The X-Men Movie Franchise - X-Men Days of Future Past (Part 4)

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.

The X-Men Movie Franchise - The Wolverine (Part 3)

The first two posts I made on this blog was my in-depth look back and review of the X-Men movie franchise as it stood and my thoughts on the existing properties and the future of the series. I said I'd make a new post when I saw The Wolverine, and eventually one for Days of Future Past. Well, this past Saturday I saw The Wolverine and then several hours later I saw Days of Future Past. I took a couple days to think about what I'd seen and now I think I know what I want to say about both. Without further ado...

                                  The Wolverine (2013)

Before having seen The Wolverine, I was pretty excited about it. I had heard they did a good job with it, and since the franchise had put out First Class I had faith they could do at the very least a competent film again. I was disappointed when it was announced Darren Aronofsky wasn't going to be directly the film anymore, as I had been really excited to see how that kind of movie would be, but when it was announced James Mangold was taking over I was pretty satisfied, as he made one of my favorite movies of the last decade, the remake of 3:10 to Yuma.

I enjoyed The Wolverine, for the most part. It has it's problems, but it's a fun and easily watchable movie that remembers who it's main character is. I grew up with the animated 90's X-Men cartoon as my introduction to the franchise, and even though I love  X-Men and X-2 a whole lot, I was still disappointed to a degree of how series they took everything. That's not to say this movie isn't serious, it actually deals with some heavy stuff about the character of Logan, and what it means to be him. What it means to be immortal, to be forced to continue living even when everything you love is dead. What purpose do you give yourself to keep living? If someone offers you the chance to die after all this time, do you say yes?

I think what makes the film work is that they tackle those questions while still bringing us the Logan we've all come to love from Hugh Jackman, but they give him more to do than just be sad and mopey about being immortal. He gets fun one-liners, he tells people to fuck off, he gets to do some fun action sequences. That being said, the story isn't anything to write home about, but the thing is, it doesn't need to be. I could have predicted all but one plot point in the film, but not every movie needs to break new ground, it just needs to be a solid entry. In the X-Men franchise at this point, we had a trilogy of films that had this grandiose scale to them, with stories involving hundreds-to-thousands of people. We then had a very bad attempt at a solo origin movie for Wolverine, where I think one of it's biggest problems was trying to preserve that grandiose scale in a solo movie, between all the mutants in it and the references to others. Then we had First Class, which was a return to form. It operated on about the same level as the first X-Men film did. Two-three main characters, a handful of supporting cast on the good and bad side and that's about it. Then we get The Wolverine, a film that has in it 3 mutants and just a handful of other characters. By focusing on just these few people, we're about to spend more time with them and just go on this ride through Japan with them.

The cinematography is lovely, the fight scenes are fought well. The story of Yashida is bland, at the end of the day, but it's a story that I think works specifically because of our main character, and his previous history. At the opening of this film we see a flashback to Nagasaki in 1945, where Logan (Who was fighting in WWII and taken as a POW and held underground, saves a young soldier named Yashida, who grows up to be the most powerful man in Japan with a very successful corporation. The story is pretty simple; it's present day and Yashida is an old, frail man who is on his deathbed. He summons Logan in order to make a proposition, he has a machine that could drain his life force, so he could continue living and Logan could finally die. Logan, knowing the pain that immortality has caused him denies Yashida the request, and he dies. It turns out that instead of leaving his business to his son, he's left everything to his 20-something incredibly beautiful granddaughter, who is now being hunted by all sorts of evil people because of this fact. Logan decides to help her and off her goes on an adventure to protect this girl and save the day.

Like I said, kinda bland, but it works. Because we have the trilogy before it, we've seen what Logan has had to go through to be at this point. In this film he's constantly dealing with seeing Jean Grey in his dreams and he's living as a hermit in the Alaskan wilderness. Between the cameo he had in First Class and the opening sequence of this film, we know Logan is old, with no signs of slowing down. This movie's underlying subject matter is dealing with the theme that you have to live with the decisions you make, but for Logan, living with a decision means potentially being reminded of what you've done for eternity. His new-found partner mutant Yukio and Yashida's granddaughter Mariko both try to further the point that no matter what has happened in the past, people need Logan's help.

Overall, I really enjoyed this film and I hope the next one they're planning on doing in a couple years will be just as good if not better than this one, and another solid entry into an ever-expanding franchise. If you were holding out on seeing it, just see it, you'll probably have a good time with it, and that mid-credits sequence is the necessary story-tying piece that connects the old trilogy with the new X-Men movie franchise. Below this point I will post what I don't like about the movie, and it will involve spoilers.


What I didn't like about this film is a pretty short list, but pretty significant I thought. First off, the lack of blood. The movie should have been rated R, but they just took out the majority of blood. I'm not someone who demands to see large amounts of blood in my movies, but if you have someone continually stabbing people with metal claws, as well as samurai swinging swords, there should be blood. You'll get some blood on Logan's claws in between moments of him stabbing, but during the act and afterward no one has any blood on them, characters barely bleed. It reeks of a grab at PG-13. I've heard the Director's Cut fixes some of this, but I haven't gotten the chance to see that version yet, but I have hope for it. Second, Logan's lovestory with Mariko seems a little odd. She's someone that, while very beautiful, he's really only known as someone who he has to keep protecting from getting killed, and she knows Logan as this mythical being who saved her grandfather during the second world war. Mariko is somewhere in her early 20's and Logan is somewhere around 120-200 years old. I mean, I guess he can't really abide by an age code when he's immortal, but at least with Jean Grey she was not only incredibly smart and talented but also had a good relationship with Logan for years, and they never got to be together. Mariko and Logan's love storyline feels like a forced love interest plot for added dramatic weight for him to protect her. Finally, and this is a big one...the mid-credits scene setting up Days of Future Past completely devalues the end of the film. At the end of The Wolverine, Mariko becomes the owner of the Yashida corporation and her and Logan have feelings for each other. She gives Logan and Yuriko their own private jet to fly around in and it sets up the two of them having mutant adventures for future sequels. Then the mid-credits scene just timeskips to two years later and Logan is suddenly in a public airport by himself going through security when he is approached by Professor X and Magneto. So the end of the The Wolverine sets up Logan having some sort of relationship with Mariko and him and Yukio flying off to wherever they want in their own plane, and then two years later he's lost Yukio, the private jet and is on his own? What the hell, that completely undercuts the movie you just watched to set up another film in the franchise.

The mid-credits sequence, while cool in it's own right, feels incredibly forced by the studio to set up Days of Future Past. In Days of Future Past, present day Professor X and Magneto band together to send Wolverine back into the 70's to change history and save mutant (and human) kind. Since the movie is about tying the franchises together and the last movie we saw old man Professor X in he died (though that end credits sequence sets up he's alive in some form) so if they didn't put this sequence into the end of this film, they would have had to spend a good 10 minutes of Days of Future Past setting up not only why Logan was there and working with Professor X and Magneto, but also explain Professor X being alive. It's extra tie-in plot they need for the next film, but since they needed Wolverine by himself, it completely undercuts the movie we just watched. Disappointing in the end on that front, but otherwise well done.