So, this is the seventh installment in the X-Men film franchise. Usually movie series lose their fire after a few outings, and the X-Men films aren’t innocent of this. But the previous two films X-Men: First Class and The Wolverine gave me hope for this franchise to recover. X-Men: Days of Future Past had everything going for it. But did it live up to the hype?
I’ve always had a place in my heart for films with an ensemble cast. It seems pretty difficult for films with a huge amount of cast members to develop all their characters correctly, as only a number of movies are able to. This film developed all it’s principle characters and even some of the smaller characters to a satisfying degree. It was nice to see Mystique (played by Jennifer Lawrence) take a more prominent and important role in this film.
Newcomer to the franchise, Quicksilver (played by Evan Peters), was very entertaining. Without giving away too much, he can lay clam to having some of the coolest effects in the film. It was nice seeing both Patrick Stewart and Ian Mckellen back in their title roles (Professor X and Magneto, respectably). Michael Fassbender (Magneto) and James McAvoy (Professor X) seemed basically like younger versions of both actors and their characters. You’d think that something would’ve been off when you have two different actors playing characters at different ages simultaneously, but nothing was.
It’s difficult when you have as big as a cast as this movie does to have a proper amount of screen time for each character. I would have liked it if certain character’s like Blink (played by BingBing Fan) had more time in the movie (Mainly because her power to create portals made the action scenes that much more thrilling). But a lot of the characters that didn’t have much time in the film didn’t really need to be developed and they were used as much as they could have been.
The action sequences in this film were phenomenal, featuring some of the most exciting scenes in the franchise. This film found new ways for the mutants to use their powers together to fight their common enemy. I attribute this to Bryan Singer’s fantastic direction of X-Men: Days of Future Past. He really knows his way around an action scene.
The plot of the film, first penned by Marvel Comic writers in 1981, adapted by screenwriter Simon Kinberg, was a thrill ride. The stakes are high, and there is no room for error in the X-Men’s plan. Throughout the film I was on the edge of my seat begging for everything to go smoothly in the mutants fictional universe. I was actually tearing up during a scene where a rather hopeless character had a chance encounter with a man who could set him on the right path. The screenplay was well written and it really made me care for these characters and their world.
The only negative point I have is that Peter Dinklage’s character, the villainous Dr. Bolivar Trask, didn’t have that much screen time. Though, I would say that Trask was a fairly well developed character, so in that aspect he didn’t need any more time in the film. Funnily enough I had this strange feeling he wasn’t going to have much time in the film.
So many sequels are meaningless ventures which don’t move the characters forward whatsoever. X-Men: Days of Future Past is anything but that. Bryan Singer, the man who started this franchise, is finally back in the directors chair and it couldn’t be more fitting. This film doesn’t seem like the seventh entry into the series. It almost feels like a new beginning for the X-Men. Though some characters had very limited time in the movie, that didn’t hinder my enjoyment of the film. Since leaving the theatre I’ve been more excited than ever for the next installment in the X-Men franchise.
Consensus: 4.5/5
Director: Bryan Singer
Screenplay: Simon Kinberg
Cast: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Hugh Jackman, Jennifer Lawrence, Peter Dinklage, Evan Peters, Ellen Page, Nicholas Hoult
Movies After Dark 