X-Men: Days of Future Past

 

Another week, another superhero blockbuster movie. This particular week it’s another outing for Marvel’s band of angst ridden mutant superheroes, fighting, as ever, for a world that hates and fears them. It’s a battle that isn’t going so well. Taking its cue from one of the key stories of the original comic, the film opens a decade or so from now, a future in which the oft-threatened war between humans and mutants has broken out and brought about a destructive apocalypse with no victors beyond the terrifyingly adaptable mutant-hunting robots known as Sentinels. The X-Men’s ranks have been thinned out to a mere handful of survivors, the majority of humanity has fallen victim to the same murderous and overly zealous robots, and everyone knows they’re living on borrowed time. It’s almost as if creating invincible robots with devastating weaponry and artificial intelligence was a bad move.

The small pocket of X-Men who’ve survived in the ruins of the war have been staying one step ahead of death by sending the consciousness of one of their own back in time whenever the Sentinels uncover their latest bolthole with a warning to get out before that happens. A nifty trick, but they know it’s a delaying tactic at best, so a bolder plan is called for. How about sending one X-Man back in time several decades to stop the war from coming about in the first place by scotching the initial cause? And, that way, we can catch up with the younger, sexier versions of the X-Men we saw in the last outing, X-Men: First Class. Everybody wins. And so, after a brutal fight scene in which the threat posed by the Sentinels is amply demonstrated and a clunky exposition scene in which Patrick Stewart’s Professor Xavier explains the plot to everyone, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine (you thought they’d send someone else?) wakes up in the early 1970’s on a waterbed next to a lava-lamp in a last-ditch effort to wrench the world on to a different course.

 

To help with his tasks in the past, Wolverine has to drag a young Xavier (James McAvoy) out of the unshaven, self-pitying despair into which he’s sunk, and bust the brooding, intensely angry Magneto (Michael Fassbender) out of prison. It’s this prison break that gives the movie its best scene, as the speedster Quicksilver (Evan Peters) zips through a room rearranging the paths of bullets with a casual nudge to the tune of Jim Croce’s Time In A Bottle while everyone else is frozen stiff. It’s a lovely demonstration of a superpower that delights far more than yet another scene of super strong beefcakes punching the hell out of each other or spewing forth blazing energy bursts.

The film moves inexorably towards a climax in both timelines, as the Sentinels close in on the last surviving mutants in the future and the younger versions of Magneto and Xavier try and set things on a different path. It’s all fairly exciting stuff, and the cast acquit themselves honourably, but Singer felt much more in control with X-Men 2, a film which juggled a large cast with superb efficiency and did not stumble at all. Here the film feels uneven and unfocused, occasionally clumsy and struggling mightily to balance the contributions of its over-large cast. Familiar faces appear for brief cameos and new mutants are often given little more than a name and a facial tattoo to distinguish them.
 

Still, it has spectacle, flashes of wit and invention, and a veneer of social commentary about How We Should All Live Together that places it far ahead of clunkers like Green Lantern and the nihilistic Man of Steel. Add a supremely cheeky ending that seems to rearrange the history of the franchise in a way entirely in keeping with the spirit of the comics (and provides a poke in the eye for the abysmal X-Men 3) and you have a superhero movie fit for the top division of the genre.

The now obligatory post-credits teaser for the next film in the franchise gives us a glimpse of the next bad guy to cross the path of the X-Men. The pale, blue-lipped guy and his four horse-riding henchmen won’t ring a bell with many outside of the comic-reading faithful, but knowing his name is Apocalypse should give you an idea of what kind of movie he’s heralding. The superhero domination of the box-office shows no sign of letting up, and if they can learn the lessons of the comics, which have killed, resurrected, rebooted and re-invented the same characters for decades, their reign may last for a long time yet.

X-Men: Days of Future Past is now showing at Savoy, Cineworld, and Showcase Cinemas in Nottingham.

X-Men Official Site