…written by Simon Kinberg, directed by Bryan Singer, starring Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawerence, Ian McKellan, and Patrick Stewart.
Having enjoyed X-Men – First Class quite a lot, and with this latest X-movie drawing from some of the best X-Men comics runs of the late 80’s and early 90’s, we were really looking forward to X-Men – Days of Future Past. Time travel and the mutant apocalypse – with Bryan Singer back to direct and all the relevant cast reprising their roles. And enjoy this movie we did. In fact, I believe this as my favorite X-movies from the series, which also places it in our top few for all super hero movies.
The premise, as with most time travel movies, deals with traveling backwards to alter history to avert catastrophe. In this case we have a near future in which mutants have been rounded up or hunted to near extinction by the familiar (to comics fans) Sentinel robots. Some of the X-Men continue to hold-out, as we learn, through Kitty Pryde’s mutant power to send a person’s consciousness back to their past self a few minutes. This allows the X-Men to alter the present and avoid the inevitable mass Sentinel assault by a few moments. But more and more Sentinels are coming each time, so when the X-Men rendezvous with Professor X, Magneto, Wolverine, and some others, they decide to try something new.
The Professor and Magneto think they’ve determined a key point in history – in 1971 – when the U.S. Government under Nixon first approved the Sentinel robot program. The tipping point came when Mystique killed the man responsible for designing the Sentinels, Dr. Bolivar Trask. What she didn’t realize is that even though she delayed the Sentinel program by decades, the program continued, and Trask’s understudies managed to collect some of her mutant DNA as a result. They eventually manage to incorporate the DNA and Mystique’s shape-shifting powers into their technology, making the Sentinels so adaptable and lethal in the future. Continue reading →