(Re)writing Mutant History

Movies about time travel can be such a mind-f---.

Particularly sequels, especially when you – Spoiler Alert! – think about it (too much).

Time travel tends to brush off things. It negates things. Yeah, OK...it does give you a second or third chance at something, but at the cost of having to pretend something didn’t quite happened the way you remember them in the previous movies. They require a lot of suspension of disbelief.

X-Men: Days of Future Past is no different.

Embattled director Bryan Singer’s much-anticipated prequel-sequel-movie-with-the-mequel, which marks his return to the Xverse as a helmer, opens in a bleak 2023, a decade after Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) was recruited by a back-from-the-dead Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen). You will recall that, at the very end of The Wolverine, the latter warned that dark forces...human forces were building a weapon that could destroy all mutants. And they needed his help, for they knew that the drone-like mutant-hunting Sentinels that Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage, from HBO’s Game of Thrones) had spent four decades developing were bad news.

And, boy, were the frenemies right. We see in this dysotopian future that the Sentinels, which were equipped to target the mutant X gene, have not only all but obliterated the mutant populace but they’ve also oppressed regular folk to the bring of extinction.

The last few mutants around (the aforementioned X-Men plus Halle Berry’s Storm, Shawn Ashmore’s Iceman, and Daniel Cudmore’s Collossus, and newcomers including Fan Bingbing’s Blink and Omar Sy’s Bishop) have been eluding death, sometimes by mere hours, thanks to warnings they’ve been sending themselves from the future thanks to Kitty Pryde’s (Ellen Page) power.

The outcome never changes, though, so they decide on a more drastic approach. Thus, they send themselves a warning 50 years into the past to 1973 by projecting Wolverine’s consciousness back into his younger self. He can heal. He can take the dangerous trip.

So off the boy with the claws goes to find the Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr that James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender played in 2011’s X-Men: First Class, so together with these younger, troubled versions of his old friends – Charles is a bit of junky and his power’s muffled by these serum that Nicholas Hoult’s Hank McCoy is administering so he can walk; Erik’s in prison, accused of assassinating JFK – he can find Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), and keep her from doing som’in’ that’ll make a better tomorrow impossible.

Yeah, this one’s that epic of a franchise reboot. So sit back, enjoy the action of the past above all; it has ’70s style and sociopolitical and emotional resonance. Watching Wolverine reassemble the splintered gang in the past is full of buddy-movie moments, which are made all that much enjoyable to watch by a cast clear that clear is fond of one another. Do not (over)analyze it (too much) or you’ll have no fun. Not that Singer will let ya: an undeniable highlight of the blockbuster is how inspiredly he handled Quicksilver’s (Evan Peters) contribution to the story, and his possible future significance as a franchise player.

After all the Apocalypse is coming, and in the end you will be happy the X-Men took this trip. They brought back some nice surprises, and the future’s never looked better.

My Rating ***

Photo: X-MenMovies.com.