Film: X-Men: Days
Of Future Past
Cast: Hugh Jackman, James Mcavoy, Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender
Director: Bryan Singer
If they’d called it X-Men: Reunion instead of ‘Days of Future Past’, it might have meant a lot less work
for the guys who did the opening credits. Reunited with the cast who launched the X-Men franchise 14 years ago, Bryan Singer makes up for lost time by bringing the characters and storylines of his original franchise together with their younger versions from the X-Men: First Class spinoff. And the resultant effect of this ‘reunion’ is a slick, mutant- loaded flick that almost wipes out the bad taste caused by the last two Wolverine films.
The film serves as a sequel to X2, which is where Singer left off, while tying it to a period of 10 years after the young Charles Xavier (a delightfully disheveled and disdainful Charles McAvoy), was paralysed. We’re first introduced to a post-apocalyptic period where metal droids called sentinels, who can mimic mutant powers and destroy them, are exterminating the mutant race.
As always, their only hope lies with a small group of survivors - Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), Storm (Halle Berry), Professor X, Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) and Magneto - who turn to time travel to stop the sentinels from ever being made.
And then the Jackman show begins. Transported back to 1973 to stop Mystique murdering the creator of the sentinels - the lynchpin that actually gets the project approved - Jackman and McAvoy find themselves in a curiously opposite state from the one we’re accustomed to. “I was quite a different person then,” as the older, balder Professor, warns Wolverine before he enters the wa rp.
H a v i n g grown used to Professor X as a straight-laced, moralistic, all-seeing mentor, it’s a rare delight to watch Wolverine give the whiskey-swilling young Xavier the pep talk that gets him back on track. And it all boils down to how Xavier and Wolverine
manage to convince Congress that mutants aren’t half-bad - while stopping young Magneto from dropping a football stadium on the White House. For fans of the franchise, the strong story and the time-travel bit (including several references to mutants’ effect on history), will work well. Singer’s signature claw-and-steel crunching action sequences are lots of fun to behold, but they still leave plenty of space for the characters to show about a hundred shades of gray. Proof lies in the fact that even Magneto catches a break - evil as nuts in the disco era, he takes one for the team in the future, to ensure h i s t o r y i s changed.
Verdict: One of the best X-Men movies to come by in the last fi ve years, simply because it doesn’t just depend on CGI and weird mutants. It has a lot of heart. And younger mutants