"My war is not over. The enemy's still out there."

Rating: 9/10 (25 May 2014)

By now, it doesn't surprise me any more when a film like this breaks into IMDb's Top 100 films (#65 as I write this) after only a couple days of release. No point in dwelling on that, but I mention it for some perspective; here's a comic book movie in the same elite company as "The Godfather", "Schindler's List" and "Casablanca". Go figure.
So with a time travel theme as the main plot element here, it would seem like some aspects of the story would be confusing but I followed it along pretty well. But help me out here. When Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) did the Jedi mind trick to gain access to the White House speech, was that a rip-off? Or since it was 1973, would you say that this was four years before "Star Wars" came out and a totally original idea? See, these time travel stories can be confusing after all.
Now it might seem like I'm ripping the movie unfairly here, but that's not my intent. I actually had a blast with the picture, even if I'm not specifically a Marvel Comics fan. I've seen all the other X-Men titles, though not chronologically, and I think this one stacks up with "X-Men:First Class" at the top of the heap. It had decent character development and excellent effects, and the 'Time in a Bottle' sequence with Quicksilver (Evan Peters) was probably the stand out scene, offering a nod to yet another sci-fi thriller in "The Matrix". It's too bad you can't do a re-wind when you're in the theater, I would have played that one a few more times.
Where this all goes from here is anybody's guess. I think the X-Men franchise is ripe for further picking, and this time they made you wait until the very end of the credits roll to give a hint of what's to come. I really didn't recognize the female character in the Darth Maul get-up, but my very fuzzy memory of the comics calls to mind a story line dealing with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. On the flip side, I could be totally off base on this altogether.
In a separate but related note, one of the trailers screened before this movie in my theater looked like a real hoot and a half coming out in August. It looked like Marvel's take on the Star Wars universe (there it is again), with a rousing score for Guardians of the Galaxy. Looks like fun.