X-Men: Days of Future Past is a bold, dark and important chapter in a superhero franchise that continues to evoke the past atrocities of man, in order to portray a fantastic fable of hope amidst hopeless times.
It also marks the return of Bryan Singer to the director’s chair, he whose vision on the first two (and best) X-Men movies propelled the superhero movie (as we know it) to new heights.
The dark, socially conscious spirit of those first two movies is felt throughout X-Men: Days of Future Past, a movie made more for those who grew up with the franchise with characters from previous films all making an appearance in one form or another, and definitely made for more mature audiences with parents of those young-uns looking for this latest fix of mutant action best to wait until they’re a little older.
The film opens on a very bleak future where an all-out onslaught on mutants - and the humans who dared to help them- resulting in a world turned to ash, with piles of bodies upon bones upon rubble that once was civilisation.
Standing between survival and certain death is a last batch of X-Men, among them Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), and Storm (Halle Berry), who team up with resilient foe Magneto (Ian McKellan) on a last chance mission to travel back through time to work with their younger selves (James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence) and stop a pivotal moment in the past from creating a future hell.
While many references to James Cameron’s The Terminator can be made, X-Men: Days of Future Past should be viewed as top grade superhero entertainment that offers that rare treat of visual spectacular and food for thought storytelling in the same package.
Where other superhero movies jam packed with characters can often feel cluttered, Singer does a great job by not letting the focus waver from the core characters and their tortured relationships, especially the fragile love triangle between Xavier (James McAvoy), Magneto (Michael Fassbender) and Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence).
Above all, it is the stakes felt in this war between species that resonate, with heavy ramifications felt throughout. This is made even more so thanks to a truly despicable villain in Dr. Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), the Josef Mengele in this war of species cleansing, whose sadistic curiosity and twisted ideology are placed under the guise of “science” and “national security”.
Singer’s approach to these characters has always been forthright, with the mutant fight has one for equality to their human kin, drawing heavy comparison to the civil and ethnic rights of the real world.
X-Men: Days of Future Past is an important superhero movie for its younger viewers since it shows what happens when fear of the other turns into a holocaust. Through Xavier and Magneto is presented two different forms of resistance that is almost biblical in nature, with one going by the way of peace and the other by the way of the sword. A choice is to be made by mutant kind on which path to follow.
Only makes sense then that this seventh X-Men movie ranks high with the first two. Singer not only injects an edge missing from the other entries since his departure, but he also cheekily revises past atrocities in the series that is sure to have fans cheering loudly.
As of now Singer’s future looks very cloudy due to scandal at its most disturbing. Yet for the here and now, X-Men: Days of Future Past presents that filmmaker at his best and brightest. |