X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)
Directed by Bryan Singer
Like a 1970s fun-fair, X-Men: Days of Future Past comes lumbering into town, on to our screens and off pretty quickly, too, or there’s no justice.
The plot is both convoluted and simple: things are bad for the X-Men in the future, with a repressive regime soldiered by large flying robots called Sentinels hunting them down in their mountain-top hideaways. The only chance to get out of this predicament is to send the Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back to 1973 where he can get the younger versions of the X-Men to prevent naughty mutant Raven/Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from assassinating small, slightly evil scientist Dr. Trask (Peter Dinklage, looking serious but never scary) to prevent him from perfecting said Sentinels.
Wait, why save him from being assassinated if that would stop him from deploying the Sentinels? Or why not go back further and….no, never mind, that logic would only lead you to question whether you could go back and stop the film from being made, and there lies madness. And the real reason for the time-travel is to allow Marvel to do a small-scale reboot of the franchise, resurrecting some characters killed off in earlier instalments.
There are some fine actors employed here, but they are all sitting glumly in the back of the bus while the CGI effects do most of the driving as far as the plot is concerned. That of course is a tradition in summer blockbusters, but the problem is that the special effects on show here just aren’t very special. That’s not to say they’re clunky, just not very fresh or original. Wolverine’s body healing after being shot? Check. Mystique shape changing? Seen it. A large building lifted into the air? We’ve had that dumped on us before.
More worrying is the lazy, wholesale ripping off from (sorry, paying homage to) other stories. The framing device that sends us back to 1973 is borrowed completely from Terminator 2; the insertion of an assassin into the President’s safe room is copied from Homeland; the working through the mind of an unconscious hero looks a lot like The Matrix; and even the ending, when Wolverine wakes up into a “corrected” future, to be greeted with a knowing wink from the Professor (Patrick Stewart), seems like it was filched from book version of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. This sort of copying is OK when you do it with flair, making it more spectacular or poignant or funny than the original – but these are very humdrum borrowings.
It has come to this, that the best part of most Marvel flicks comes after the closing credits: the half a minute or so clip of the next movie – a tantalising glimpse of something that is so short, so elliptical that you still have some hope that the full movie might be that intriguing, rather than another example of the noisy vacuity you’ve just sat through. Some hope.
