X-Men Days of Future Past Review. Spoiler Free!
In 1981, Chris Claremont and John Byrne created the Days of Future Past story arc. It ran in issues 141 and 142 of the Uncanny X-Men and became an instant classic and one of my favourite comics of all time. The story of how one X-Man must travel back in time to save mutants from an event that causes a war for their survival has been re-imagined several times (remember the great version in the 90’s cartoon where Bishop travels back in time?), and most recently in Brian Singers X-Men: Days of Future Past. While this fifth installment into the X-Men film franchise is not at all true to its comic source, it is a successfully entertaining super hero movie that manages to smooth over the missteps of the movies that came before it; it even managed to scrub X3’s version of the Phoenix Saga from my mind.
From the beginning of the movie there’s a good balance of action, humour and character development. From the first big action sequence, you can’t help but be drawn in, but I think the real strength of this movie is in the depth of the characters. Singer has introduced new mutants from the comics into the cinematic universe, including Blink, Sunspot, Warpath and Bishop. Along with characters like Ice Man, Colossus and Kitty Pryde who fans will recognize from the previous movies, they are fighting to stave off the extinction of mutant kind. While all of these mutants fighting together as a team create really dynamic and exciting action sequences, the real strength of this movie is in Wolverine and his journey into the past. When he travels back in time to stop the event that will create this terrible future, he encounters a young Professor Xavier and a young Magneto, both of whom are very different men from those he knows in his present.
Wolverine’s struggle to help Charles Xavier overcome his personal demons and save the future brings out the best not only in the characters, but also the actors. Hugh Jackman has Wolverine down and James McAvoy is very convincing as the young Professor who has lost all he loved and as a result lost his way. Other fantastic performances come from Michael Fassbender as the young version of Magneto and Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique; both characters are villains with a quiet malice that Fassbender and Lawrence easily master. They are also incredibly charming characters, as both Fassbender and Lawrence managed to charm me despite the actions of their characters.
Days of Future Past had so many other highlights, great humour and little Easter eggs for fans of the comics and the movies; however it was the characters and the performances that brought them to life that were the real stars. Each character is tortured, and they all have their own personal battles above and beyond the external threats they face, and that is where X-Men: Days of Future Past finds its heart.
