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Friday, May 23, 2014

X-men: Days of future past






In order to review this movie with any kind justice, I will have to spoil some details. Trying not to reveal to much of the plot of course, but if you're very particular about details I would recomend you watch the movie before reading this.

SPOILERS AHEAD. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.


In the future, robots, called sentinels, have taken over. They began by targeting all humans with the mutant gene, then they started killing people who carried the gene without having any powers. All hope seemed lost. Only a few X-men are still alive. Among them are Professor Xavier (miraculously alive after being obliterated in The last stand) who have one last idea that could save the world from the sentinels taking over completely.

By sending Wolverine back into time, or at least his concious, to stop a man from being killed, he can reverse history and change the future...

So, before we go into what I actually thought of the movie, I have to adress the faults or at least what I found faulty.

The script was horrible. No, horrible is to strong. The script was good, just full of plot holes and inconsistensies.

First of all, how can Xavier be alive?
He was turned to dust back in The last stand. Of course we have the post credit scene in The last stand that sort of explains him being alive, but that is a very weak explanation.
To base the resurgence of a main character on a hidden on a post credit scene is mot a valid decision by the screenwriters. How many people take the time to sit through the entire credit roll? I actually didn't see it until this week when I re-watched them all.
Shouldn't his resurrection have been better explained in this movie? Why do they just assume that everyone saw that scene?

And then there is the case of the sentinels. Where do they come from, why are they never mentioned in the earlier films? Acording to the story they tell you in Days of future past, the sentinels were created after Bolivar Trask, the man who invented them, was killed by Mystique. This was in 1973. Now, we know that the first X-men movie takes place in the not too distant future. This was in 2000 so the not to distant future must be 2005 something?
The last stand takes place a couple of years later, around 2006-7 maybe?

Then we have The Wolverine, the 2013 stand alone that ended with a tie in to Days of future past. There we see Professor X and Magneto meeting up with Wolverine some time in 2013. In that scene they seem to know something, they hint at what we see Days of future past.

Days of future past have a pretty clear date when it takes place, 2023. So somewhere between 2013 and 2020 sort of, the Sentinels appear and starts killing everyone.
The project have been in progress since the 70:s though and back then they already had working prototypes. How could the sentinels just come from nowhere and take over in a matter of years? What happened between 2013 and 2020?

They could have explained this but instead they gloss over it by simply saying, the sentinels came and took shit over and now they rule the world.
Then they do something that I really can't get a grip on. In the last stand, a man called Trask is sitting around being a typical government man. He is played by Bill Duke and is alive and well in 2006-ish.
In the Days of future past, Bolivar Trask is played by Peter Dinklage. One could aegue that this is only a change of actors, nothing to take notice of, but the Peter Dinklage Trask is killed in 1973.

At this time, one would assume that the screenwriters are ignoring The last stand. They have Xavier alive and Trask is dead, but then we se flashes of Wolverines past. We see him in WWII and we also se him killing Phoenix, wich happened in The last stand. This means that the events of The last stand happened and are part of history, so how can Trask be alive in 2006 but dead in 1973?
This creates a very interesting time paradox, wich is way to complex to discuss now. I will however write an article about this on the not to distant future (haha!)

These are huge plotholes. Not something that they could just ignore. Trask may be a small role in The last stand, but he was still there, they mention his name several times.

These things annoy me.
I am sitting there marveling at the acting, the directing, the action, the setpieces, all of it is borderline spectacular. James MacAvoy really shines as a broken man only trying to forget the past. Jennifer Lawrence takes her rendition of Mystique to new heights, adding a lot of emotions to a previously one dimensional character. Evan Peters stands out as newcomer Peter"Quicksilver"Maximof though. For the brief moments he is in the movie, he owns the screen.

Despite all these great performances, the script keeps ruining every scene for me. The plotholes won't let go of me and they stop me from enjoying the movie too the fullest.

I rarely feel so torn about a movie. Often a film is good, the script is good, acting, photography, everything. If the movie is bad, it is often bad across the board.
Days of future past is a great movie...except for the script, wich really doesn't hold up at all to the level of quality the rest of the movie displays.


After spending the entire week trying to pump myself up to like this movie. I am now left in a position where I can't decide wether it was a complete failiure or a good way to spend two hours. I ask myself, why I do this? The worst part is that I will probably do it all over when X-men Apocalypse comes out in a couple of years.
For some reason I keep coming back to these movies, even though they keep dissapointing me.

Weird...

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