Revisiting X-Men: Days of Future Past

Like many others, I saw the latest X-Men movie in theaters, and enjoyed it quite a bit. I left the theater feeling like I had finally seen the bonafide, all out, sentinels-infused X-Men movie that had, at best, only been hinted at before in good, but muted outings like X2: X-Men United. On top of making more money than its predecessors, Days of Future Past beat out the previous best franchise Rotten Tomatoes score by five percentage points.

So when it showed up on iTunes recently, five or so months after its theatrical release, I thought I'd give it a rent and have some more fun with my favorite X-Men movie. The problem is, upon second viewing, I realized that it actually sort of sucks.

A big reason is that there's just no chance for it to be a movie and let us meaningfully hang out with these allegedly beloved characters. It is a finely tuned plot delivering machine. The intense focus on plot suggests how insecure the franchise is about its characters, and how unsure Bryan Singer, returning to the franchise after a ten year hiatus, is about how to make these characters relate to each other. The characters in Days of Future Past are functions of plot only, and briskly entering scenes to charge the story into its next phase. I can't think of a single scene that isn't maniacally intent on thrusting the story forward. I can watch any movie to get a nice dose of tight story--I watch X-Men movies to, you know, hang out with the X-Men. 

The only characters who make more than cameos are the ones on the Blu-Ray cover. Actually, Future Professor X and Future Magneto are on the cover, and they are barely more than cameos. We get little to no sense of the wider mutant community. The whole point of making an X-Men movie is to explore as many mutants with obscure abilities as possible, to build a rich world where the reality of mutancy delights, fascinates, and sometimes terrifies us. 

Look, Singer's enthusiasm for his version of the X-Men universe is admirable. He has excelled, as many have noted, at treating the idea of mutancy as an allegory for the gay experience. That is a big, important part of what makes the X-Men interesting. But it is only part of it. Teamwork is the other. The real focus of an X-Men movie should be showing them coming together as a team to use their strange powers to help themselves grow and to fight evil.

The emphasis on star power in this franchise makes that difficult. (The other characters literally exist inside of Hugh Jackman and Jennifer Lawrence's bodies in the main theatrical poster). It's also tough to showcase teamwork when you've used the leader of the X-Men, Cyclops, so poorly, or cut him out entirely, as the two New Universe movies have done. It is nuts that Beast is the only classic X-Men character in Professor X's orbit when Wolverine goes back in time --that absolutely would have been Cyclops. 

And the movie would have been better for it. Constantly butting heads due to their opposing styles, Cyclops and Wolverine have a naturally interesting dynamic between them, which Wolverine and Beast kind of don't. There's little reason for Beast to have been one of the, like, four mutants with any kind of real screen time, other than as cynical fan service. (And maybe also that Nicholas Hoult has become a fairly popular actor, whose fame was boosted no doubt by his long relationship with Jennifer Lawrence). This movie isn't about allowing characters to interact in ways that don't shove the story forward. When Wolvie tells Young Beast that in the future they would be good friends, you wonder what those relationship building experiences were and when we'd ever get to see them.

But what about the sentinels! Yes, it's true, we finally got sentinels. The whole plot is about them, and we finally get to see them in action threatening mutants and challenging them to push the limits of their powers. But like Beast, this is a case of throwing in fan favorite characters without really understanding what's cool about them.

We don't get to see the actual sentinels that X-Men fans think of when they think of sentinels. We get to see plenty of weird, cybernetic future sentinels and a couple 1973 prototypes in limited, brief scenes. We don't get to see the big purple sentinels that chase Wolverine around, forcing him to he has to claw his way up to their heads and stab out their cranial circuitry like we all want. 

The sentinels were cool because they were an everyday looming threat to the X-Men. We got used to them battling our heroes, and dug them as cool foes between boss fights against Mr. Sinister or Apocalypse. The movies didn't give them a chance to become cool. In their rush to appease fans, they just immediately made less cool versions of them into boss battles.

But what about that awesome slo-mo Quicksilver scene! Yes--Quicksilver breaking Magneto out of prison was a truly memorable set piece. The audience I saw it with broke into three separate applause breaks during the prison break. This is a capital M Moment that feels like it was intentionally stuck there to offset the lack of moments in the rest of the film. A film without moments needs to have a Moment. A film that can't generate its own moments between characters, since it has little room for characters in the headlong story rush, needs to construct a scene that compensates for that lack. If audiences remembered anything about the movie, it was probably that scene.

The cynicism of the production behind Days of Future Past isn't surprising, and it certainly led to a successful project. "Let's just throw sentinels and Jennifer Lawrence and Hugh Jackman at it and stick to a tight script, book-ended by action scenes from the original cast members." Done and Done!

Lawrence is great as Mystique, as she is in everything. But having the film be so focused on her and Hugh Jackman, albeit understandably so considering how hugely famous and popular they both are, makes this not an X-Men movie. They should both star in a big budget action movie together and it will make a bunch of money. Let Hugh Jackman make the talk show rounds and discuss how fit he is to promote that movie. But they've tried to make that and call it an X-Men movie.

Fox lucked into getting a huge star out of the material in Jackman, and got new life a decade later by having Jennifer Lawrence involved in the franchise just before she got super duper big. (Not to mention getting in on the ground floor of Michael Fassbender). These are all just star vehicles, not real X-Men movies. The very idea of Cyclops baffles that studio--they can't get the most important X-Men team member right. That would be like The Avengers movie leaving out Iron Man. 

It was too perfect that the biggest, most emotionally charged scene in the film, the impending violent death of the remaining X-Men at the hands of the unbeatable future sentinels, evaporates entirely when Young Mystique decides not to assassinate Bolivar Trask, the creator of the sentinels. That unbearably tense moment vanishes into thin air, like it never happened. That's basically how I feel about this cynical movie.