(Singer plans to direct at least one more X-Men movie, and after that another Wolverine film along with a spinoff X-Force franchise are both contemplated.) These franchises may exhaust themselves commercially, in the fullness of time, but they are designed to go on forever, morphing and reshaping, rewriting the past and birthing new offspring.
It feels like the “Götterdämmerung” of this particular Marvel story-stream, but of course we can never have such a thing, or at least not on purpose. But in between the whiz-bang action scenes and the high-flown moral debates – Singer’s films have excelled at capturing the adolescent moral gravity of actual comic books – “Days of Future Past” thrives on the sunset mood of a grandiose final chapter, a story of godlike beings facing the end.
In reality, this is a middle-chapter movie in an apparently endless saga if you’re not habituated to this franchise and its universe, the first 15 minutes or so will be utterly bewildering.
I basically really enjoyed this movie, even while lamenting that I was enjoying it under mendacious premises and that there was something fundamentally cynical about its elegiac, retrospective tone. This back-to-the-future problem is handled with a high degree of ingenuity in Bryan Singer’s $250 million action spectacle “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” a movie about the erasure and/or replacement of the past that combines the casts of the original and rebooted X-Men franchises, rather like whichever “Star Trek” movie it was where Capt.
"Game of Thrones" star Peter Dinklage also is pitch-perfect as Bolivar Trask, the man behind the sentinel program and, more or less, the bad guy.One of the problems with superhero cinema in what might be called its decadent or rococo phase is that all possible narrative modes and approaches have been tried, and all that the armies of highly skilled Hollywood people can do is to gild the lily at immense expense - to do it all over again “better,” or at least with more elaborate special effects. When this film is available for home viewing, it's a scene fans will watch over and over. "X-Men: Days of Future Past" also gives us what could be the most entertaining, creative and funny scene in all of the X-Men movies, featuring Evan Peters ("American Horror Story") as the lightning-fast Quicksilver conducting a jailbreak. Now, put McAvoy and Michael Fassbender (Young Magneto) in an airplane together, arguing about who screwed over whom the worst, and you have one of the best-acted scenes in the entire Marvel film canon.
The strength of the entire X-Men series is the actors, and James McAvoy’s performance here as a pseudo drug-addicted, self-pitying young Charles Xavier is worthy of its own indie film. Then again, time travel falls apart under close scrutiny in every time travel movie, so let’s forget that and focus on the chaotic goodness that is "X-Men: Days of Future Past." While writer Simon Kinberg went to great lengths to make sure he crossed his paradoxes and dotted his wormholes, the time travel element here falls apart under close scrutiny.
Never mind that he’s not actually physically going anywhere: only his consciousness is, although when he's injured in the past, it physically affects him in the future. The person they decide to send back is Wolverine: he's the only mutant who can handle the physical brutality of time travel, because his mutation allows him to instantly heal. What to do? Since Kitty is able to project a person’s consciousness back in time, Professor X and Magneto hatch a plan to send one of the mutants into the past to convince the younger Prof X and Magneto to work together in order to prevent Mystique from doing something that sets off the series of events that lead to this horrific future.