Redemption for a Stagnating Franchise

Rating: 8/10 (26 May 2014)

I have been an X-Men fan since I was kid. I grew up with my dad reading the comics to me and playing the board games that existed at the time. I collected action figures and of course am a huge fan of the first two X-Men films that Bryan Singer made. This film ranks up with them, although it is not without its own flaws. It has some of the best scenes in the entire franchise, but it also has a few moments that sort of felt rushed or written wrong.
As my review title suggests, this film has certainly redeemed the franchise as a whole. Several missteps that had been made by previous films have been corrected and this is certainly going to be welcome news to die-hard comic fans. However, because of the reset that this film has sort of accomplished, it now raises a number of questions. Will Wolverine have adamantium claws in the sequel film(s)? Will Charles Xavier ever go into Logan's mind and see what the past was originally set as? Are characters such as Blink, Bishop, Sunspot, and Warpath going to return? There are a lot of questions that I would love to know the answer to right now, but I guess that is another story for another day.
Probably the largest complaint I had about this film was the fact that it was advertised to focus on both the past and the future, yet it is roughly 85% past and only 15% future. The salvation of the film is that Wolverine, Charles, and Erick are not the only main characters. What broke up this monotony was the more prominent role that Nicholas Hoult plaid as Beast and seeing Jennifer Lawrence reprise her role as Mystique; both excellent characters in the movie acting and story wise.
The most disappointing part of the film for me was that it did not feature enough of the Sentinels. If the film had seen them hunting mutants more than it did, I think that it would have made their on screen presence more intimidating. Don't get me wrong, they are a force to be reckoned with, but I feel that they were sort of wasted at times. The future only sees them in two brief fights. Interestingly, they remind me an awful lot of the silver giant from Thor, the one that fights Thor on earth and releases fire from its head. Watching the fights in this film, I felt that once again the threat was not really the Sentinels, but rather it was that Erick would screw up the past even worse than it had already been. I am still waiting for an X-Men movie where we actually get to see mutants in a flat out battle against mutants: the X-Men vs. the Brotherhood.
No doubt there is a future for this franchise, but with Apocalypse looming on the horizon, I would not exactly call it a "bright" one. Apocalypse has as likely a chance of ending of giving us the first truly spectacular mutant vs. mutant fight, but it could also be the film that just might end the series on a low note. Days of Future Past was a good film that made up for the problems that other X- Men films have made, but I couldn't help but feel (at times) that this was a large part of why the film took the direction it did. I honestly enjoyed it, and will see it again on Blu-ray, but I do hope that the next film will finally unleash Wolverine to his full potential WHILE still allowing other mutants to shine as they did in this film. Nevertheless, this film is definitely worth seeing if one has the time and money. Just make sure you do not take any friends that have not seen every X-Men film, or spin off, up to The Wolverine.
I would give this movie and 8.5 out of 10 if that was an option.