a multitude of other comic book movies, a lot of them try really hard to take everything seriously and ground them in reality. While the X-Men franchise has always tried to tell stories as allegories for racial discrimination and the gay rights movement, they still try to have fun with it. This film heartily embraces the nature of comic books and sacrifices a lot of deeper meaning for a story that attempts to cover a lot of ground and embraces new concepts. So the story isn't trying to cover as many deep topics as say X-2, but it trades it in for a story that can go further and do more in it's run time than a lot of the other films in the franchise.
The basic plot of the movie is fairly simple. In the present X-Men universe, from The Last Stand and The Wolverine, these robots named Sentinels have taken over policing Mutants, and the world has become a post-apocalyptic wasteland, with them having murdered tons of Mutants as well as any humans sympathetic to the Mutant cause. They have a skin that looks like Mystique's and can adapt to anything being thrown at them to fight back. We find Kitty Pryde, Bobby and some new faces to the film franchise (hello Blink and Bishop) hiding out in some weird mountain bunker when Professor X, Magneto, Wolverine and Rogue find them and engage in the plan of the film.
Kitty Pryde can essentially put someone to sleep and send their consciousness to the past. She uses this when they get caught by sentinels to send Bishop's consciousness back to his body a couple days to a week before, so he knows what to do so they never actually get found. Kitty sends their thoughts back in time and when the person wakes up, the new future takes hold. The sentinels are made by Trask industries, the founder (played by Peter Dinklage) was shopping around initial designs in 1973, but no one would fund the sentinel program. However, Mystique murders him, and she gets taken hostage and experimented on. It's through this process that they decide to not only fund the sentinel program, but they give the robots her adaptive DNA, which makes them so deadly. So Professor X wants Kitty to send his conciousness back in time, so his current mind in his 1973 body can stop Mystique from murdering Trask and therefore the Mystique DNA'd sentinels will never exist. Kitty however insists that she only sends people back up to a week to a month and couldn't possibly do 50 years without destroying the person's brain. So Wolverine steps up as the one man whose healing abilities would not only allow him to travel back that far, but also look exactly the same age. And that's the beginning of our film. Logan is transported back to 1973, and it's roughly a decade since the events of First Class. He has to convince Professor X and Magneto to join up with him to stop Mystique from murdering Trask, among other things.
Post apocalptic world, time travel, stopping assassination plots and giant robots? It's a comic book movie alright. In what other medium would such a harebrained collection of ideas gel together so nicely. I had an absolute blast with this film. Even though it's not the deepest story out there, it's one of the very few comic book based movies that actually feels like the material it came from. The music and cinematography is great, the acting is great from all of the main cast and it's a lot of fun. What the story does right in my opinion is that even though it's focusing on this grand plot that encompasses all of the world, it still only focuses on a handful of characters to tell that story. Unlike The Last Stand, where they tried to do a story that impacted the entire world and tried to focus on every major character they had introduced thus far, Days of Future Past lets us spend a lot of time with our handful of characters without trying to develop a million characters. In fact, one of my favorite parts of the film is our time with Quicksilver. The advertising with him before the movie was absolutely terrible, but his use in the film is fun, filled with laughs and just big enough that he feels like a nice addition to the universe without having to devote time out of the movie to develop him and his story, that can come later.
I'm trying to not give much away here, so I'm just going to say that I did not expect how the end played out, for better or worse and it threw me for a loop. Overall, I had a great time with this movie and it's a great entry into the X-Men franchise. Jennifer Lawrence puts in a great performance as Mystique, James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender do great as young Professor X and Magneto, especially when the legends themselves Patrick Steward and Ian McKellen are also in the film. Hugh Jackman of course is Wolverine, and he knows exactly how he wants to play that character after 14 years and it works great. So check this movie out, have fun and hopefully Guardians of the Galaxy will fulfill my hope of being another comic book-like movie this summer.
Spoilers
One thing I wanted to talk about was the impact that the end of the film has on the franchise itself and the reveal at the end. It's confusing, and very comic book-y, but it puts into question everything we know about the franchise, which potentially adds more questions than it does answers.
At the end, the characters save the day and Wolverine gets sunk into the water. He wakes up, it's 50 years later, back in the X Mansion. Storm, Beast, Bobby, Rogue, Scott Summers, Professor X and Jean Grey are all alive and well and Logan is (fittingly) a history teacher at the school. The idea is that the effects of the events in 1973 had a ripple effect, and anyone who died because of the sentinels is alive, but also, because of Wolverine's intervening, 1973 Professor X also knows about Dark Phoenix inside of Jean Grey and can teach her to control her powers instead of trying to suppress it, meaning she never goes evil and doesn't kill Scott or Professor X and doesn't die.
So at this point, they've retconned the second worst movie in the franchise, The Last Stand, and everyone including Fox was already pretending that Wolverine Origins doesn't exist anyway. So that's great. However, this chain of events puts into question the whole original trilogy, as well as The Wolverine. The only movie that still without a stands true as having happened is First Class. While the events in X-Men and X-2 could still have happened in one form or another, they don't happen the way they do as they exist now. Since 1973 Logan knows Professor X, there is no reason why he couldn't start teaching at the school anytime afterwards, meaning there is no reason for him to be out in Canada bar fighting, in which he meets Rogue, saves her from Magneto's people and both of them get taken to the X Mansion. And yet, there Rogue is in the end cameo sequence, so somehow she still makes it to the Mansion. Magneto is now known to the world to be a bad guy in 1973, so his motivations and actions are possibly very different from what he did in the original films as well. It's possible he still does everything he does, but like I said, it has to happen a somewhat different way than what we saw. We see at the end that Mystique has taken to impersonating Stryker and she takes Wolverine...but unless she's planning to free him once they're alone, it doesn't make sense. The climax of the film comes down to her deciding that there has to be more than one way to change the course of history without killing those people, and that is ultimately what changes the future. So why is she taking Wolverine? If she's going to let him go, then likely the Wolverine of the now current timeline will never have an adamantium skeleton or claws. It makes no sense for him to choose to put the metal into his body himself, and if Mystique does keep him as Stryker and experiment on him or whatever...that completely devalues her story-arc of the film. It's a situation I'll be interested to see how they get out of.
The one thing I think that ultimately disappoints me about this ending is writer Simon Kinberg's disregard for The Wolverine. He wrote the credits stinger from The Wolverine that undercut everything that movie was leading up to, and now with this film the events of The Wolverine never happened. Similar to the original trilogy the events could still happen, but a different way. He saved Yashida in 1945 so that still happened and Yashida is still in a world where he's dying and wants Logan's healing factor. However, he wouldn't be a hermit in the Canadian wilderness for Yukio to find, with Jean Grey around he has no reason to fall for Mariko, and with him teaching at the school there is no reason he'd get on a plane with Yukio and have adventures. Between the mid-credits scene disreguarding the ending of The Wolverine and the end of this film changing history, The Wolverine just gets thrown out. It had an interesting enough premise and lent itself to sequels, but now they will likely never return to Logan, Yukio, Mariko and that private jet they had. In a universe that is trying so hard to tie everything together after the abomination that was Wolverine Origins, it saddened me to see that they're just throwing previous good storylines out of canon so they can fix bad ones. Next we'll get X-Men: Apocalypse, with everyone in the 80's. I assume this will catch us up on what the hell happened with Mystique and Logan, as well as giving more screen time to characters who should be able to start existing now, like Gambit and hopefully more Quicksilver. Then after that film, 3 years from now, we'll get another Wolverine film, and likely Hugh Jackman's last time playing the character. There is only so long you can stay looking the same for a character that isn't supposed to age, and they've already cheated and used special lighting techniques in The Wolverine and Days of Future Past to lessen the wrinkles off of Jackman. At that point, he will have played the character for 8 movies over 17 years. Nearly 20 years as a character who isn't supposed to age. Hopefully they give him a good send-off, but who knows in what direction they'll take his story next. Guess we just have to wait two years and find out.
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