X-Men: Days of Future Past
A Mistake can have devastating and unforeseen consequences.
After a pair of movies that were not well received by fans or critics this movie sets out to correct the mistakes of the past so that they don’t affect the future. This is both meant literally and metaphorically. In the future Mutants and Humans are being oppressed by the Sentinels. Machine’s designed to hunt and kill mutants that have turned on humans because humans will give birth to future mutants. The Sentinels were created by Bolivar Trask in 1973 but were not perfected into their current form until decades later. If Trask dies than the American government will invest in the program and doom the earth.
Part of what has to happen here is Wolverine is having his mind sent back 50 years so that he wakes up in his younger body. He is to find Xavier, find Magneto, and stop Trask from being assassinated. There are some genuinely funny moments in this movie (mostly involving Quicksilver) as well as some stand out action sequences (The Pentagon break in, the future Sentinel battle, and the past Sentinel battle). But at its core the movie is about correcting a mistake and embracing you pain.
Past Xavier is a broken man. He takes “treatments” to help him walk at the cost of his mental powers. He tried to open the school but his students/teachers were either drafted for Vietnam or killed. He shuts the world out because it’s too painful to deal with. Hank McCoy is his caregiver/enabler (I call him that because he isn’t really doing anything to help him). Wolverine is trying to make the best of a bad situation while trying to correct a mistake caused by Mystique.
Sadly there are some wasted parts in this movie. William Stryker shows up as an army major before he begins weapon x. He’s just there as window dressing. Peter Dinklage plays Bolivar Trask. A man who admires Mutants but wants to use them as a tool to unite humanity against extinction (insert prejudice leader using persecuted minority to unite people metaphor here). Jennifer Lawrence does well but is not a stand out performer. I also think that there could have been more of the Future X-Men but the film already has so many characters in it that some only show up for a few seconds (like Kelsey Grammer as future Beast). However with all of these problems this is still a good movie.
I give X-Men: Days of Future Past 7.75 homing bullets out of 10.
Clifford T. Hofferd is a movie critic living in Prince George, British Columbia, Canada. Follow Clifford’s blog at thengpblog.blogspot.ca
