a consistent franchise bodes for wonderful potential

Rating: 7/10 (27 May 2014)

After Matthew Vaughn's X-MEN: FIRST CLASS (2011, 7/10) transposes the mutants' universe into 1960s and allows some new blood to play their younger selves, X-MEN series has officially opened a new chapter. Three years later, the original helmer (X-MEN 2000, 7/10 and X2 2003, 7/10) Bryan Singer returns to the director chair to push a reset button to nullify all the damages done by Brett Ratner's X-MEN: THE LAST STAND (2006, 7/10). In this latest episode, the story devises a time-travel mission to the past in order to save the entire world from the Sentinel apocalypse.
With many cast members of the first three X-MEN movies reprise their roles, fanboys will hurrah to welcome back McKellen and Steward pair as the old Magneto and Professor X, with their disciples Storm (Berry), Kitty Pryde (Page), Iceman (Ashmore) and a handful of new characters in the near future, facing their common enemy, a robot army composed of killing machines named Sentinels, originally designed by Dr. Bolivar Trask (Dinklage) to obliterate mutants, but things go out of line, an indiscriminate massacre is endangering the whole planet.
So they send Wolverine (Jackman) back in 1972 to stop the Trask assassin executed by Mystique (Lawrence) would directly spur the advance of the prototype Sentinel maturing into the indestructible destroyer. And the paralleled worlds engage a race against the clock, the impending doom vs. the eleventh-hour history-shifting decision.
One much-hyped staple of the franchise is the frenemy between Professor X and Magneto, under a more liberal context now, the younger two (played by McAvoy and Fassbender respectively) construes a more (b)romance-inclining attachment to incite devotees' enthusiasm, yet this time around, McAvoy gains the upper hand with a tough inward struggle to crucify, through a fictional vis-à-vis with his older self, his character has a transcendent enlightenment while Fassbender is recycling the same character from the previous chapter with more flashy CGI- laden spectacles.
Wolverine is the nominal leading role, but in fact, he doesn't have too much action sequences to handle and is cast away before the crux arrives, Mystique, thanks to Lawrence's current much marketable star power, becomes the game-changing MVP amongst all the participants. As a Chinese, I cannot overlook the red-hot Bingbing Fan is cast as Blink, finally a role with sensible potential for her Hollywood moonlighting. Also worth mentioning, Evan Peters' Quicksilver steals the limelight with his time-frozen exploit makes THE MATRIX trilogy's bullet time pales in comparison.
The film is a tightly orchestrated by a cliff-hanging urgency, accompanied with a cogent script maximally facilitates the story development to be assimilated even by a novice in the mutants club. A great art design accomplishment to restore the 70s milieu, while the make-believe future settings are ominously fashioned as a video game production.
The franchise is consistent in my rating system, a 7/10 is a tremendous achievement considering I am not a comic book adherent, and the promising ending beckons a pristine start is on the horizon since everyone survives the forbidding annihilation, a solid building block cements more excitement will ensue in the follow-up X-MEN: APOCALYPSE in a two-year span.