The Triumphant Return of Bryan Singer to the X-Men

Rating: 9/10 (1 April 2015)

Fox receives a lot of aggression for their treatment of Marvel's comic properties and, while some of it is well founded, people seem to forget that Fox has also done really well with their X-Men series. They've made some serious missteps (X-MEN ORIGINS) but they've also done more good than harm, releasing some seriously awesome X-Men films (e.g. FIRST CLASS, X2). When director Bryan Singer returned to the franchise and announced he was doing a time-travel plot that would bridge the casts from his and Matthew Vaughn's films, I knew we were in for something great. And I was not disappointed. The film opens in the near future where mutantkind has been hunted to near extinction by a force of adaptable murder-machines called Sentinels. Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and his few remaining X-Men come together with one last ditch effort to end it: Kitty Pride (Ellen Page) will use her powers to send Wolverine's (Hugh Jackman) consciousness decades into the past where he will need to connect with a younger, troubled Xavier (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) and convince them to aid him in preventing a pivotal assassination that set the dystopian future into motion. Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) has gone rogue since losing touch with Xavier and Magneto and she plans to murder Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), a mutant-hating industrialist who's Sentinel program goes on to all but destroy the world's mutant population. DAYS OF FUTURE PAST is easily the most epic X-Men film, uniting the past and present to save the future.
This movie is amazingly fun. I love the X-Men movies (well, maybe not X-MEN ORIGINS) so I was pumped going into the film, and I loved what I saw. As much as I loved Vaughn's FIRST CLASS, I miss the original team and this is the closest we've gotten to a new movie with them since 2006. I would love a new movie focusing solely on them but it was still cool to see Storm, Kitty Pride, Iceman, and Colossus (in a role limited to punching) in action again. Plus, no spoilers, but the end of the movie left me smiling as a fan. We're also introduced to some new faces that I'm hoping get developed more in the future. After a handful of films, we finally meet Bishop (Omar Sy) but he doesn't get a chance to do much; we get to see his powers in action and that was a good start. Blink (Bingbing Fan) is a breakout character in the sense that her power of portal creation made for some fantastic action sequences. The future Sentinels were a little too plain for my tastes. I loved their ability to adapt to the mutant powers and coordinate in slaughtering their targets but their shape-shifting design was too generic, reminding my of the Destroyer from THOR. The future sequences, bleak as they are, are primarily action sequences as the surviving mutants try to defend Kitty and Wolverine but the real juicy stuff is happening in the '70s.
As is the case with most of the X-Men films anymore, Wolverine is a key component to the story but I'm happy to report that he isn't the central character. Just like FIRST CLASS, this is Xavier and Magneto's show with some Mystique thrown in for flavor. Xavier of the '70s is a drug-addled man in a never-ending pit of depression. Beast (Nicholas Hoult) has developed a serum that allows the Professor the use of his legs (following the events at the end of FIRST CLASS) but removes his mutant power of telepathy. When Wolverine finds him in the past, he is a broken man and there's a nice role-reversal as Wolverine must now guide Professor X instead of the other way around. Magneto is still the idealistic criminal, though incarcerated under the Pentagon forwell, that part is best left to the movie to reveal. His escape results in the best sequence in the entire movie when Wolverine and crew recruit a young speedster, Quicksilver (Evan Peters). I was one of the fans worried about Quicksilver's use in the film, knowing that it was quick on the heels of the announcement that Marvel would be using the character in AGE OF ULTRON and fearing this was just a way for Fox to spit in Marvel's face. Plus early character images looked sort of goofy with the costuming. Again, I was wrong and Quicksilver was pure awesome.
I could spend well more than the allotted words praising everything I loved about this movie. I still haven't mentioned Dinklage's awesome performance as Trask or the wicked Vietnam scene. In contrast to my earlier comments on the future Sentinels, the originals from the '70s are much cooler, staying closer to the original comic design. The film has its flaws but they're overshadowed with everything I loved about it. Bryan Singer returned to the franchise he brought to life and essentially apologizes for all the garbage that happened while he was away. For that alone, DAYS OF FUTURE PAST has my fandom but it doesn't hurt that it's just an awesome movie to boot.