Domonic Vescio takes another peek into the X-Men universe and, while all of them have aged poorly, at least Days of Future Past can still rock when it needs to.

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X-Men: Days of Future Past
Dir: Bryan Singer
Starring: Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Halle Berry, Anna Paquin, Peter Dinklage, Elliot Page, Nicholas Hoult

“The future, a dark, desolate world.”
The dystopian part of this comic book movie is partially set in 2023. Awkward.

The X-Men movies are a weird thing to me. I like some of them, but even the ones I originally really enjoyed have aged oddly, to say the least. The choices they made and stories they tried to translate were awkward and confusing, which might be the most X-Men thing they could’ve done. Retcons that went nowhere, reskinning characters or creating some whole cloth when they had a reservoir of decades of mutants to pull from the long history of the comics, and the, let’s speak plainly, WEIRD fixation with blue mutants. Mystique, Nightcrawler, Beast, someone had to be VERY blue in just about every single movie. It takes hours of complicated makeup work to get actors covered head to toe in blue paint and textures, and it usually costs a pretty penny to boot. Now, there are plenty of X-Men who are blue, but there’s also quite a few OTHER FUCKING COLORS. Oh, they had shiny silver for Colossus. Bully for them.

X-Men: Days of Future Past is the seventh in a series of movies that jump around timelines, characters, and actors in a chaotic and disorganized path through the history of this specific cinematic universe, and it is the EPITOME of this all-in-one movie. In XM:DoFP, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) has his 2023 consciousness sent back in time by Kitty Pride (Elliot Page) to his younger 1973 body to alter the dystopian future by stopping Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from assassinating Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), the creator of Sentinels (giant mutant-hunting androids). When Trask is assassinated, mutants become Public Enemy Number One and are hunted down and experimented on so the government can update the Sentinels to adapt and combat the “growing mutant menace.” Wolverine shows off that sweet naked Jackman ass, meets up with a who’s who of heroes from the other movies in a family dynamic more complicated than a Vescio Family Picnic (there are a LOT of us) and, with perseverance and gumption, they save President Nixon and Bolivar Trask and ride off into the sunset as a stronger and healthier unit.

Just kidding, Magneto (Michael Fassbender/Ian McKellen) nearly ruins everything by using said Sentinels, and an entire fucking is stadium lifted and then deposited around the X-Men and the second douchiest American President ever to, I don’t know, kill everyone who doesn’t agree with his “let’s just kill all the humans because EVOLUTION” thing. The team has to fight him while convincing Mystique to NOT shoot Trask, who is himself a mega-douche, while Magneto monologues and Wolverine gets pin-cushioned with rebar and flung into the Potomac. The rebarinating/drowning stresses his mind enough that he gets shunted Back to the Future like he was Eric Stoltz (see what I did there?). He wakes up in a comfy, futuristic bed and the timeline is fixed and not only is the Xavier School for Gifted Students still around, but so are like, five previously dead X-Men. Happy fun. With a post-credit scene that telegraphs what should have been the dopest shit of all fucking time by making the next villain Apocalypse, my personal favorite X-Men baddie. But in reality that ended up being probably the third most disappointing X-Men movie made (so far), X-Men: Apocalypse, which came out two years later to…less than stellar reviews. It’s real bad, y’all. If you’re wondering which movies are the big winners of the X-Crap awards, it’s X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019) in first place, and X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) coming in second. An honorary X-Crappy goes to X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) for being mostly just forgettably bad.

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When I first saw XM:DoFP there were a lot of differences from the source material, but since every single X-Men movie is full of differences, it didn’t bother me so much. It’s much more glaring now after 10 years and a bunch of Marvel Cinematic Universe movies done, in my opinion, [mostly] right. Most of the changes I’m still fine with, Wolverine going back instead of Kitty, stuff like that. What I can’t get past is the design of both the 2023 and 1973 Sentinels. Man, the more I watch this flick, the worse they look. At least with the ’73 Sentinels, they sort of tried to make them look like the ones from the comics, but they had such a hard-on for sleek 2014 designs they couldn’t quite get it sorted out to look, you know, COOL. That and the wannabe Thor Destroyer looking future Sentinels just kinda lose me. I wanted those big, blocky, square-fingered Jack Kirby style Sentinels to rip shit-holes through the future. Instead, I got plastic (the wave of the future) and Sentinels created with mutant DNA? They’re robots, but with you know, MUTANT GENES. That doesn’t make sense, but then, I’m not a geneticist. Or mechanic…

The story still swings close enough to the source. The core of Days of Future Past is in there, but I think they painted themselves into a corner with all the changes the previous movies made. XM:DoFP is one of the comic stories that could potentially fix that, with its giant retcon of everything that came before it. It takes place before most of the other movies, so none of them actually happened in their new timeline, which is probably for the best.

The Good Stuff

  • Dinklage is an amazing actor and he plays a really great Bolivar Trask.
  • Chris Claremont, who co-wrote the original comic story, and Len Wein, who created Wolverine, cameoed as congressmen early in the film.
  • Magneto saying, “I don’t know karate. But I know crazy,” quoting James Brown. Hilarious.
  • Ian McKellen and Partick Stewart as Magneto and Professor X are in the mostly useless future, but they really do embody those characters the best.

The Bad Stuff

  • The Sentinels suck.
  • The convoluted storyline, which on one hand, is VERY X-Men, but really, they just dug their own grave with this one.
  • The weird way they didn’t use much of the future they were trying so hard to save. All of the scenes felt tertiary, and they were probably only there to drive the 1973 storyline. That and all of the characters they used felt like the worst kind of fan service. Bishop is cooler than that.
  • Elliot Page desperately underused as Kitty Pride.
  • The still crappy designs for some of the mutants. Toad has always looked dumb in the movies, but he looked dumb in the comics. The over-use of prosthetics isn’t always the best way to go. Also, tattooed virus guy in Vietnam doesn’t make sense. Does he have the tattoos ’cause of his mutation, or was he just REALLY lucky when he got them in the EARLY FUCKING ’70s?!
  • And finally, getting my hopes up for Apocalypse. Bryan Singer, you SUCK for that, on top of all the gross shit you’ve done.

Look, I actually do still like this movie. It’s fun, the action is pretty awesome, and it at least feels like the X-Men of the comics, mostly. It’s par for the course for the series. The Big Ideas of the comics still come through, the mutant struggle with humans mirroring the Civil Rights Movement has been a HUGE part of the X-Men throughout its run. Sure, Sentinels replace the cops in the comics, but if you don’t see the parallels between cops in the ’60s and murderous robots used to control the masses, then I can’t help you.

At least we can all agree,

MAGNETO WAS RIGHT.

‘Nuff said.

— Domonic Vescio

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