directed by Bryan Singer
screenplay by Simon Kinberg
Anyone who has followed Twentieth Century Fox's film franchise adapting the popular X-Men comic books will know that the franchise, which thus far has had five movies and two Wolverine-oriented spinoffs, has seen its ups and downs. After starting off strongly with the first two movies in 2000 and 2003, both directed by Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects) the series saw a disheartening dip in quality when Singer left to direct a Superman sequel in 2006, resulting in the awful X-Men: The Last Stand, directed by Brett Ratner, compounded by an even worse Wolverine spinoff in 2009 by Gavin Hood. In 2011, Matthew Vaughn's prequel X-Men: First Class surprised audiences and critics by restoring a pretty high standard of quality to the X-Men franchise. Last year's The Wolverine, directed by James Mangold was not quite in its league but it was a surprisingly decent movie as well.
With X-Men: Days of Future Past, however, Singer finally returns to the franchise he started fourteen years ago, and gives not only the best X-Men movie that has ever been produced, but a movie that easily stands shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the very best films of the Disney-owned Marvel Studios, like the first Iron Man, the global phenomenon The Avengers, and the recent Captain America sequel.
The film opens in the year 2023, when mutants have been nearly wiped out by an unstoppable army of extremely powerful robots called Sentinels, built specifically to destroy them and their supporters and which, apart from unbelievable firepower, also have the ability to adapt to any threat. As a result, not even the combined abilities of the remaining X-Men, such as the ice powers of Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), teleportation powers of Blink (Fan Bingbing), fire powers of Sunpot (Adan Canto), armor and strength of Colossus (Daniel Cudmore), enhanced senses of Warpath (Booboo Stewart) the weather powers of Storm (Halle Berry) or even the metal-manipulating powers of Erik Lensherr a.k.a. Magneto (Ian McKellen) are able to stop them.
So far, the remaining X-Men have been able to stay alive thanks to the power of Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) to project the consciousness of Bishop (Omar Sy) into the past to warn the other X-Men of the attacks in time for them to evacuate their location, but time is running out fast. Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) then has the idea to send someone's consciousness back in time, all the way to the single event that led to the launch of the Sentinel program by the governments of the world, the assassination of Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage) by Raven, a.k.a. Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence). Professor Xavier theorizes that by stopping the assassination, they can change the future. However, to send someone's consciousness that far back in time could kill them, which is why Logan a.k.a. Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), with his healing factor, is the only person who could survive the process, and as a result Kitty sends him back to 1973, where he must enlist the aid of a much younger Charles (James McAvoy) and Erik (Michael Fassbender). It won't be easy; Charles has become addicted to a serum developed by Hank McCoy (Nicholas Hoult) that enables him to walk but has dulled his telepathy, while Erik is incarcerated underneath the Pentagon for supposedly having killed the President of the United States. Logan, Charles and Hank recruit a young man named Peter (Evan Peters) with the mutant gift of super speed in the hope of busting Magneto out of jail, but the challenges that lie ahead are going to be a lot more difficult than that as Trask, initially turned down by the American congress, starts to get too cozy for comfort with the right people in the U.S. government.
As happy as I was to find out that Bryan Singer was returning to the director's chair for the latest X-Men movie after over a decade away from the franchise, I confess my joy was slightly tempered by the notion that he'd be working from a script written by Simon Kinberg, who also wrote the disastrous X-Men: The Last Stand, and whose resume includes other films I really didn't enjoy, like Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes adaptation in 2009. As it turns out, I needn't have worried; Kinberg's script, apart from being surprisingly taut and well-structured, is actually quite reverent to the canon that was established by the previous films, with the exception of the failure to explain why Professor X is in his old body, which got vaporized in The Last Stand while his consciousness was moved into another person's comatose body. The real marvel (pun intended) here is that thanks to the time-travel element, this is easily one of the most complicated stories that has been attempted in any comic-book based movie, and yet with the exception of a few niggles, Kinberg actually pulls it off. If nothing else, such is his and Singer's sleight-of-hand that it's easier to ignore the gaffes, which are inevitable with that kind of storytelling.
Still, even though Kinberg has raised his game, it's still Singer's show, and he extracts electrifying performances from his leads. Jackman's charisma, as expected, is still dialed up to 11 here, but the good news is that he gets to do a lot more than shout and skewer people here; there's some welcome gravitas to his character that was actually hinted at in the last Wolverine solo movie but gets explored a bit more effectively here. The narrative focus, however, is on the newer cast members, in particular McAvoy's younger Xavier, who is a broken man after the events of First Class. McAvoy gets to do more than wear long hair and bell-bottom pants; he does an exemplary job of portraying the younger Xavier as having fallen from grace, a stark contrast from the hopeful young man he was in his first movie. For me, the film's most powerful scene doesn't involve explosions or energy blasts or fisticuffs; it's the scene where, through the magic of telepathy, young and old Charles meet and converse. Fassbender's Magneto was the breakout star of First Class with his overpowering, feral performance, but this time it is McAvoy's turn to shine. Fassbender's Magneto has traveled quite a bit further into full-on bad guy territory this time, though arguably understandably so, but the good news is that his portrayal is no less nuanced than it was the first time around, and his brutality here feels like a natural progression of what came before. Jennifer Lawrence, meanwhile, gets to show off her martial arts skills (when she's not being swapped out with a stunt double) and some pretty impressive linguistic (or at least phonetic) ability when Mystique carries on an extended conversation in Vietnamese and later throws in a smattering of French. She doesn't get quite as much attention from the script as she did in First Class, even though, ironically, Mystique is more central to the plot this time, but the supremely talented Lawrence is able to make the most out of her slightly diminished role. I also enjoyed seeing Nicholas Hoult return to the role of McCoy, also known as the Beast, as well; there was a lot more of his trademark acrobatic fighting this time, and he had a much better makeup job than he did in First Class. Dinklage, as the film's bad guy, turns in a solid, if not particularly remarkable performance, though to my mind that was more down to the writing. He certainly wasn't anything like Brian Cox's somewhat flamboyant bad guy William Stryker in X2: X-Men United, a younger version of whom is played here by Josh Helman. Still, Dinklage's performance is entirely creditable, and it was refreshing that, for a change it did not actually touch on his stature.
Finally, the "future" X-Men get to showcase their powers and little else, though Page's role as Kitty Pryde is fairly substantial even though she plays out more like a plot device than an actual character. I must say, though, that Fan Bingbing is absolutely gorgeous as Blink, and I hope to see more of her in future installments.
For me, however, the breakout star of this movie was Evan Peters, who played Peter Maximoff, also known in the comic books as Quicksilver. A bravura sequence in which he puts his super speed on full display is easily the best action set piece of the entire movie, and lays down a serious marker that I suspect was intended for Fox's rivals over at Marvel studios, who through some curious legal development will also be able to feature Quicksilver in their Avengers sequel next year, to be played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, whom I actually found to be insufferably bland in the current hit Godzilla. It was also a stroke of genius for Singer to set the scene to the sound of Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle" although that has fooled at least one reviewer into thinking that Quicksilver's power is to stop time. The only thing truly wrong with this iteration of Quicksilver is that he is gone from the movie way, way too soon, and for no good reason, really. I can already see the "How It Should Have Ended" skit on Youtube in which he plays a bigger role and simplifies everyone's problems. Still, even without him around the movie has plenty of highly-impressive action sequences.
It's hard to talk about the specific things I enjoyed about the film without spoiling plot points, but I will say that, apart from enjoying the film on its own merits, I was decidedly struck by how faithful Singer and his crew managed to be to the atmosphere of the original comic book series, which was extremely effective in juxtaposing the bleakness of the future and the tumult of the end of the seventies, even though in the movie Singer has turned back the clock a few years. There's even a highly memorable, if decidedly grim moment involving Storm and a sentinel that feels like it's been ripped right out of the comic book, albeit with more visceral impact here.
For me the honor of top Marvel-based movie of the year still goes to Marvel Studios' Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but this comes a very, very close second and only loses out because of some quibbles I have with the script. I will say that of the two, this is definitely the more ambitious film, comparable even to what Marvel did by putting together The Avengers two years ago. One thing the X-Men franchise definitely has going for it is that it is the longest running comic book film franchise whose makers haven't actually pushed the reboot button, although the time travel story device serves a similar purpose.
I can actually foresee nerds in the future debating what the better Marvel movie was: this, or The Avengers. It's that good.
8.9/10
[mild spoiler warning]
Oh, and I am happy to report that people unhappy with certain plot points of X-Men: The Last Stand will be very happy with this film. That is all.
[end spoiler warning]
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