I probably don’t need to tell you that the last few X-Men movies are shit. In my personal opinion, things pretty much went downhill from the point when stupid Twentieth Century Fox deigned to boot Bryan Singer from X3, refusing to work with his tight schedule since he directed the reboot for Superman. God, X-Men: The Last Stand was crap. I don’t remember much of it (my psyche probably repressed the memory due to sheer awfulness) but I do remember it sucking pretty much in an epic manner.

Fortunately, they managed to rope Bryan Singer back to direct another X-Men film. I pretty much flipped when I learned that news and then just got progressively flipper when the teaser poster indicated that the new story line will be picking things up from the happenings of X-Men: First Class, which meant that both Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy will both be back to serve as eye candy. Yipee.

Anywho, here’s my round up of Bryan Singer (the genius behind Usual Suspects)’s X-Men: Days of Future Past.

Please note that there may be spoilers. Read at your own risk.

THE STORY:

The remaining X-Men – Professor X (Patrick Stewart – Star Trek), Storm (Halle Berry – Swordfish) and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman – Les Miserables)- have joined forces with Magneto (Ian McKellen – The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug) in search of a small band of mutants – Shadow Cat (Ellen Page – Inception), Ice Man (Shawn Ashmore – The Following), Blink (Bingbing Fan), Colossus (Daniel Cudmore – Twilight Saga), among others – who may have a last-ditch solution to the greatest problem that the mutants ever faced: the sentinels.

The solution involves transporting Logan’s mind back to the past, to nip the problem in the bud so to speak, and prevent the chain of events that caused the sentinels to be invented in the first place from happening. Unfortunately, the younger Charles (James McAvoy – Becoming Jane), Eric (Michael Fassbender – 12 Years A Slave), Hank (Nicholas Hoult – Warm Bodies) and Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence – American Hustle) were all very different people, caught up in drama and still reeling from the consequences of what happened in Cuba. It is up to Logan to bring them all together and fight a threat that can exterminate all mutants in the future.

THE GOOD:

1. The lack of diva-ing. Considering the staggering number of Oscar nominations and wins that the cast of this film has, it was a total surprise to see that there were no particular character stand outs. None that didn’t make sense or handled improperly anyway. Obviously some leeway was given to the ‘it’ people – Jennifer Lawrence and Peter Dinklage – but they didn’t dominate the story needlessly. Thank God for a director who can control his actors.
2. Stellar performances from everybody in the cast. Seriously. Everybody was so freakin’ good in this movie, it’s ridiculous.
3. That even though the plot basically was hinged on Mystique, JLaw was only onscreen for a fraction of the movie’s run time. When I saw the poster for the first time and saw that Jennifer Lawrence was almost as big as Hugh Jackman – the franchise’s most recognizable star – I was scared that there would be a repeat of what happened in X-Men: The Last Stand when Halle Berry got her Oscar and demanded a bigger role. Again, thank God for directors who can control their actors.
4. Evan Peters as “Peter” Maximoff. In a sea of extremely talented actors, it would be incredibly easy to get lost in the crowd but this dude not only held up his own pretty well, he actually gave a memorable performance.
5. The controlled fan-service. The biggest problem that the past movies had was that they packed the movies with as many mutants as they could without bothering to develop any of the characters. Obviously it was just for the sake of the fans, so that they can see their favorite character and what not, but it ended up being a waste because none of them were utilized properly. Here, with the exception of Blink and Warpath who both, by the way, got awesome fight sequences, there were no new mutants introduced. The writers and director made sense of the mess of characters from the previous movies that didn’t make any sense. It was awesome.
6. That awesome cameos. I literally got goosebumps when I saw Anna Paquin again.

THE BAD:

1. The new uniforms. I’m not feeling the orange netting and personally think that they should’ve stuck to pure black.
2. The weird accents. In X-Men: First Class director -Matthew Vaughn specifically instructed Michael Fassbender and James Mcavoy to not copy Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart’s accents because, he felt, that the younger actors would give a better performance in their natural ones. Here, however, since both sets of Eric and Charles are shown side by side, it was necessary for them to at least sound the same. It was more than a little jarring, actually.

THE UGLY:

1. Kitty’s powers. Where the fuck did that come from? I’m nit picking, of course, since in the grander scheme of things this is a negligible plot hole but it makes me think that her role in the movie was replaceable. Did they write that in there specifically for Ellen Page’s sake?
2. It was a bit predictable, which is totally okay since the treatment is more than meticulous, but you know. Things sort of lost steam during the last fifteen minutes because the ending was pretty much spelled out there.

All in all, X-Men: Days of Future Past is a film that delivered, despite the world’s humongous expectations. Bryan Singer just has flair for capturing the difficulty and struggles that the mutants face, painting a picture that is almost as horrible as the holocaust (if you’ve seen his Apt Pupil, I think you’d see just how deep his understanding of the subject is). Once again he has managed to transcend above each character’s petty struggles, giving us a story solid enough that it managed to siphon the best performances out of his actors. It’s been truly too long since an X-Men movie felt more than just a comic book adaptation. Never mind the fact that he basically stole the plot to JJ Abrams’ Star Trek reboot, because who cares, really, when the end result officially eradicates all previous movies and opening the door wide open for fantastic new sequels? squeee James Marsden is back!

THE VERDICT: 9.3/10. Must watch and truly worth the wait.

*All photos are lifted from the film’s IMDB page.