Review of 'X-Men: Days of Future Past'

A 'X-Men' film

In an alternative universe robots, Sentinels, created in 1973 by Dr. Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage) hunt and kill mutants as well as any humans that aid them. Sentinels are advanced machines with shape-shifting abilities that give them talents that mutants normally have making them very efficient at what they do. Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) along with the remaining X-Men are making a final stand against the robots but realize their best hope is send Logan (Hugh Jackman) back in time (aided by an X-Men with time travel abilities) to stop the robots from being created. Logan stops Raven/Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from being captured (this is where Trask figures out the shape-shifting bit) but, of course, things are not so simple…Attempting to bring the young Magneto/Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender) proves difficult and he is soon off on his maniacal, destructive ways…

Pop the popcorn, summer cinema is here! All you would expect from an X-Men movie and perhaps a bit more: Fantastic acting, a great and intelligent story, amazing special effects (the lifting of an entire stadium into the air by Magneto? Wow)…This story ties together all of what has come before - From the original X-Men series to X-Men: First Class - in spectacular fashion. The characters, as always, are played with conviction and compassion - they have real depth here with their all-to-obvious human failings. Trask is chilling yet somehow understandable and the same with Magneto - despite being the token “baddies”. The audience is quickly convinced that there is real peril here - The sentinels are unstoppable from the first brutal view we are given in the opening stages of the movie (X-Men killed? Wow again). You might think with the backwards and forwards in time thing happening it would be confusing but it is, surprisingly, not (I suppose it helps that there are different actors in each time frame…).

If anything I could fault (and it is hard, believe me) it might be the somewhat pat ending (without trying to give anything away).

For those geeks out there: Be sure to stay after the film for a rather confusing scene that follows the credits…(who the heck is that and what's with the history-bending thing?).

A great lot of fun.

Rating: “I have absolutely no complaints”

Review Date: 2014-06-01

Directed by: Bryan Singer

Studio: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

Year: 2014

Length: 131 minutes

Genre: Science Fiction

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1877832/

• X-Men (2000)
• X-Men 2 (2003)
• X-Men: Apocalypse (2016)
• Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)