X-Men: Days of Future Past

I finally got the chance to see X-Men:  Days of Future Past.  I definitely thought it was a cool movie.  Almost as good as X-Men:  First Class.  The story changed some of the comic book stuff, which is quite understandable and allowed the casts from the original movies to return, which was definitely cool.  I would recommend not reading anymore if you do not want spoilers.

I loved how the movie did not waste time trying to explain characters.  For example, we see Bishop, and I do not even remember anyone calling him by name.  Nor was there the obligatory exposition of Professor X saying “Bishop use your powers to absorb energy and fight off the sentinels!”  It is nice that comic fans get to say “hey that is ______” and non-comic folks do not need to know, just that it is some mutant who is fighting in the war.

My favorite part of the movie was Quicksilver.  When Logan and Charles meet him, he is playing ping-pong with himself at super-speed.  He knows that they are not cops because he searched their cars while they were walking down the steps.  He is funny, cocky, and a bit of a trouble maker.  He alludes to the fact that his father is Magneto by saying “hey, my mom used to date a guy with the power to control metal!”

The best scene with Quicksilver is the breakout of Erik from the Pentagon.  The guards draw their plastic guns and begin shooting at the group.  Quicksilver yawns, puts on his headphones and then starts running.  Everything stops moving and he moves peoples arms so they hit themselves, moves the bullets so they miss Charles and Erik and steals a guard’s hat.  It was pretty awesome and such a cool way to see powers in action, it reminded me of Nightcrawler’s assassination sequence from X2.

The biggest downfall the movie was probably the plot.  I know that sounds weird.  It made sense for most of the movie, Wolverine must go back in time in order to stop Bolivar Trask from being assassinated and causing the Sentinel program to go forward.  That goes well at first, but then Erik decides that Raven must die since it is her DNA that builds the advanced Sentinels.  Okay, I still follow.

Then the group splits.  Magneto retrieves his helmet and decides to take control of the Sentinels by infusing them with metal, since they were made from some new non-magnetic material.  I had problems with this, since they would not obey him just because their skeleton has metal in it now, which I guess we see at one point.

And why did Magneto have to take a baseball stadium and drop it around the White House?  I guess it was meant as a barricade, but who was it stopping?  I am sure that troops could still get in, plus the Sentinels can fly.  Also, as an aside, that was RFK Stadium, which in the 1960s was the home of the Washington Senators, who moved to Texas in 1971.  The movie is set in 1973, so why is the guy getting the field ready for a game?  Those sorts of things take me out of a movie.  I know, I can buy a guy lifting the entire stadium, but I get annoyed that no one checked to see when baseball stopped being played there.

I guess what I am trying to say is that how would not assassinating Trask fix the future?  If he ended up living, he would have continued his work on Sentinels and you do not know if he will find another excuse to have governments back his program.  We already saw that he was working with other countries.  If I was going back in time, I would have tried to go back a little earlier, you know to maybe make him a friend of the mutants.

Then comes the ending.  The good guys win and Logan wakes up in the future.  Unfortunately he does not remember anything about this new timeline.  And for some reason, Jean and Scott are still alive.  So that means nothing from X3 happened (not a bad thing).  BUT that is where we get another problem…

At one point Logan allows Charles into his mind and he sees all the bad stuff, mostly stuff from X3 (you know, Jean dying).  So it is firmly established that in the future that stuff happened.  Yet in X3, Charles died (yes, I know he transferred his mind to another body, just bear with me) so how could he be in the future, being the most useless mutant ever in the fight against the Sentinels.  Also, how come in the first three X-movies we do not see Sentinels? 

And how come at the end of the second one, Professor X and the gang reveal themselves to the President.  The world seems to know nothing about mutants at that point!  Yet, in their future they say that Mystique killed Trask, which launched the Sentinel program.  So the Sentinels should have been around at that point.  They should have been deep in that war.  Does this make sense?

I made this cool timeline to highlight my point…

So basically the war with the Sentinels start in 2013 after the events of Wolverine.  It took the government forty years to finish building these things?  Where were some of these things when Magneto was taking over the Statue of Liberty?  Or when he was attempting to use Professor X to kill all the humans with Cerebro?  The government just allows Magneto to destroy the Golden Gate Bridge?  It just does not make sense. 

Alright, I am done ranting.

Comic Book Movie Grade:  B+

Author: Ngewo