X-Cellent

Rating: 9/10 (20 June 2014)

This movie elevates the whole series by both being a great film on its own and by brilliantly tying all the films closer together, paying homage to them, building on the events that have taken place, and giving us the answers to several questions that have been building up as the series went on. With a great cast and characters, a clever screenplay, and impressive direction, X-Men: Days of Future Past is the best film in the series yet.
Film series generally put an emphasis on one character above the rest, and for the X-Men series this character was Wolverine. Having two solo spin-offs about him and having been the main character of all the films except First Class, Wolverine is still a main character, but part of what now truly feels like an ensemble: Wolverine, Mystique, Professor X, and Magneto all have equal focus in this movie. I don't fault the previous X-Men films for not being an ensemble of the same level, as it's perfectly normal to have a primary focus on one character in particular and most of the movies did have great casts, but I do feel Days of Future Past makes the best use of its cast yet.
We get to see quite a few familiar faces, such as Storm, Kitty Pryde, Iceman, and Colossus in the future, and Beast, Havok, and Toad in the past. Some are major supporting roles and others are mere cameos, but it's nice to see these characters again and to see most of the cast members reprise their roles. There are also several new characters. Like the returning ones, some aren't as prevalent as others, but all are distinct and stand out in their own way.
The amount of continuity errors in the X-Men series continued to increase as it went on, and this film manages to correct most of them. We now know why Xavier was able to walk at times after his paralyzation and why Beast looked like a normal person in X2, and the change of the series' timeline provides future opportunity to fix most of the remaining errors, as the events have all been changed now. This change in the timeline doesn't mean that the events of the previous films of the series no longer matter, as they directly lead to the story of Days of Future Past and are still remembered by Wolverine. Days of Future Past pays homage to every X-Men film, and all remain important to the series as it continues.