I liked X-Men: Days of Future Past. It’s not quite as sound as First Class, which is understandable because it takes a lot more work to bring these two casts together. It’s good fun though. It’s more like a Roger Moore James Bond movie, maybe even Moonraker but I say that as a Bond fan who appreciates the blatant outrageousness of Moonraker. If Moonraker sounds like an insult, then Days of Future Past is at least Octopussy.
It even begins with a pre-title action scene followed by what amounts to a briefing by M, if you will. Patrick Stewart explains the mission to send Wolverine back in time. No explanation is given for how he’s been resurrected from The Last Stand. That’s not time travel, because this is the prime timeline from which we begin. But it’s basically like Bryan Singer saying, “Hey, that wasn’t my call and I don’t acknowledge that Xavier died.” I respect that. Anyway, Xavier explains how Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage) developed the sentinels from Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence)’s DNA, so that’s the point in time to go stop him. While he explains, the old gang (Halle Berry, Ian McKellan, Shawn Ashmore, Daniel Cudmore, Page and Jackman) listen and chime in with questions. There are worse ways to deliver exposition.
When Wolverine goes back, waking up at some point in his forgotten past, so begins an adventure in which young Xavier (James McAvoy), Hank McCoy (Nicholas Hoult), Erik (Michael Fassbender) and Mystique travel the world trying to change the past, with a little help from some other mutant friends. The globetrotting adds to the James Bond feel. There are many scenes where you would expect to see a spectator having a drink, witnessing some mutant mayhem, and then pouring out the drink. I suppose all of the X-Men movies have scenes where mutant action explodes into the pedestrian world, but something about mutants bursting out of the frigging White House while tourists film them on their Zapruder style 8mm cameras puts a real emphasis on the gimmick of it all. It’s a little more lighthearted than, say, a teenage mutant coming out to his parents in X2, just as Moonraker was still James Bond, but a funnier James Bond.
The humor is charming; a little goofy, but again, charming. Quicksilver (Evan Peters) has the most fun. He’s a bit more like Speedy Gonzalez than The Flash, but the little details are endearing, like when people’s clothes flap as he invisibly dashes by. It’s a little less dignified when Xavier tries to fast talk some guards with some flimsy improv. Shout outs to significant historical events like JFK are making a spectacle out of the mutants in the past, more so than I think the Cuban Missile Crisis story did in First Class, yet it contradicts nothing. It fits both the nation’s ambiguous history and the lore of the comic books. Just like Roger Moore’s increasingly fanciful gadgets don’t violate the lore of James Bond, but they’re further away from Cold War espionage.
The X-Men movies have always dealt with a relevant political allegory, be it the Nazi style registration of mutants or a scientific “cure” for mutation. The sentinels may be an extreme version of our current drone debate, but as they originated in the comics long before, they seem more like a retro evil machine from an evil scientist. It’s sort of for the same purpose as Bond villains too. Drax in Moonraker and Stromberg in The Spy Who Loved Me were both destroying the population to make room for their master races. X-Men is just an inversion, where the weaker species designs the evil killer robots to prevent the master race they fear from taking over.
It’s not the subtle historical allegory that First Class was, where a holocaust survivor feels he’s witnessing the dawn of a new persecution (essentially Magneto’s point of view in all of the first three X-Men films). This is Bolivar Trask labeling the mutants as homo sapiens to the old homo neanderthals, ignoring of course that most emotional species have no interest in genocide. Again, this is what all the X-Men stories do, but this is emphasizing the extinction angle rather than the mere persecution angle.
We’re also seven movies into X-Men, which is exactly when Moore took over Bond and exactly the point where a significant portion of the audience didn’t see the previous films. Now they have to be summarized in a shorthand, particularly when Wolverine explains Xavier’s history to Xavier himself. He’s really explaining it to the audience who may not have seen the previous movies, and it shows.
In this context, it might not be overly apparent to the die-hard X-Men fans that Days of Future Past seems to be repeating some of the set pieces from previous X-Men movies. Flying the stadium is just like flying the Brooklyn Bridge in The Last Stand, and Magneto’s encounter with Wolverine goes the same way it always does, down to the same poses, but it’s a good callback. Just like every Bond movie basically ended with the same Volcano hideout attack from You Only Live Twice, whether it be transposed onto an underwater submarine base, a space station or a castle. This will be the first time we get to see those set pieces in 3D though, and the 3D really works. My favorite is when Jackman’s nose pokes out of the screen when he wakes up in the past.
Days of Future Past is broader in tone than even the previous Bryan Singer X-Men movies, but the tone is deliberate and consistent to create the movie they wanted to make. Roger Moore vocally decided he wanted his Bond to be funnier. His seven films are consistent, even the somewhat more straight-faced For Your Eyes Only. Likewise, Days of Future Past is still very much an X-Men movie, and I’m frankly happy to see them have some fun with it, even if I found the allegories of First Class a bit more poignant.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
