We'll start with the story, or what I feel I can share without giving too much away. There will be a lot of name drops here of X-Men characters that you may not have heard of, so many that I will not be cluttering this review with links to all of them. If you want to know more, you'll have to look them up yourself. The movie opens in the future, where Shadowcat (my favorite of the X-Men, btw), Iceman, Sunspot, Colossus, Bishop, Warpath and Blink are on the run from the Sentinels, powerful robots who have devastated the earth as of (about) the year 2023. They were designed by Trask Industries, based on a design from the '70's by the company's founder and namesake, to hunt people with the mutant gene, or anyone who might birth a mutant, armed with the power to adapt to mutant powers, derived from Mystique's power to turn into anyone (on a related note, Jennifer Lawrence is back as Mystique, and she's as impeccable as ever). The Sentinels always win, killing off some of my favorite characters right off the bat, but it's okay because Shadowcat has found a way to send peoples' minds into their past bodies, and so she sends Bishop back each time so that he can warn the others of the coming attack, and the group can move on before the attack happens.
Prof. Xavier, Storm, Wolverine and Magneto join up with the other future X-Men soon after we see one of these consciousness jumps, and Xavier reveals that he has a plan to use this power to send someone back to their body from 1973 so that the events leading to the formation of the Sentinel Program and the subsequent capture and study of Mystique can be prevented and the future changed for the better. They choose Wolverine to go, as he is the only one whose mind can survive a jump that long. Now Wolverine is tasked with convincing the characters in the past continuity of the danger and changing the future. He finds and gives inspiration to a depressed Xavier, frees Magneto from a super jail under the Pentagon, with the help of Quicksilver (who was awesome and hilarious, or as I like to say awesolarious), and then saves Mystique from capture by Trask. Magneto, however, is still a thing, and he of course attempts to use the '70's prototypes of the Sentinels to seize the world for mutant kind. Now the past X-Men must stop him, while the future X-Men protect Wolverine's body long enough for them to do so, since the moment Wolverine wakes up the changes to the timeline will become real and only Wolverine will remember that anything has changed, and they'll probably never get another chance to fix things.
I went into the movie very, very worried. Time travel movies are often confusing and inaccessible at the very best, and I expected this movie, having so many characters in it, to be far to confusing and inaccessible for casual viewers to enjoy. I knew that I would like it, but I worried that movie-goers and critics would not, and that it would hurt the franchise (even more than X-Men Origins: Wolverine already has). I was surprised, however, to discover that, for a time travel movie, this movie was actually very straightforward and easy to follow. The time-travelling character had clear goals the entire time, and the rules of this entirely mental form of time travel were clearly spelled out and easily understood and followed. That combined with some fantastic costuming, directing and cinematography, and absolutely spot on performances by every member of this all-star cast, made this movie a fun ride from start to finish. While something like Captain America: The Winter Soldier is still better, this movie was a fantastic foray into what was great about the X-Men movie franchise back before X3 ruined it for everyone.
Most impressively of all, however, was the fact that, in the end, this movie managed to actually recreate the continuity of these X-Men movies and develop a new groundwork that the films can follow going forward, and go forward they will if the end credits scene is any indication. Let's just say (X-Men comics fans will get this, but the rest of you won't, sorry) that the Apocalypse is coming. Overall Days of Future Past was a surprisingly fun experience that brought the X-Men movies back to their roots while still expanding upon and (re)developing the lore, and I thoroughly enjoyed every moment. If I were to complain about anything in this movie, it would be that you must have some knowledge of the X-Men going in to really get it, and that some characters simply weren't developed at all, though I can forgive the latter, as the characters who needed developing got the development that they needed. While it's not a perfect movie, I give X-Men: Days of Future Past a well above average 8 out of 10. Check the movie out when you have a chance, and come back later for another Something Awesome.
Thanks for the review.
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