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| The poster for Bryan Singer's X-Men: Days of Future Past |
X-Men 4 (not counting the origins movie X-Men: First Class (2011) or the Wolverine films (2009 and 2013)), is a huge event movie that has strong hold over large audiences the world over, as is evident from its impressive B.O. numbers.
In case you're wondering, my three stars is a very generous assessment of the film in my opinion.
It seems almost impossible to give an outline of Future Past's plot without either being too general or go into too much detail, but trying might be fun, so here goes:
The future is terrible due to anti-mutant 'sentinels' that emulate mutant powers to defeat them (successfully), a technology based on Mystique's mutant powers of shape-shifting after her capture by her nemesis, Dr. Bolivar Trask, a powerful weapons scientist, in the mid-1970s. To prevent sentinel-extinction, the X-Men collaborate to send Wolverine back in time to make Mystique a good girl, who doesn't try to kill Trask - or President Nixon! - and thereby provide the need for the sentinels. But this is a difficult task, getting the younger, apathetic Xavier to wake up and smell the morning coffee, - and get him and Magneto to meet and agree on anything. Their oppositional personalities clash again in Future Past, one a hopeful, the other a skeptic.
Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook (2012)) gets a chance to play empowered angry-woman, who may or may not turn good, in the last second, of course, ( - which do you think it is...?)
The most interesting new character is Peter/Quicksilver (Evan Peters (Adult World (2013)), a young ADD-type guy, who can think and act really, really fast. Peters is energetic and well into the character and brings some fun into an otherwise very self-serious sci-fi action adventure. Other young performers, like Booboo Stewart as 'Warpath' (The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010)) is pretty much wasted due to his ridiculous make-up and costume, which is a shame.
Future Past is not generally a movie with any great actors' work in it; the universe isn't geared for that, and the ones singled out here are minor nuggets; the big guys, James McAvoy (The Last Station (2009)) and Michael Fassbender (12 Years a Slave (2013)), so good actors by themselves elsewhere, can't bring much to X-Men.
Fassbender at one point gets in contact with the power-figures in the human world by removing a stadium (!) and putting it on top of the White House, then ripping out the vault that they all hide in, and tearing it open of the lawn. His lacking subtlety seems symptomatic for a movie that stomps around different times and locations without much drive behind it, - what is it all for, one wonders, (if one has fallen out of the universe, as I clearly have.)
X-Men (2000) was really good; X-2 (2003) was even better; X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) by Brett Ratner (Red Dragon (2002)) was humongous and not very good. By X-Men: Days of Future Past, I have lost my enthusiasm for the series, which seems to have now developed into a possibly never-ending franchise. All things have a time, and for me, X-Men had a time, and that time lies clearly in the past.
The details:
Regarding the curious plot of Future Past, a nonsensical title if there ever was one, production people of the movie have said that with a time traveling movie, 'you can do anything'. Meaning that the time travel philosophy of parallel universes etc. makes everything feasible narrative-wise. Which is really only true, as long as you can get your audience to come along with you. With Future Past, I wondered why, - in all the other X-Men movies, - we've never heard of the sentinels, which were created and developed in a 50-year period following the mid-1970's? (Thus probably should have been an issue in all the other movies as well... - Is it all a parallel universe? Does anything have any consequence at all? - Not good questions for any movie.)
All logic and cohesive thought comes to an end sometime in a superhero franchise like X-Men, which likes to somersault around with multiple characters, times, places... This one also continually relies on the audience being familiar with the previous films, which is another weakness in my mind.
In the end, the X-Men are popcorn and multi-plex and merchandise fodder above all else. The Beast character most incarnates this, as he time and again grows from nice man into blue, ravenous wolf-like monster; pure eye-popping spectacle and very little else.
Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects (1995)), the director behind the two first and this X-Men film is the man who has shaped the franchise as it is more than anyone. As I zone out of the X-Men universe, I get more interested in Singer's personal problems, as he was accused of raping a boy many years ago while promoting Future Past, which he instantly stopped doing, (with good reason.) That case, and possibly more than the one, go on, as Singer, - one of the most successful directors in the world today, - is poised to direct the next X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) (Zzzzzzzz), but will he be able to? Reality sometimes beats fiction, and this is certainly a case of that, for me, anyway.
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| Evan Peters as Peter/Quicksilver eating a burger for an X-Men: Days of Future Past photo shoot, a movie mainly about selling and eating, (for the people involved, if you catch my drift) |
Watch the trailer here
Budget: 200 mil. $
Box office: 739.6 mil. $ and running
= Big hit
What do you think of the X-Men movies and the newest chapter?
Any thoughts on Bryan Singer's private debacle?
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