X-Men: Days of Future Past

IMDB
First time viewed: Yes
Current Release: Yes
Watched With: Andrew

Bryan Singer returns to the director seat for the franchise he started off over a decade ago. They use this opportunity to bridge the casts of two different timelines and at the same time reboot the whole endeavour and erase everything bad (and good) about the other films sans the high calibre cast.

The movie starts off wit a bang and rockets through to the finale. There's a lot to get through and a billion characters to showcase. Most amount to nothing more than a cameo (they managed to just squeeze Rogue in after all) but Mystique, Wolverine and Charles Xavier carry us through the film. 

Out of the new character introduced only Quicksilver gets more than one line. Evan Peters does well with the role and his sequence is probably the most fun in the film. The first time a single character will be played across competing franchises, it will be interesting to compare Aaron Taylor-Johnson's take in the next Avenger film after his brief post credit introduction in the last Captain America film. 

And then we have Peter Dinklage playing the main villain, but really, young Magneto is just the biggest dick. Either way the both don't get that much servicing from the script. And I think that's the biggest problem I had with the film. So many characters and so much plot, there's no time to really invest in any relationship, or any one character for that matter. At least not as much as I did in First Class. But that's never been this series' strong suit. 

While its nice that they reset the continuity and all, it's a little annoying that it makes the other films superfluous. And it's also a little annoying how they just ignore what happened to Xavier at the end of the 3rd film.

But it's a perfectly entertaining film, there's some cool fx, The Sentinels in the future are really neat. Actually the retro ones and neat too. And the fights with them are really great, it feels like the most action we've seen from a mutant team all using their powers together and there all great sequences. And seeing Blink in action is the closest we might get to a live action Portal film. 

And perhaps it's just my imagination but the 3D image seems much crisper than recent films. Perhaps that's just because they went to the effort of shooting the whole film in 3D instead of post-converting or maybe it's just the cameras they used, but it sure looks nice. 

So I don't think I liked it as much as First Class, I just seemed to be more invested in the character and story in that film, but i certainly had a great time with this one.