14 years in the making

Rating: 9/10 (24 May 2014)

The X-Men film franchise was started in 2000 and was one of the first Superhero films of the modern Superhero renaissance. After that the franchise was running for 14 years creating sequels, prequels, one good spin off Wolverine film and one dreadful spin off Wolverine film. After watching Days of Future past, you really get the feeling that this is the film that the past 14 years have been leading up to, using all our favourite characters across the franchise and putting them against one of the greatest threats they could face in this masterpiece of a modern blockbuster.
It chose probably one of the best stories from the comics and is ideal for the franchise as it allows the film to use characters from both the original X-men trilogy with those from First Class. The film starts in the future, where the sentinels have almost brought mutants to extinction by hunting them and killing on sight, immediately establishing the potential for the dark drama of the film. In a final resort, the last surviving members of the X-Men attempt to send Wolverine into the past so he can unite the young Xavier and Magneto to stop Mystique whose powers inadvertently caused the creation of the sentinels to begin with.
One of the new characters in the film is Quicksilver who is a great character dominating most of the time he was on screen with his funny and fast paced nature creating some of the best laughs of the film, with one scene seeing him literally getting one of his enemies to punch himself in the face. Another impressive addition is Peter Dinklage as Trask who creates the sentinels and is arguably one of the lead villain of the plot. Just like Magneto, he honestly believes what he is doing is right. By doing what he believes is best for humanity and not recognising how sinister his actions can be he becomes a more interesting character.
But the focus of the film does remain on the main characters of the franchise. For example the leading character of the film is Xavier. Just like First Class was an origin film for Magneto and why he created the Mutant Brotherhood, this film shows how Xavier got over his darkness and chose to follow a brighter path to form the X-men. We also see Magneto return and get to see two contrasting relationships between him and Xavier. Their past selves who hold great resentment to each other and their future selves who are close friends and regret the conflicts of their past. There's also Hugh Jackmans Wolverine where we see a different version of the characters to the previous films. He has some funny moments, but the overall performance is far darker being changed by the previous films and the bleak hopelessness of the future.
But with so many great characters I can only mention so many. So I will just say that each of them have a distinct personality that drives their actions. It also feels like each character is there for a good purpose, having some impact on the plot. To top this off, many of the characters are being played by some of the best acting talent of recent times with the entire cast being real acting heavyweights and bringing their full talent to each role.
The film is also very well made, with X-men veteran Bryan Singer returning for directing duty. He uses two significantly different styles for both the future and the past. All the future scenes are shot in a darker way with less colour as a reflection of how bleak the future has become, emphasised even further by the ruins that we see our characters survive in. The 70's on the other hand contrast to this with it's busy city streets and detail of recognisable traits from the decade with the likes of water-beds and the lack of more than 3 channels creating regular chuckles but also being a great setting for all the dramatic scenes too.
Singer also does well as an action director for the film. Whilst some people did complain that the first 2 X-men films were at times too light on action, I doubt anyone will be saying the same of this film, as it contains some of the best fight sequences of the X-men franchise thus far. Not only are they well made, but also they vary greatly from Wolverines brutal fights to the more VFX heavy attacks of Magneto. But luckily these impressive fight scenes never draw any attention away from the story or characters within the film, with the plot leading to fight scenes instead of the fight scenes leading the plot.
The only single thing that stops this film from getting a 10/10 for me is the fact that I don't think we saw enough of the future. It would have been interesting to have seen more of how these characters have been surviving with the Sentinels attacking or just how they met up with one another to form this plan. However I do hear that there were some future scenes filmed, such as an entire sub plot with Rose, but was cut for time purposes. So hopefully there will be more of the future seen in the DVD release.
Besides, this is in itself mostly a minor nitpick for such an epic film. It is a masterpiece in every sense, with brilliantly directed fight sequences being amongst the best of the year and the franchise, genius writing which takes one of the best X-men stories and uses it to the full potential it can achieve and an incredible cast who juggle the difficult mixture of comedy, drama an action perfectly. Now we just have to wait another two years and hope that Apocalypse will match the brilliance that this film contained.