X-Men Days Of Future Past Review: Not Bad Marvel..

I am a Marvel Comics man through and through. I respect DC Comics, and have enjoyed their comics and characters for years, but to me Marvel is king. And the best Marvel affiliation has always been the legendary X-Men.

The X-Men had the best comics, best characters, best storylines and some of the best villains.

Once Marvel started producing the X-Men movies starting with their first release X-Men in 2000, I couldn’t wait for my favorite characters to be in live action. Then one by one every movie was a disappointment. 

I can’t speak for other die-hard comic book fans but the X-Men movies were a continual miss on the big screen.

I began wondering had DC’s bosses infiltrated FOX Studios and re-wrote scripts and characters just out of spite. 

I was absolutely shocked that Marvel was coming out with subpar X-Men movies while hitting home runs with the first two Toby Maguire Spider-Man movies, Blade with Wesley Snipes from 1998, the First Iron Man movie, Captain America 2, and the best Marvel movie to date, the Avengers.

I understand that two different studios produce the comic movies (which is a topic I will be addressing in another post), but the X-Men should have all been classics. Sadly they weren’t.

In 2012 FOX released X-Men First Class. Finally, after more than a decade the people at FOX and Marvel gave the public a good X-Men movie.

The plot was good, the storyline fit, the actors were well cast, and most importantly, the X-Men had edge.

And this is what’s been missing from all the X-Men movies. Every X-Man movie was a cookie cutter version of the Jim Lee/Chris Claremont X-Men from the early 1990’s. The 90’s X-Men were an action packed forced to be reckoned with.

Those comics weren’t based on trying to make things PG-13. Those were storylines that comic fanatics like myself could believe in and enjoy.

There was always a balance between the serious X-Men and quirky one-liners or lighter material. X-Men First Class was the first movie from the theatrical series that truly captured what made the X-Men comic book icons.

The X-Men’s follow up to First Class and their latest movie Days of Future Past finally got it right.

This is the X-Men movie I was waiting 14 long years for. 

The darker side of the X-Men was unleashed in this movie, and the interchange between the terrible future that is the fate of all mutants, and the past where Wolverine is charged to set things right was good.

The Days of Future Past storyline is one of the best in comic book history and this film tried to that storyline justice.

The opening sequence when Warpath, Ice-Man, Bishop, Sun Fire, Colossus, Shadowcat and Blink take on these new breed of sentinels was fantastic.

And it was this sequence of events I was hoping to see more of in the film. And unfortunately that is where the film fell short for me.

The movie needed more scenes featuring mutants from the future taking on the sentinels and how the war was lost on the mutant side.

We’re just shown a dystopian future where carnage and mayhem has reigned supreme for mutants and mankind alike.

Directors must never forget that as much as the storyline and scripts give the movie substance, it’s the live action sequences with the mutants actually exhibiting their powers that are the allure of comic heroes.

Every minute of the film that involved Quicksliver who is portrayed by Evan Peters was excellent.

If the movie could have given the audience more scene that involved Quiksilver and all the other mutant then Days of Future Past would have displayed the full mutant impact that it needed.

Days of Future Past also needed more dialogue between a young Professor-X and Magneto.

The audience is given one 5-minute scene on a plane, and the last 7 minutes of the film.

The Magneto and Professor X-Dynamic was supposed to be the driving force of this movie, but unfortunately it became merely and after thought as the film turned more into a third Wolverine installment.

Overall the movie was good and it shows that the X-Men series is finally headed in the right direction. X-Men First Class was good, Days of Future Past was better, and I am sure all diehard comic book fans are enjoying the upward trend. My rating for X-Men Days of Future Past is 2 1/2 stars out of 4.