X-Men: Days of Future Past

Eh.

They wasted a lot of talent, and a lot of potentially cool ideas on this movie. I mean, you have a roster of DOZENS of characters - each with a unique and cool power - and what do you do with it? You have ice guy and fire guy fire bland and uninteresting blasts at bland and uninteresting robots for five seconds. And in the past, you have one bullet time sequence that was fresh and new in 1999, and a bunch of martial arts brawls I could have seen anywhere.

Jesus Tap Dancing Christ, the X-Men roster is...how strong? 100+ characters? And you pick Wolverine? The most bland, uninteresting power set since Forearm!?

Jackman does a lot to make Wolverine work - as do all the actors, really. But the script just...doesn't go far enough, and the action directing is subpar.

Basically, it COULD have been great.

Instead, it's just another, "Well...it was no Marvel movie."

Been listening to Movie Bob, have ya, Zoombie? He agrees with a lot of your observations (yeah...since when was Kitty Pryde's mutant power the ability to send people back through time? Damn Hugh Jackman for being a bigger star than Ellen Page!).

Oh, comic book movies why can't you be more like the comic books that are keeping Hollywood's head above water? One would think with all the technological innovations in the 14 years between Bryan Singer's first stab at Charles Xavier's crew and now, he would find ways to make the films more faithful to the source material, not less.



Leaving Wolverine's spandex aside, bub.

I have been watching Moviebob, but he just expresses views that I usually agree with.

I've always found Wolverine boring. It only really crystallized when I saw the movie with him in Japan and realized that Wolverine fighting Ninjas was one of the most boring action scenes I'd ever seen...

EDIT: Also, slight tangent. I'm a huge fan of the roleplaying game Aberrant, which is basically X-Men with a twist (what if the X-Men and mutants were crazy popular instead of hated by everyone?) and I've run multiple games of it as the game master. That means I've had to basically describe multiple action scenes that include dozens of mutants throwing their mutant powers at eachother.

Why is it that when I do that, I can showcase and show off the awesome, cool, badass powers of 20+ characters and a movie that cost many many many many times more than I'll ever make in my entire life...can't?

My problem with all of this is Magneto.

If Jackman and Stewart were great casting choices, McKellen was inspired. I don't have a problem with Fassbender, but McKellen is Magneto, every bit as much as Max von Sydow is Ming the Merciless.

I'm not interested in seeing anyone else in the role, not in the least. Plus, it's Magneto's age and cynicism that makes him both formidable and interesting. Imo, he's the best comic book villain of all time, but as his older self.

I didn't like First Class much at all, mostly for this reason, and I have no interest in seeing this film. YMMV, of course.

One of the most enjoyable things in the film for me was watching Blink's ability. It was fascinating on screen and I'm happy to know that she signed a 5 movie deal. There's a whole lot more that I though about the movie, like it lacked tension in places. But at the end of the day I really enjoyed this movie.

Cyia said:

One cheesy thing I did miss with this one was the Stan Lee cameo. He didn't have one.

They should have made him one of Mystique's face shifts in the crowd.

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I'm shocked he wasn't the janitor at the stadium...

Cyia said:

The biggest shift from the books is, of course, that it's supposed to be Kitty Pryde going back in time, but she's replaced here by Wolverine for obvious marketing-type reasons.

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I've seen this claim in one or two articles and there's really not much truth to it. Simon Kinberg explained why in a recent article.

“It didn’t come from a place of wanting to make Wolverine front and center, because we could have done that without sending him back in time,” said Kinberg, who added that the film could have simply used the 1973 era Wolverine within the plot. Instead, Kinberg wanted to remain true to the “Days of Future Past” narrative, in which it’s someone’s future consciousness that is sent back in time into their past body. One problem: The Kitty Pryde of the movies wasn’t even born in 1973. “Once we made the decision that we’re gonna send someone’s consciousness back in time, given that we cast Ellen Page — and we loved Ellen Page as Kitty — we couldn’t send her back to the days of Michael Fassbender and McAvoy and Jen Lawrence; she’d be, like, negative 20 years old,” he said. “We couldn’t actually have her consciousness wake up in her body, because it would be a sperm cell.”

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http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/x-men-days-of-future-past-questions-simon-kinberg-answers

This was definitely a reset / reboot rather than a sequel. Some of the damage done by X3 gets happily wiped away.

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The fact that I can now feel that the crapfest that was X3 didn't ever happen is one of my favorite parts.

Spoilers: En sabah nur! En sabah nur! En sabah nur! Having to explain the after-credits scene filled me with joy. Here's hoping the sequel can deliver.

I'm wondering how the X-2 ending fits into everything now, since Jean becomes Phoenix at the end off that movie. We can reasonably assume that since X-3 is now gone, that she never turned into the Dark Phoenix. And without the Hellfire Club? Oh, they were killed in/after First Class... well...

Enjoyable film. I wish there'd been less of an info dump when it comes to the sentinels and the situation in the future. That's minor criticism though. Good film. Hope the next one can deliver.

Do I need to have seen First Class to understand this movie? I've seen all the rest (though I try to block out X3 as much as I can, because few movies find me putting on my rantypants the way that one did).

I really liked this one--I really liked First Class, too. This movie, I thought, took itself just seriously enough and wove in some real recent history in an interesting way (I thought First Class did the same thing to even better effect). It wasn't fabulous--it was all about Raven's moral dilemma, and yet Raven didn't seem to be much of a character here, just a doll being pulled back and forth between Charles and Erik. Even so, the performances really grounded it, and it worked.

shelleyo said:

Do I need to have seen First Class to understand this movie? I've seen all the rest (though I try to block out X3 as much as I can, because few movies find me putting on my rantypants the way that one did).

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No, I don't think you need to have seen First Class, though I recommend the movie. I'm sure you already know the truly pertinent point: Erik and Charles (the younger as well as the older versions) are frenemies with a history. But you might want to know that it was Erik who "shot" Charles and thereby paralyzed him (I guess that's a First Class spoiler, so I'll white it out).

1st Class is worth seeing, though, imho. I enjoyed the heck out of that.

Zoombie said:

Eh.

They wasted a lot of talent, and a lot of potentially cool ideas on this movie. I mean, you have a roster of DOZENS of characters - each with a unique and cool power - and what do you do with it? You have ice guy and fire guy fire bland and uninteresting blasts at bland and uninteresting robots for five seconds. And in the past, you have one bullet time sequence that was fresh and new in 1999, and a bunch of martial arts brawls I could have seen anywhere.

Jesus Tap Dancing Christ, the X-Men roster is...how strong? 100+ characters? And you pick Wolverine? The most bland, uninteresting power set since Forearm!?

Jackman does a lot to make Wolverine work - as do all the actors, really. But the script just...doesn't go far enough, and the action directing is subpar.

Basically, it COULD have been great.

Instead, it's just another, "Well...it was no Marvel movie."

Click to expand...

I will only agree with one point of this, the roster is strong and tons of mutants to pick from but what's the point of bringing in 4 new characters and kill them off (the NBC Heroes season 3 Complex). Blink was there for effect and iceman, kitty, and colossus where there for nostalgia and continuity.
If you want to complain about a plot or character do you have a better one in mind or not?
I loved the story, I've got no problem with the basic plot. You're not supposed to be thrilled about every second of the movie the sentinels are interesting but the length of the fight could dull them. I have watched the original cartoons and they changed the story but I would have been mad if they did they exact same story. As a fan it was a fantastic time.

Overall, I liked it. Way better than First Class. Blink was awesome and Quicksilver was great. I can't wait for the DVD to hopefully see the cut Rogue footage.

Mikilao said:

If you want to complain about a plot or character do you have a better one in mind or not?

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Hmm...

well, in the context of this film, they actually did a pretty good job bringing the Days of Future Past plot off, though I'm pretty sure that they could have had more focus on Mystique/Raven's character, rather than just tossing her back and forth between Charles and Erick.

Also, personally, I'd have liked it if they kept the original ending of the comic: Keep the future ambiguous. In the comic, we're left not knowing if the dark future had been averted or not, only that if we want to make sure it WAS averted, we'd all have to try and be better people.

Now, if you want me to come up with a really cool X-Men plot for an unrelated movie...

Well, give me time to think...I mean, it took me 10 years to come up with my REALLY ridiculously awesome Superman plot that no one is ever going to make.

I loved the action in the film, and didn't have much of a problem untangling the time travel plot at all.

In case anyone is interested, I covered the press conference in NY and my feature with quotes from the cast members is here.

I loved it.

Took a long lunch to see it Friday, then took my 11-year-old son to see it Friday night. Then took the 19-year-old Saturday afternoon.

LOVED IT!

The action was great. I totally bought James McAvoy as a young Patrick Stewart. I mean, I loved him in 1st Class, but seeing him right along side the original, I thought he might fall short, but he didn't. The future fight scenes were incredible. The past fight scenes weren't half-bad either.

LOVED. IT.