Review: X-Men: Days of Future Past

"X-Men: Days of Future Past" is a good film. However, I have to say that I prefer "First Class" for a number of reasons. This is a spoiler free review.

The movie ran into the same issue as other movies with a broad scope, namely juggling a lot of plot threads and sacrificing character building for screen time. "First Class" was great because you felt the bond between Eric and Charles, which made the inevitable betrayal sting (but at the same time it was believable). They also made you care about each of the kids in that class and the background cast, so you felt bad when some of them died or were injured.

There are shining moments, certainly. Trask has some solid scenes and Peter Dinklage was a great choice, especially for the contrast of having someone afflicted by dwarfism comment on genetic mutation and its impact on society. Quicksilver has a great scene where we see things from his perspective in high speed. The future scenes with Stewart and McKellen remind you why we care about Magneto and Xavier in the first place.

The problems, though, is the lack of establishing motivation. Mystique's motives are the only ones that are fleshed out to a significant degree: she wants revenge for her fallen colleagues. We see Xavier fallen on hard times, the Vietnam draft having taken many of his students (the writers apparently forgot about the student exception to the draft), but while we see the consequences we don't see the setup. There's no feeling of loss to match Xavier's mood, so he comes off as destitute without just cause. We're told, rather than shown, that he's suffered "too much loss."

Magneto's reasons for his own inevitable "doing things my way" is also poorly stated. They do a good job of setting up a theme of "old friends" and "reconciliation" in the future scenes, but fail to capitalize on this in the past. You know he's going to take matters into his own hands, since that's his MO, but, given the context of the first half, there's very little reason for him to do so. Sadly, his big master plan doesn't hold up under scrutiny, especially since he does earnestly believe that the sentinels will cause the future extinction of mutants.

So, in the end, it's a movie that had great ambitions, but left out a few pieces here and there (as well as making at least one big error in internal consistency). The result is it hits decently well, but isn't the knock-out punch it could have been. Both "First Class" and "X-Men 2" are better films; I would put this about even with the first "X-Men." It is, at least, a big improvement over the other three films, making it a mid-ranked offering.

All that said, I am looking forward to "Age of Apocalypse!"