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X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST. Directed by Bryan Singer, with Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Ian McKellen, Ellen Page and Peter Dinklage.
REVIEW: David Rooney
MATTHEW Vaughn and a superb cast reinvigorated the franchise with a cool retro style and globetrotting intrigue in 2011’s X-Men: First Class.
The series’ original director, Bryan Singer, continues that momentum in the vigorously entertaining X-Men: Days of Future Past. While it’s more dramatically diffuse than the reboot and lacks a definitive villain, the new film is shot through with a stirring reverence for the Marvel Comics characters and their universe. And it ups the stakes by threatening nothing less than the genocide of the mutant population, among them faces old and new.
Since its first screen appearance 14 years ago, this exciting series has been driven by the theme of ostracised outsiders empowered to fight against their social stigma in ways both good and evil. That vein remains front and centre here, with the mutants’ humanity amplified by their extreme physical vulnerability.
Hardcore followers will have a geek field day dissecting the challenging pretzel logic of writer-producer Simon Kinberg’s screenplay, from a story by Jane Goldman, Kinberg and Vaughn, who had originally planned to direct.
The central premise comes from the 1981 Uncanny X-Men comic Days of Future Past, in which Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) uses her consciousness transference powers to go back from a dystopian future and rewrite history.
In dumbed-down pop-cultural terms, that functions like the dream of Bobby Ewing’s death in Dallas. While it’s a far less outrageous plot gambit, it calls into question many events from the original three movies – specifically 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand– providing a blanket licence to erase continuity lapses among the films and usher in fresh developments moving forward. The screenplay ponders whether time is immutable while raising the possibility of infinite outcomes.
Echoes of the Holocaust have rippled throughout the series, and Singer opens with present-day scenes of a desolate, burnt-out New York, where mutants and mutant-sympathising humans have been rounded up in internment camps.
Jumping to a similarly devastated Moscow, we watch Kitty, Iceman (Shawn Ashmore) and a small band of mutants face an attack from the deadly Sentinels. Dropped in from airborne carrier ships, these robots are designed to track and destroy the mutant gene. They resemble towering, muscular versions of the aliens from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, constructed out of magnetic plates that allow them to change shape and adapt to whatever force is unleashed against them.
The mutants escape and regroup in the rubble of an ancient Chinese monastery with Professor X (Patrick Stewart), Magneto (Ian McKellen), Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) and Storm (Halle Berry). The movie is missing an explanation of how traditional adversaries Professor X and Magneto reached a collaborative truce.
But within the elastic boundaries of comic-book mythology that seems no big deal.
Threatened with extinction, the mutant holdouts hatch a plan to return to the post-Vietnam Paris Peace Accord of 1973, when Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) killed Dr Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), a US military scientist developing the Sentinels programme. Mystique was captured and experimented on, with the transformative powers of her DNA tapped to perfect the Sentinels.
Wolverine’s ability to heal makes him the only one able to withstand the 40-year time jump. Kinberg’s script milks welcome humour out of sending the least diplomatic of the X-Men back to convince the younger Professor X (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) to join forces and stop the assassination that triggered anti-mutant hysteria.
Having Wolverine awaken on a waterbed staring at a lava lamp and listening to Roberta Flack lightens the mood at just the right moment.
Cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel and production designer John Myhre provide marked contrasts between the two periods – brooding darkness in the present; a softer, more naturalistic look in the past – that helps as the action progresses and cross-cutting increases. In the same way the 1960s Cold War setting gave a distinctive vibe to Vaughn’s franchise entry, this one offers maximum enjoyment in the extended central action that unfolds roughly a decade later.
Perhaps the film’s standout sequence features the much-discussed new addition of Peter Maximoff, aka Quicksilver ( American Horror Story regular Evan Peters). The rights dispute that kept the character out of previous films has been resolved, allowing him to appear in both the X-Men and Avengers franchises.
His super-speed skills are conveyed by shooting at 3 000 frames per second, notably when Peter runs around the walls during a fabulously staged Pentagon break-in. With his silver shag, Pink Floyd T-shirt and mischievous sense of humour, Peter is a terrific character who breathes playfulness into the movie.
Logan/Wolverine has possibly never been more compelling. In his seventh turn in the role, Jackman brings powerful physicality, laconic humour and depths of sorrow beneath his gruffness that make him an unusually nuanced figure for a sci-fi action movie.
Visual effects and CGI work, unsurprisingly, are top-notch throughout, and the Sentinels’ attacks are rendered with a chilling visceral charge.
It’s hard to imagine fanboys having too much to grumble about here, as Singer has pulled together an ambitious, suspenseful screen chapter that secures a future for the franchise while facilitating continued reinvention. – Reuters/ Hollywood Reporter