X-Men: Days of Future Past [Celluloid Hero]

X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

First, I will admit that I am a sucker for the X-Men. I read some comics when I was younger, really liked the old cartoon version, and I've enjoyed the past six movies (some more than others, but all still enjoyable). Second, I will admit that I am a sucker for time-travel movies. Putting the X-Men into a time travel movie gave me pretty high hopes.

I'm not a hardcore comic book fan, so I can't speak to some of the more intricate complaints that people have had about the previous movies. What I can complain about, though, are the self-inflicted contradictions that have come up within this universe. There have been situations with background characters, changing actors, and altering the movie character's personality versus the established comic book personality. The biggest issue came when the reboot "X-Men First Class" came out. The timeline for various characters got messed up, the ages for certain actors didn't seem to make sense when compared to the original trilogy. "Days of Future Past" was an attempt to both continue the rebooted series while reconciling with the original.

DofP takes place about a decade into the future, in a society where being a mutant results in imprisonment or death. The X-Men continue to survive as a small group, using a form of time travel to escape the Sentinels that are programmed to destroy them. They are mostly made up of younger X-Men, but are found by a veteran squad of Wolverine, Storm, Professor X and Magneto.

The movie is visually fantastic. The effects have improved with each passing movie, and for the most part so has the acting. In the beginning no one was sure if it would be a success, but now we're seeing great actors like Michael Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence sign on. The vibrant and colorful style of the 70s was a great contrast to the dark and dystopian future.

"Days of Future Past" has essentially negated almost all the previous movies. Except for the portions of "Origins: Wolverine", "The Wolverine" and "First Class", pretty much everything from the 1970s to the present has been wiped out. It was an interesting take on how to resolve the continuity errors that appeared between the movies, and also a way to allow the subsequent movies to have a clean slate. It could also prove negative in that future movies now have a canonical option to just start fresh by time traveling.