Directed by: Bryan Singer.
Written by: Simon Kinberg & Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn.
Starring: Hugh Jackman (Logan / Wolverine), James McAvoy (Charles Xavier), Michael Fassbender (Erik Lehnsherr), Jennifer Lawrence (Raven / Mystique), Halle Berry (Storm), Nicholas Hoult (Hank / Beast), Anna Paquin (Rogue), Ellen Page (Kitty Pryde), Peter Dinklage (Dr. Bolivar Trask), Shawn Ashmore (Bobby / Iceman), Omar Sy (Bishop), Evan Peters (Peter / Quicksilver), Josh Helman (Maj. Bill Stryker), Daniel Cudmore (Colossus), Bingbing Fan (Blink), Adan Canto (Sunspot), Booboo Stewart (Warpath), Ian McKellen (Magneto), Patrick Stewart (Professor X), Lucas Till (Havok), Evan Jonigkeit (Toad), Mark Camacho (President Nixon), Michael Lerner (Senator Brickman).
One
could – and lord knows many already have – spend their time drawing detailed
diagrams about what the time travel in X-Men: Days of Future Past means for
what we have already seen in the previous 7 X-Men movies (basically, that
everything that happened in all of them except for First Class didn’t actually
happen – or at least happened in a slightly different way) – and whether or not
what happened in those previous movies makes sense in light of what we now know
happened in the past in the original timeline, which one assumes is the
timeline that the other movies took place in (the answer – not really). As with
all movies of this sort, it’s easy (and sometimes kind of fun) to get lost down
the rabbit hole of alternate timelines, but for me this is more or less
meaningless. The real question is whether X-Men: Days of Future Past makes
sense and is entertaining as a movie unto itself – and the answer is pretty
much yes. Like almost all the previous X-Men movies (and more than most if we’re
being honest) this one suffers a little bit by having so many characters – and their
powers to keep track of (which is made all the more confusing when they give
mutants powers they didn’t use to have – since when can Kitty Pride send people’s
consciousness back in time?). The movie then asks us to keep track of multiple
timelines simultaneously, in addition to keeping track of all the characters.
This sounds like a recipe for disaster – or at least an extremely convoluted
and confusing movie – but somehow director Bryan Singer and the writers manage
to make it all make sense – at least while you’re watching the movie, and if
you don’t spend too much time diagramming everything out afterwards.
The
movie opens in the future – 2023 to be precise – which is a dark place. The
government has created a new weapon to be used against mutant – known as
Sentinels – which are essentially giant robots who are programmed to read the
DNA of its targets and wipe out the mutant threat. If this wasn’t bad enough,
the Sentinels have evolved to the point where they aren’t just killing mutants –
but they have discovered “regular” people who will one day be the parents – or grandparents
– of mutants and starting wiping them out as well – essentially meaning that
humanity has created a weapon that will exterminate them all. According to
Professor X (Patrick Stewart) this dark future can all be traced back to 1973 –
when Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) assassinated Dr. Bolivar Trask (Peter
Dinklage) – a brilliant scientist, and founder of the Sentinel program. She did
this because he was conducting experiments – basically torture that ends in
death – on her fellow mutants, and she wants to stop this. All she succeeds in
doing however is convincing people that mutants really are a threat, and giving
his program the funding needed to bring it to its fruition. And because she was
captured, she becomes the most important test subject – and her ability to
transform is fused with the Sentinels, giving them almost unlimited power. So
essentially, they need to stop Mystique before she can do that, and so they
send Wolverine back in time, to talk to Professor X and Magneto (Michael
Fassbender) to try and convince Mystique to not kill Trask. They selected
Wolverine, because he’s the only one who will survive the journey. His body isn’t
really going back, just his “consciousness” – so he’ll wake up in his older
body. There are problems when Wolverine arrives. Professor X has grown cynical,
and is addicted to Hank McCoy (Nicholas Hoult)’s serum that will give him back
use of his legs – but at the price of his mutant abilities. And Magneto is
being held captive way beneath the Pentagon for taking part in the
assassination of JFK a decade earlier (“How else could a bullet curve like
that?”).
The
movie is less action oriented than most of the previous X-Men movies. That isn’t
to say there isn’t action in the movie – there are some amusing scenes with
Quicksilver (Evan Peters) who enters the movies for the first time, and in the
dark future scenes there are battles with the Sentinels as they try to stay
alive long enough for Wolverine to get the job done – but for the most part,
this is the most plot heavy and character oriented superhero movie I can recall
in recent years. For the most part, this works. By now we already know that the
likes of Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, James McAvoy, Ian McKellan, Michael
Fassbender, Nicholas Hoult and Jennifer Lawrence are fine in their roles – and the
new additions (essentially Peters and Dinklage) are also quite good. It was
kind of fun to see a lot of the old crew for the previous Singer/Brent Ratner
X-Men films come back for what amounts to mainly cameos.
Does
the movie make sense? For the most part, while I was watching it, it seemed to.
There are a lot of questions about what precisely happened, and how much of
what we think we know has now changed in light of Wolverine travelling back in
time and changing things. So many questions in fact that I jokingly told my
wife that the next movie should be called My Dinner with Professor X, where
Stewart and Jackman sit done to dinner (like Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn in
Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre) so Stewart can explain everything that
happened and everything that has changed to Wolverine. But I think what
essentially the movie does is reset the X-Men universe. They have already said
the next movie – Apocalypse – will be set in the 1980s, and because Wolverine
has changed the past, it frees them up to do anything they want in the future
and not be beholden to what has come before. This is both kind of cool and kind
of a cop out – but I’m on board for future installments. The X-Men series has
been wildly inconsistent over its previous 7 installments – and I still think
only X2 and X-Men First Class come close to be great movies – but they all seem
more willing than most of the other series to take risks, and do something
different each time out. We’ve essentially seen the same Spider-Man movie 5 times
now, and all the Marvel movies that feed into The Avengers are having their
characters follow similar arcs with different results (the latest Captain
America may be the best of all these movies, but they are also starting to fall
more and more into the trap of each movie essentially being a trailer for the
next movie). The results of the X-Men movies is not always satisfying, but more
often than not, they are something a little bit different. That almost passes
as daring in the world of superhero movies.
No comments:
Post a Comment