X-Men: Days of Future Past

X-Men: Days of Future Past is a nice addition to the series. The themes are consistent, the characters are interesting, and there's some cool stuff going on. Considering all the material they have, it seems like they could keep doing episodes like this forever. 

My X-Men exposition feels a little familiar since I just talked about it for the last Wolverine movie, but I'll say it again. I've never read the comics, but I liked the X-Men: Evolution animated series, and the first X-Men movie; I skipped the second one and First Class. I love James McAvoy, so that's pretty much all I needed to be interested in this one. The 70s kitsch might have seemed novel, too, but in practice it wasn't actually very interesting.

Mystique really bugged me. I don’t like Jennifer Lawrence, and I don't get why Mystique has to be naked all the time. It just looks weird. I don't remember how Mystique looked in X-Men, but in this one it really seemed like Jennifer was just wearing a nylon suit. Her hands were so obviously painted, it just didn't work; it made all the wrinkles in her hands stand out so much. I didn't like her hair, either. I don't like seeing her feet, and her body looks bizarre. It seems like she wears clothes a lot in the comics, so I don't see why they couldn't have put some clothes on her.

I have a problem recognizing Michael Fassbender, too. I feel like I just haven't seen him in anything. I kept thinking, "Am I supposed to know who that actor is? I know it's not Jude Law." And that was about as far as I could get with it. 

I loved the opening sequence. It brought you right into what's so cool about the X-Men; all the mutants' powers are so unique, and they can all do such cool things. I wasn't familiar with any of the characters, but I liked Blink's look. She had a lot of cool stuff going on. I wish they could've just stopped and shown us what she looked like. I don't think I like Ellen Paige as Kitty, but I never seem to like Ellen Paige in much of anything.

I liked that Wolverine basically got to carry another movie. He's a good character. I thought it was kind of dumb when he cut Kitty and then later they're like, "She can't go on, she's lost too much blood!" and it's like…you guys couldn't tear apart a shirt and make a bandage for her or something? Have you just been letting her bleed out or what? For some reason, I pretty much hated the entire scene when Wolverine first went back to the 70s.

 

I liked it when he met Beast and The Professor, though. It was good that he didn't have to work too hard to convince him to help. That's not fun to watch for forever. I was interested in the back story between Charles and Mystique. I guess you get more of that in First Class. Quicksilver was an interesting character. I liked how they off-handedly implied that Magneto was his father.

The end fight was pretty good. It was a bummer watching everyone die again, though. Blowing up the ship was great. I liked that Magneto got hurt by something that wasn't metal, so he couldn't control it. But he couldn’t control any of the pieces of the Sentinels, and nobody else got hit, so maybe he should've just done a better job of taking cover, like everyone else did. It was kind of annoying how they kept switching between the Sentinels and the final fight, like a million times at the end. They needed to stick with one or the other for longer stretches at a time.

I liked how Charles used Magneto's power to pull the stuff off himself. I'm ambivalent about whether what they did really would have solved anything or not. I guess the answer is "it did." But the fact that a mutant could save them from another mutant really doesn't negate the fact that the mutants are dangerous and humans should probably have a way to fight them. Not that humans should eradicate them or anything, but it wouldn't be a bad idea to be able to protect themselves from them. So I don't see how that convinced everyone to be like, "oh, nevermind, this Sentinel thing is just too expensive." Maybe they didn't trust that it couldn't be used against them. Maybe they felt like it was too powerful a weapon to exist.

It was really nice to get to see Wolverine back in the "present" and everyone at the school alive. When we saw Jean, I thought it was going to be Mystique. I'm glad Jean got to not die, though. Killing her really seemed to mess Wolverine up. I couldn't tell if he was going out with her or not, though; it seemed like Scott was, which is how it was on the TV show, but Jean wasn't like 10 years older than Scott on the show. I liked that the ending was kind of bittersweet because you knew all the pain Wolverine was about to be in, too, in the past. It kept it from being too over-the-top happy.