Okay, let me make it clear before anyone leaps to the defense of what many are calling the best film of the franchise so far - X-Men: Days of Future Past is by no means a bad film. It's just far from a great one, in my humble view at least. It left me with similar feelings I had towards it's predecessor, X-Men: First Class - a load of peeps on screen doing fun, clever things with their mutant powers for just over two hours... and, that's it. I was neither bored nor thrilled with First Class, a film that neither gets anything wrong nor adds anything particularly new to the series (except for maybe Michael Fassbender's triumvirate of accents, which he's thankfully narrowed down to just one for DOFP). Hence why I feel that DOFP, with it's honourable ambition to try and tie all the previous films together whilst not getting too bogged down with previous goings-on, overreaches in a way that the series maybe can't help but do at this stage in the game. Let me explain...
It's the future, and things have gone somewhat to pot. The world is a fusion of the worst parts of The Matrix and Tron: Legacy, all craggy rocks and bad neon strip-lighting. Mutants have been overthrown by The Sentinels, a bunch of super robots invented by a 70s Peter Dinklage (funny how no-one knew anything about them in any of the other films), and it falls to Wolverine to get sent back in time by Kitty Pryde - wait, sent back in time by a girl who's superpower is walking through walls? - to change history and stop them taking control in the first place. This crazy time travel scheme is thought up by none other than Professor Charles Xavier, who - hang on, didn't he die at the end of the third film, and throw his consciousness into someone else entirely? - you know what, I'm fine with iffy logic, but DOFP truly takes the piss.
It shouldn't fall to mere plot holes to ruin a film, but the X-Men franchise has become a disparate entity already, with two dodgy Wolverine spin-offs and the much-maligned third film sparking the ire of many a fanboy (I really don't see the problem with it if you ask me, my jaw dropped when Prof. X exploded and Jean Grey's death brought me to tears). You can see why so much began to rest on DOFP getting things back on track; and in many ways it does, basically giving you 'what you want' from an X-Men film, whilst also bringing something new to the table - in this case, time travel. But when so many plot points rest on internal logic it makes the mistakes stick out like a sore thumb. It doesn't ruin proceedings so much as leave you with a nagging feeling that too many things have been left unanswered because hey, there simply IS no answer. You're not really meant to question why future-Xavier is alive, just WATCH HIM SAY THE F-WORD!! Magneto's 100 feet under the Pentagon with no metal nearby to use his powers on, but plonk him in the middle of a giant football stadium and WATCH HIM RAISE THAT CONCRETE DUDE!!1 #MutantsRock #Lol (I know a football stadium contains metal, but so does the f*cking Pentagon)
I guess I better list a few things I DID like about the film. Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) is great, her character about as far-removed from both the 'good' and 'bad' camp as can be, which makes for some interesting decisions on the part of both the young Prof. X and Magneto as to how they deal with her actions. There's a superb slo-mo scene involving Quicksilver (Evan Peters) taking down a throng of security guards, in what's easily the most fun 'mutant power' sequence in any X-Men film to date. And the Zapruder-aping handheld cine footage that eats into proceedings towards the film's climax is used perfectly sparingly, giving the viewer a first-person perspective of mutant chaos unfolding around them whilst cheekily (and a little unsettlingly) alluding to the fact that mutants were implicated in the JFK assassination. But whilst these elements are great, what the film does lack is a sense of epic scope - and when you're playing with a huge cast list, time travel AND giant killer robots, you'd think that 'epic' would fly off the screen. But when you've seen Magneto lift an 18-wheeler, a submarine and the Golden Gate bridge, where do you go next? Having an entire football stadium dropped on the White House lawn SHOULD be epic, but the sense of 'been there, seen that' is overwhelming.
What I'm most concerned about is the fact that the Marvel Cinematic Universe now seems to resemble Forbidden Planet's comic book aisles; rows and rows of X-Men, Spider-Men and Other-Men graphic novels, all with the same spine artwork, hundreds of the f*ckers stretching endlessly into the geek ether. Plenty of fun to be had within every one of them I expect, but in my formative years I couldn't help but lean towards the likes of Alan Moore and his one-off masterpieces: Watchmen. V for Vendetta. From Hell. An unfair comparison you might say, but they all occupied the same shelf space. When you know Marvel once cranked out Hulk, Ang Lee's unique and excitingly divisive one-shot with a tone all of its own, it makes DOFP seem a trifling generic distraction. And with so many characters now vying for screen space, I can't help wonder if the X-Men mythos is a distraction better suited to the small screen, spread over a season or five. But hey, go see it, you won't be bored... maybe you'll love it. But I just don't know if I care enough to get that excited about the next installment of The X-Men are Doing This Now.
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