★★★★☆
Four Stars
I was seven when the first X-Men film came out. Nonetheless, I remember being distinctly disappointed by it and its sequel, X2, in much the same way the Tobey Maguire-era Spiderman franchise left me with a vague distaste for superhero movies that the The Amazing Spider-Man reboot has only recently dispelled. Superhero films were movies where characters weren’t people with ideas or emotions, but icons with iconic abilities; Spiderman never stopped to think about how he felt about Mary-Jane, he just duly rescued her from the Green Goblin.
Batman wasn’t the clandestine antihero he should have been – he was little more than advanced military technology coupled with a husky voice. Even when Marvel tried to get under the skin of a single character in the form of 2009’s dire Origins: Wolverine, the result was insipid and cliché-ridden. It was understandable, then, that I sat down to watch X-Men: Days of Future Past with slight apprehension that would soon be dispelled.
It was clear from the start that Future Past was much more visually engaging than its predecessors. Azurine duo Mystique and Beast benefit in particular from ten years’ worth of CGI advances, whilst action sequences are gripping and stylish but used sparingly and kept thankfully brief.
The fusion of old and new casts is seamless; thanks to a plot concerning time travel, Future Past presents the likes of accomplished veterans Sirs Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen alongside the youthful talent of ever-reliable Ellen Page and a captivating Jennifer Lawrence. Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy represent welcome additions too, providing much-needed charisma alongside a stony Wolverine, and the film benefits from the inspired casting of Peter Dinklage – betterknown as Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones – as military scientist Bolivar Trask.
As for the plot itself, there’s a little left to be desired. Time travel is always a minefield in cinema and Future Past suffers from moments of confusion. There is some recapping of the previous film but it’s probably worth rewatching First Class again before this installment. That said, the alternate history of the 1970s allows the writers a rich seam of possibility which they exploit to its full extent, with scenes that see Mystique in action in Saigon and Magneto implicated in the assassination of JFK. It is only really at the final hurdle that Future Past falls, thanks to a muddled ending, overly drawn-out in that way that the final scenes of so many major blockbusters now are.
The question remains, however, of whether the superhero genre has finally matured from mere action vehicles into deeper studies of what it means to be human, or not. This has always been X-Men’s trump, and Fassbender’s Magneto in particular displays a wonderful ethical ambiguity that begs comparison with the conflicted morality of Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parker in Future Past’s fellow release The Amazing Spider-Man 2.
Just as the latter wrestles with the consequences of his continued involvement with Gwen Stacey and the danger he puts her in as Spiderman, so the former asks whether he can bring himself to kill someone who trusts him deeply in order to safeguard his entire race. Both characters have numerous scenes in their respective films in which their internal struggle is explored.
It has been suggested that this is a trickledown effect from the shades-of-grey antihero morality central to the Bronze Age of Comic Books (i.e. the “ darker ” comics of the late 80s and 90s – think Watchmen). Whatever the reason, it’s to Days of Future Past’s credit that it manages to be fast-paced, humorous and thought-provoking, all at once.
