XMEN:DOFP - Official Reviews

[jo]

This came from the film / entertainment critic for FOX 5 -- so it is probably an official reaction. Maybe we can start off the thread for reviews and even social media responses from film critics, news critics, filmsite bloggers, and other entertainment reporters.

Btw, many of the links for many of the following tweets are courtesy of the posters from the SHH Forum. Thanks, guys

Kevin McCarthyVerified account
‏@kevinmccarthytv Geeking out! Saw #XmenDaysOfFuturePast - Mind = officially blown! - Insane emotion/action! Every performance is awesome! Fav #XMen flick!!!

Probably a little biased ( given who tweeted it) - but who cares


Jo

[jo]

From someone from CinemaBlend and Fandango...and contributor to Washington Post and NBC ( per his Twitter profile)--

Sean O'Connell ‏@sean_OConnell · 2m
There are so many amazing scenes in #XmenDaysOfFuturePast and I can not WAIT to watch it with a theater filled with #xmen fans!

Sean O'Connell ‏@sean_OConnell · 4m
Do you know what character is legit great in #xmen? Quicksilver. I'm not joking. He REALLY works! Great scene.


Sean O'Connell ‏@sean_OConnell · 5m
Cap 2, Spidey 2, and a killer #xmen movie in theaters all at the same time? Glorious time to be a comic-book movie fan. Enjoy it, fans!

Sean O'Connell ‏@sean_OConnell · 7m
Can't believe how much I enjoyed #xmen. Such an incredible Marvel movie. Fans are going to lose their minds!!


Sean O'Connell ‏@sean_OConnell · 8m
McAvoy, Jackman and Fassbender blew me away in #xmen. McAvoy is doing amazing things with Prof. X. Best use of Wolvie in years!!


Sean O'Connell ‏@sean_OConnell · 9m
Wow! DAYS OF FUTURE PAST is the greatest, most complete and staggeringly entertaining #xmen movie to date. Incredible. Movie of the summer!

The fanboys will be delirious


Jo

[jo]

From another media person --

Paul Salfen ‏@paulsalfen · 10m
Wow! #DaysofFuturePast was so good! Definitely the best X-Men movie so far. And that's all you need to know...go see it! #XMen @xmenmovies

Paul Salfen ‏@paulsalfen · 5h
@drewpearsonshow Looking forward to interviewing the nicest man in Hollywood again tomorrow, the great @realhughjackman for @xmenmovies.

[jo]

From another entertainment reporter --

Shireen Sandoval @shireensandoval · 20m
LOVED #XmenDaysOfFuturePast and love me some mutants (for the record) @decodrive @wsvn ?? #NYC #moviecoverage

[jo]

twitter.com/devincf

Devin Faraci wrote that beautiful love letter to THE FOUNTAIN, but he hates the XMEN movies and Bryan Singer. It is said that he is also a Marvel Studios apologist. It seems he was not invited to the press screening of Days of Future Past.

Devin Faraci
‏@devincf Again, I hear good things about DOFP. But the junket crowd is hard to trust.


@devincf DAYS OF FUTURE PAST screens tonight. Everyone seeing it is a junket person.


@devincf
I am NOT seeing DOFP. The movie may or may not be good, but remember most of the people seeing it tonight are whores.

I can't also make out what Kris Tapley is trying to say in some of the exchanges.

[jo]

From another film blogger invited to the press screening --

Ajay Fry ‏@ajayfry · 6m
1st I heard "Don't tweet" then later "Tweet only reactions, no spoilers" so I'll say this: It's basically the #XMen film I've always wanted.

[jo]

From a major filmsite --

Steven Weintraub ‏@colliderfrosty
X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST is great. Film finds a way to make both casts work & Quicksilver...wow. His main scene is highlight of the film.

Steven Weintraub ‏@colliderfrosty
and like all Marvel movies... make sure you stay till the end of the X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST credits. It's def worth it.

Steven Weintraub ‏@colliderfrosty
if you're going to see X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST, do yourself a favor and try to avoid spoilers. You're so close, don't give in now.

From a filmsite whose blogger is a real fangirl

Amirose Eisenbach

@amirosie
Lover of film, music, chai lattes, Batman, hot sauce and hugs. Editor and Co-Host of AMC Movie News
Santa Monica · amctheatres.com/movie-news





Amirose Eisenbach ‏@amirosie · 5m
@lilluster time and place to gush sir haha. Gotta stay articulate ;P

Amirose Eisenbach ‏@amirosie · 11m
Pep talk to self: do not reveal your true geeky nature to the delightful #XMen cast. Play it cool, woman. Leave the Magneto helmet at home

Amirose Eisenbach ‏@amirosie · 18m
@phoenixncf no spoilers from me! I want you to experience it in all its magic the way I did. So much goodness packed in. Sensory overload.

Amirose Eisenbach ‏@amirosie · 21m
@minionmyk that's exactly why you should trust me because I would be way more critical than others since it's my fav property Get excited

Amirose Eisenbach ‏@amirosie · 22m
@dmoney54114 yep I'm an X-Men addict and it gave me everything I wanted and more. I'm too excited, I need to drink tea or something haha

Amirose Eisenbach ‏@amirosie · 31m
Literally freaking out about how incredible #XmenDaysOfFuturePast was. My expectations were sky high and it even surpassed them. Just wow.

Amirose Eisenbach ‏@amirosie · 10h
It feels like X-Mas. Seeing #XmenDaysOfFuturePast tonight and interviewing the cast tomorrow. Career officially peaking right…meow

[jo]

A negative reaction ( first one!), from a contributor with Variety --

David Ketchum ‏@ketchumatmovies · 4m
@joshbrunsting It really isn't good though. I'm kind of speechless at the social media reaction. Must be the same people who loved ASM2.

@ketchumatmovies 5m Did everyone else actually see the same X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST screening I saw tonight? Sure doesn't seem like it! #disastermovie #mess

[jo]

And from someone from LATINO REVIEW --

LatinoReview-Kel ‏@latinoreview · 1h
One last thing about X-Men: Day of Future Past...Laugh all you want but the Quicksilver scene was pretty awesome. That is all.


LatinoReview-Kel ‏@latinoreview · 1h
@dofpxmen Can't say anymore on it...Sorry...But believe me it was good.


LatinoReview-Kel ‏@latinoreview · 1h
@dofpxmen Quicksliver LOL JK...Magneto (Young Version)



LatinoReview-Kel ‏@latinoreview · 1h
@colliderfrosty 110% just your reaction.


LatinoReview-Kel ‏@latinoreview · 1h
Saw X-Men: DOFP & it was really good! In opinion its the best X-Men movie so far but that's just me. It was like Avengers but with Mutants.

[jo]

The formal, long-form reviews are now coming in --

From VARIETY :


variety.com/2014/film/reviews/film-review-x-men-days-of-future-past-1201177971/

Film Review: ‘X-Men: Days of Future Past
May 12, 2014 | 03:48PM PT

Bryan Singer returns to blockbuster form with this strikingly ambitious continuation of the 'X-Men' saga.

Chief Film Critic


Justin Chang

Chief Film Critic

@justincchang


No skyscrapers blow up, no cities are leveled, and while the White House and a football stadium suffer some serious structural damage, the wholesale destruction of human civilization is kept to a refreshing minimum in “X-Men: Days of Future Past” — just one of several respects in which this strikingly ambitious yet intimately scaled entertainment distinguishes itself from so much of its comicbook-movie kind. Back at the helm of the Fox/Marvel franchise he successfully launched 14 years ago, director Bryan Singer stages a stealth reboot by introducing a playful time-travel element to the ongoing saga, bringing two generations of mutantkind together in a story that toggles cleverly (if not always 100% coherently) between the political tumult of 1973 and a not-so-distant dystopian future. Singer’s scandalous recent headlines are unlikely to impact the commercial fortunes of this keenly anticipated tentpole attraction, whose B.O. haul stands to rival and perhaps exceed that of the series’ top earner to date, “X-Men: The Last Stand.”

Its $459 million worldwide gross notwithstanding, that 2006 smash marked the beginning of a severe lapse in quality for the franchise, as Singer, having directed the excellent first two pictures, left the third one in the singularly ill-suited hands of Brett Ratner. (“The Last Stand” was followed, but not much improved upon, by Gavin Hood’s “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” in 2009.) Fortunately, the overall series has been on the creative upswing in recent years, buoyed by Matthew Vaughn’s terrific prequel “X-Men: First Class” (2011) and James Mangold’s unexpectedly fine “The Wolverine” (2013). And given that Singer’s own career hasn’t exactly flourished in the meantime with “Superman Returns,” “Valkyrie” and last year’s bomb “Jack the Giant Slayer,” it’s not especially surprising to see him make his long-overdue return to blockbuster form here: Not since 2003’s “X2: X-Men United” has this filmmaker tapped so effortlessly into his talent for comicbook gravitas, his ability to mine emotional resonance, pop poetry and (crucially) sly humor from material that could otherwise have veered into strained seriousness or high camp.



Social buzz for the new X-Men film began early at Comic-Con when a panel of old and new characters revealed the unique style of the superhero sequel. Marketing and publicity stunts like The Bent Bullet viral website about the JFK assassination/mutant conspiracy have kept social conversation consistently high for the film. Jennifer Lawrence, in blue body paint, also doesn’t hurt.’

Just as the first “X-Men” opened with a flashback to the Holocaust, so the new film commences with a grim evocation of death and warfare, this time set in a fictitious future. A government army of killer robots known as Sentinels has almost succeeded in wiping out all mutants and their human supporters, leaving Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and his longtime friend/nemesis, Erik Lensher/Magneto (Ian McKellen), to seek refuge with their few remaining allies in a remote Chinese safe house. Their last hope is Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page), whose powers include the curious ability to transport a person’s consciousness through time: Professor X and Magneto propose that she send Logan/Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back to the year 1973 in order to undo certain key events and thereby erase the Sentinel program from history. (With his superhuman powers of bodily regeneration, Logan is the only one who could withstand such a journey — a handy justification for keeping the series’ defining character front and center.)

Hurled back to the heyday of lava lamps and waterbeds, Richard Nixon and Alice Cooper, Logan must convince the younger, hipper version of Charles (James McAvoy) that a dark future awaits if they don’t act immediately. This turns out to be easier said than done. The ’60s were an especially rough decade for Charles, leaving him a mental and emotional wreck: His school for young mutants has been abandoned (only Hank McCoy/Beast, played once again by Nicholas Hoult, has stuck around), and he’s addicted to a serum that restores his ability to walk yet stifles his telepathic powers — which is to say, his gift for empathy. Still, Logan proves sufficiently persuasive, and Charles reluctantly agrees to help him infiltrate the Pentagon and free Erik (Michael Fassbender) from the subterranean prison where he’s being held for past crimes.

It’s a dangerous but necessary step that’s pulled off, with smashing aplomb, by Logan’s old pal Peter (Evan Peters), a leather-jacketed, silver-haired mutant known as Quicksilver for his incredible agility, and one of the few Marvel crossover characters who can claim membership with the X-Men and the Avengers. While Aaron Taylor-Johnson is playing the character in Disney’s concurrent Marvel franchise (he’ll be seen at length in 2015’s “Avengers: Age of Ultron”), the bar has been set remarkably high here: Peters’ Quicksilver steals every scene he’s in, especially one brilliant, deliriously fun action sequence that reveals how everything seems to advance in slow-motion from his perspective.

In order to stop the Sentinels devised by the mutant-mutilating Dr. Trask (Peter Dinklage), the latest in a long line of “X-Men” villains creepily modeled on Mengele, the uneasily aligned Charles, Erik and Logan must first head to France, where the Paris Peace Accords are about to take place. Their goal is to track down the renegade shape-shifter Raven/Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), who doesn’t realize that her plot to assassinate Trask will only accelerate the government’s mutant-extinction program. “We can show them a better path,” Charles intones more than once, cutting to the moral and thematic core of a series that has always expressed its solidarity with the oppressed and misunderstood, predicated on the sincere notion that the honorable deeds of an embattled few can indeed alter the hearts, minds and fortunes of many.

Working from Simon Kinberg’s screenplay (very loosely adapted from an “X-Men” comicbook storyline by Chris Claremont and John Byrne), Singer unspools these intricate developments in a smooth, carefully controlled style that, while hardly skimping on expertly choreographed action and lavish f/x spectacle, puts a gratifying premium on psychological depth and delineation of character: The story effectively becomes a platonic triangle, with Professor X and Magneto (who, as always, has his own surprising agenda) waging war for Mystique’s soul. Nearly all the moral conflicts at play — will Mystique abandon her murderous agenda? Can Charles overcome his crippling anguish and fight the good fight? — are resolved in fairly foreseeable fashion, dovetailing neatly with the tale’s overarching themes of individual and collective redemption. But if the characters’ quandaries at times feel overly circumscribed, they’re also advanced with a bracing emotional directness, devoid of either cynicism or sentimentalism, that touches genuine chords of feeling over the course of the film’s fleet 130-minute running time.

While not as brassy in its period stylization as Vaughn’s ’60s-set “X-Men: First Class,” “Days of Future Past” embraces its specific historical moment with similar revisionist gusto, from an early subplot that sends Mystique off to Saigon to rescue a squad of mutants from Trask’s clutches, to a borderline-tacky plot point concerning Magneto’s suspected role in the JFK assassination. Given the popular Hollywood practice of depicting real-life U.S. presidents as obliquely as possible (“Lee Daniels’ The Butler” notwithstanding), it’s refreshing to see an actor (Canadian thesp Mark Camacho) actually dare to inhabit the voice and visage of Nixon, and inhabit them well, in a movie that uses the former POTUS’ post-Vietnam flop sweat to smart narrative advantage. Stylistically, the decision to give certain public moments the grainy, bright-colored look of ’70s newsreels adds a touch of verite immediacy, although the Super 8 and 16mm footage looks rather odd in 3D (much of the film was shot stereoscopically, and makes fine if not exceptional use of the format.)

As they did in “First Class,” McAvoy and Fassbender make an electrifying duo here, doing full justice to the emotionally complicated swirl of love, anger, kinship and betrayal that binds Charles and Erik, and rendering the kinder, gentler interplay between Stewart and McKellen all the more poignant by comparison. In a picture grounded by a number of richly involving two-character dialogue exchanges, one of the most moving sequences finds Charles’ older and younger selves mysteriously communicating across the space-time continuum. While Lawrence looks fetching enough in Mystique’s blue birthday suit, the actress registers with less impact than one might have hoped; coming off her explosively entertaining turn in the much more elaborate Me Decade re-creation of “American Hustle,” she has relatively little to do here other than glower, snarl and let the f/x artists do their thing (though it’s fun to hear her speaking Vietnamese at one point).

With Wolverine playing the unusual role of mediator this time around, Jackman is in unusually restrained, cool-headed form; the actor’s slightly disoriented appearance throughout is entirely appropriate to the character’s journey, and may well be shared by a few fans in the later reels, when the story’s time-travel logic gets especially raggedy. By the end, however, it’s clear that the “X-Men” series has effectively opened a temporal loophole that should lead to fresh adventures down the road — namely, “X-Men: Apocalypse,” which is set to be released in 2016, although it’s unclear whether the embattled Singer will return to the director’s chair.

The film’s intense focus on its four leads — plus the excellent Dinklage, easily beating out McAvoy for most conspicuously ’70s hair — leaves little room for the rest of the ensemble, with its surfeit of new and familiar faces. For all the ways in which the material fits Singer like a glove, the filmmaker still hasn’t figured out a way to make Halle Berry’s Storm a compelling presence; Shawn Ashmore’s Iceman pops up in welcome but somewhat truncated fashion; and it’s a mystery why Anna Paquin retains such prominent billing, given Rogue’s blink-and-you-miss-it appearance. Speaking of Blink, the mutant who goes by that name is one of the more memorable “X-Men” newcomers, due more to her nifty powers of teleportation than to Chinese star Fan Bingbing’s muted performance. Other fresh additions to the mutant ranks who register briefly here include Bishop (Omar Sy), Sunspot (Adan Canto) and Warpath (Booboo Stewart).

Costume designer Louise Mingenbach has fun outfitting roughly half the cast in an array of period duds without going overboard. Like many of Singer’s prior pics, the production benefits from the dual contributions of versatile editor-composer John Ottman — particularly evident in the story’s clean pacing and construction, despite some busy cross-cutting in the action-heavy final stretch.


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

Reviewed at Fox Studios, Century City, Calif., May 10, 2014. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 131 MIN....

[jo]

www.hollywoodreporter.com/movie/x-men-days-future-past/review/703209

X-Men: Days of Future Past: Film Review

4:10 PM PDT 5/12/2014 by David Rooney


The Bottom Line

"X-Men" director Bryan Singer gets back behind the wheel to provide another good reason for mutant pride.


Opens

Friday, May 23 (Fox/Marvel)

Cast

Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Halle Berry, Nicholas Hoult, Ellen Page, Peter Dinklage

Director

Bryan Singer





Matthew Vaughn and a superb cast reinvigorated the franchise with cool retro style and globetrotting intrigue in 2011's X-Men: First Class. The series' original director, Bryan Singer, continues that momentum in the vigorously entertaining X-Men: Days of Future Past. While it's more dramatically diffuse than the reboot and lacks a definitive villain, the new film is shot through with a stirring reverence for the Marvel Comics characters and their universe. And it ups the stakes by threatening nothing less than the genocide of the mutant population, among them faces old and new. Huge worldwide box office seems guaranteed.


Since its first screen appearance 14 years ago, this exciting series has been driven by the theme of ostracized outsiders empowered to fight against their social stigma in ways both good and evil. That vein remains front and center here, with the mutants' humanity amplified by their extreme physical vulnerability.

Hardcore followers will have a geek field day dissecting the challenging pretzel logic of writer-producer Simon Kinberg's screenplay, from a story by Jane Goldman, Kinberg and Vaughn, who had originally planned to direct. The central premise comes from the 1981 Uncanny X-Men comic Days of Future Past, in which Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) uses her consciousness transference powers to go back from a dystopian future and rewrite history.

PHOTOS: 'X-Men: Days of Future Past' Premiere: Jennifer Lawrence, Hugh Jackman Hit Black Carpet

In dumbed-down pop-cultural terms, that functions like the dream of Bobby Ewing's death in Dallas. While it's a far less outrageous plot gambit, it calls into question many events from the original three movies – specifically 2006's X-Men: The Last Stand – providing a blanket license to erase continuity lapses among the films and usher in fresh developments moving forward. The screenplay ponders whether time is immutable while raising the possibility of infinite outcomes. But spend too long trying to align what happens here with earlier developments and your head will explode.

Echoes of the Holocaust have rippled throughout the series, and Singer opens with present-day scenes of a desolate, burnt-out New York, where mutants and mutant-sympathizing humans have been rounded up in internment camps.

Jumping to a similarly devastated Moscow, we watch Kitty, Iceman (Shawn Ashmore) and a small band of mutants face an attack from the deadly Sentinels. Dropped in from airborne carrier ships, these robots are designed to track and destroy the mutant gene. They resemble towering, muscular versions of the robots from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, constructed out of magnetic plates that allow them to change shape and adapt to whatever force is unleashed against them.

STORY: 'X-Men's' Ellen Page on Life After Coming Out, the Bryan Singer Case and Her Battle With Depression

The mutants escape and regroup in the rubble of an ancient Chinese monastery with Professor X (Patrick Stewart), Magneto (Ian McKellen), Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) and Storm (Halle Berry). The movie is missing an explanation of how traditional adversaries Professor X and Magneto reached a collaborative truce. But within the elastic boundaries of comic-book mythology that seems no big deal, and it's nice to see their bromance rekindled.

Threatened with extinction, the mutant holdouts hatch a plan to return to the post-Vietnam Paris Peace Accord of 1973, when Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) killed Dr. Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), a U.S. military scientist developing the Sentinels program. Mystique was captured and experimented on, with the transformative powers of her DNA tapped to perfect the Sentinels.

Wolverine's ability to heal makes him the only one able to withstand the 40-year time jump. Kinberg's script milks welcome humor out of sending the least diplomatic of the X-Men back to convince the younger Professor X (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) to join forces and stop the assassination that triggered anti-mutant hysteria. Having Wolverine awaken on a waterbed staring at a lava lamp and listening to Roberta Flack lightens the mood at just the right moment.

STORY: 'X-Men: Days of Future Past' Premiere: Jennifer Lawrence on Mystique's 'Undetermined Future," James McAvoy on a 'Different' Xavier

Cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel and production designer John Myhre provide marked contrasts between the two periods – brooding darkness in the present; a softer, more naturalistic look in the past – that helps as the action progresses and cross-cutting increases. In the same way the 1960s Cold War setting gave a distinctive vibe to Vaughn's franchise entry, this one offers maximum enjoyment in the extended central action that unfolds roughly a decade later. It's also where the series’ refreshing emphasis on character is strongest.

Looking Christ-like with his '70s mop and scruffy beard, McAvoy's Charles Xavier couldn't be less like that of Stewart, with his steely but benevolent authority. Disillusioned Charles is addicted to a serum produced by Beast (Nicholas Hoult) that gives him the use of his legs but strips him of his telepathic powers. Professor X is the one character whose younger and older selves actually meet, in a scene that is among the movie's most emotionally resonant.

There are also affecting moments when Wolverine encounters Major Bill Stryker (Josh Helman), triggering traumatic flash-forward memories of his painful physical transformation and his love for Jean Grey.

But the midsection includes thrilling action set pieces too. One involves the chaos that ensues when the X-Men thwart Mystique's initial attempt to kill Trask, spilling from an official building out into the crowded square below. Just as connections to the Cuban missile crisis enlivened First Class, historical references to the Nixon era add dramatic traction here, not to mention mutant links – both grim and amusing – to JFK's assassination. Singer flips back and forth during the Paris clash between widescreen format and footage from bystanders' home movies that evoke the Zapruder film.

Perhaps the film's standout sequence features the much-discussed new addition of Peter Maximoff, aka Quicksilver (American Horror Story regular Evan Peters). The rights dispute that kept the character out of previous films has been resolved, allowing him to appear in both the X-Men and Avengers franchises, albeit without cross-referencing. His super-speed skills are conveyed by shooting at 3,000 frames per second, notably when Peter runs around the walls during a fabulously staged Pentagon break-in, whimsically accompanied by Jim Croce singing "Time in a Bottle." With his silver shag, Pink Floyd T-shirt and mischievous sense of humor, Peter is a terrific character who breathes playfulness into the movie, and many will be sorry he doesn't stick around longer.

Other new recruits are more limited in scope, like portal-punching Blink, played by Chinese beauty Fan Bingbing, who has virtually no dialogue but is nonetheless a vivid presence. Among the returnees from the series' origins, Berry's Storm sticks to the sidelines until kicking up a tempest during the climactic action sequence, and as has been reported, scenes involving Anna Paquin's Rogue were cut for pacing reasons, reducing her appearance to a cameo. Other unbilled stars of the pre-reboot X-Men pop up briefly.

Fassbender's young Erik/Magneto was the revelation of First Class, and the actor again shows riveting self-possession and charisma to burn – not least when he's standing astride the roof of a moving train in bellbottoms while tearing up railway tracks. But this movie belongs to Jackman and Lawrence.

Logan/Wolverine has possibly never been more compelling. In his seventh turn in the role, Jackman brings powerful physicality, laconic humor and depths of sorrow beneath his gruffness that make him an unusually nuanced figure for a sci-fi action movie.

Switching from her honorable Hunger Games heroine into badass mode with supreme ease, Lawrence is sensational, whether slinking around in Mystique's body-hugging blue reptilian skin, displaying the shape-shifter's balletic fight skills or adopting seductive human form. Her romantic friendship with Charles, stretching back to their childhoods, adds poignancy to Mystique's struggle, notably in a wonderful airport scene during which Professor X gets inside her head via random people in the terminal.

As the nominal villain, the always excellent Dinklage brings gravitas, but the character's ambiguous morality makes him a less commanding nemesis for the mutants than Kevin Bacon's Nazi war criminal in First Class. Trask also gets somewhat overshadowed by the relentless robotic weapons of destruction he created.

Visual effects and CGI work, unsurprisingly, are top-notch throughout, and the Sentinels' attacks are rendered with a chilling visceral charge. The classy use of 3D is a model of restraint, yielding visual rewards particularly with Magneto's handiwork. Editor John Ottman keeps the pace satisfying but never rushed. Doubling as composer, he supplies a score that ranges over many distinct moods, giving a winking nod to fat blaxploitation beats during the initial shift to the '70s.

It's hard to imagine fanboys having too much to grumble about here, as Singer has pulled together an ambitious, suspenseful screen chapter that secures a future for the franchise while facilitating continued reinvention. Audiences should sit tight through the end credits crawl for an enigmatic signoff scene that provides a taste of the next installment, X-Men: Apocalypse...

[jo]

www.thewrap.com/x-men-days-future-past-review-mutant-sage-crosses-streams-hugh-jackman

‘X-Men: Days of Future Past’ Review: Mutant Saga Crosses the Streams of Its Old-School and Newer Characters



Movies | By Alonso Duralde on May 12, 2014 @ 4:04 pm Follow @aduralde


'X-Men: Days of Future Past' Review: Mutant Saga Crosses the Streams of Its Old-School and Newer Characters




Make sure you're caught up on all things X if you want to keep track of what Wolverine's doing in the past and how it might affect a dystopian, war-on-mutants future

As Cole Porter never advised, “Brush up your X-Men,” especially if you want to stay afloat in the tricky, time-tripping storytelling of “X-Men: Days of Future Past.”

Do some light streaming, dig out the DVD box sets, browse the Wikipedia pages or consult the cashier at your neighborhood comic store, but make sure you come into the theater with a fairly confident grasp of what went down in “X-Men,” “X2,” “X-Men: The Last Stand” and “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” — “The Wolverine,” oddly, not so much — since the screenplay by Simon Kinberg (“Sherlock Holmes”) assumes you already know mutant chapter and verse.

There's a healthy amount of exposition to walk you through all of this, admittedly, but given that the story also involves multiple time streams and alternate futures, it's best not to stop and ask too many questions; here be dragons.

Bryan Singer, thankfully, is back in the director's chair for the first time since “X2” (still the gold standard of this franchise), and he keeps things moving along briskly enough that you can just go along with the ride of Superhero Stuff without getting bogged down in the labyrinthine plotting if you don't want to.

x-men-days-of-future-past-DF-11515_rgb“Days of Future Past” opens in a terrifying, dystopian future where cities are in ruins and the streets are littered with corpses. (One of the first shots we see is of a bulldozer dropping dozens of human bodies into a mass grave, just in case you were planning on bringing any very young children.) The devastation is the result of a years-long war between the mutants (and their human allies) and the Sentinels, near-indestructible robots created by Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage).

Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen), now fighting together against the Sentinel threat, with Storm (Halle Berry) and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), meet up with a crew of X-Men — including Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page), Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), Bishop (Omar Sy), Colossus (Daniel Cudmore), Blink (Fan Bingbing), Sunspot (Adam Canto) and Warpath (Booboo Stewart) — who have remained alive only because Kitty can send Bishop back in time a few days to warn them of the impending attack.



Exhausted and near defeat, the only hope for the remaining X-Men to defeat the Sentinels is to go back to 1973 and stop Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from killing Trask at the Paris Peace Accords; that murder not only cemented the humans’ anti-mutant sentiment, it also allowed her to be captured and having her shape-shifting DNA incorporated into the Sentinels themselves.

Before, you can ask, “Wait, what about those earlier movies where Mystique was played by Rebecca Romijn?” it's decided that Wolverine is the only one who could physically withstand being sent that far backward in time. To stop Mystique, he'll have to rally the younger incarncations of Professor X (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender), which is no easy feat — a drunken, self-pitying Professor X is taking an experimental serum from Hank McCoy (Nicholas Hoult) that gives him the use of his legs but suppresses his mental powers, while Magneto is being held prisoner beneath the Pentagon for the assassination of JFK. (At last, a plausible explanation for the “magic bullet” theory.)

Singer clearly revels in getting to portray the whacka-chicka early 1970s, but never goes as far as “American Hustle,” even though he too gets to put Jennifer Lawrence into some stunning Qiana ensembles. “Days of Future Past” occasionally feels the burden of juggling this many characters and timelines and events; fans of the series should know that, apart from Wolverine, it's the “First Class” incarnations of the X-Men that get the bulk of the screen time.

See video: Jennifer Lawrence Kicks Evil Soldier Ass in ‘X-Men: Days of Future Past’ Teaser

They even manage to add a few more mutants into the mix; springing Magneto involves the assistance of a teenaged Quicksilver (Evan Peters), whose high-speed shenanigans provide some of the film's most exciting moments, particularly a slo-mo bullet time sequence that's a great mix of action and comic slapstick.

Singer wisely doesn't overload us with gigantic set pieces, saving most of his chits for Magneto's grand climactic gesture; Abbie Hoffman would be disappointed that Magneto doesn't levitate the Pentagon, but he does the next best thing.

While there are fun moments and a continuation of the franchise's main idea — Professor X's peace, love and understanding vs. Magneto's fight the power — “Days of Future Past” ends up feeling more exhausting than exuberant.



Cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel, a frequent Singer collaborator, helps delineate the sunny, mustard-colored early 1970s from the dark bleakness of the film's horrifying future, but those future segments are such a bummer (and then, so quickly shunted to the background) that they throw off the balance.

There's not a lot of time and space for acting here, but the cast wisely gets the most out of each brief moment they're allowed to stop and talk. Josh Helman, as the younger version of one of the X-Men's most ferocious enemies, is particularly well cast, since his smug expression is hissable even when he's just standing in the background.

Still, this is the best “X-Men” movie since Singer went off to other pursuits, and it puts enough of a whammy onto the mutant narrative to allow future sequels to veer off in any number of directions. Too bad that in doing so, it, like “The Amazing Spider-Man 2,” often feels more like a set-up for movies to come rather than a satisfying experience in and of itself.

[jo]

From a film site --

www.cinemablend.com/reviews/X-Men-Days-of-Future-Past-6836.html

MOVIE REVIEW

X-Men: Days of Future Past pulls off the impossible. Truth be told, it pulls off several “impossibles.” By seamlessly adapting comic writer Chris Claremont’s cherished, 1980 story arc of the same name into a big-budget, movie-star-driven extravaganza, director Bryan Singer finally delivers on a long-standing promise to X-Men supporters to both honor this cherished, time-hopping narrative and bring the detested, awe-inspiring, mutant-hunting Sentinel robots to the big screen. It’s an X-Men story that’s nearly 14 years in the making. It’s the X-Men movie dedicated fans never thought they’d see. And now that it’s here, it’s the greatest X-Men movie we’ve seen to date, and a new standard-bearer for the massive potential of comic-book franchises far and wide.

Miles and miles of narrative foundation had to be laid out over the years before X-Men: Days of Future Past could even entertain the notion of existing, and that’s one component of the “impossibles” I was referring to earlier. For those who might not know, Singer’s mutant saga relies on time travel to tell a shockingly intimate story that bridges the original cast of the initial X-Men movies – many of whom haven’t been seen on screen in these roles since Brett Ratner’s 2006 sequel X-Men: The Last Stand -- to the younger counterparts introduced in Matthew Vaughn’s series reconfigure, X-Men: First Class. The lynchpin of this streamlined time twister is the series’ biggest star: Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, whose sent back in time by his long-time mentor and friend, Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), to possibly prevent a cataclysmic future.

X-Men: Days of Future Past isn’t a direct translation of Claremont’s revered, two-issue story arc. Details have been altered to make this more of an interpretation, one that borrows significant components from the comics but grows, organically, from the cinematic legacy created by the four previous X-Men movies and, yes, the standalone Wolverine films. While we were so busy heaping praise on Marvel President Kevin Feige and his crew for mapping out a massive Marvel Cinematic Universe, Fox was quietly shifting mutant pieces around a superhero chess board and realizing they had enough moves under their belt to pull off Days of Future Past. It’s remarkable how Days snaps seemingly disconnected pieces of the larger X-Men puzzle into place, justifying decisions made in previous movies and restoring temporary order to the series. Days of Future Past miraculously tidies up the once-disjointed history of the X-Men movies, simultaneously setting the series on an open road to countless future stories. (Look for a brief tease for X-Men: Apocalypse, due in theaters in 2016, in the end credits of this particular film.)

The masterstroke was the hiring of Bryan Singer to return to the film franchise he helped launch back in 2000 with the first X-Men movie. Though we don’t get to spend a lot of time in the bombed-out, post-apocalyptic future world Xavier, Magneto (Sir Ian McKellen) and the older X-Men are trying to restore, Singer opens Days of Future Past with thrilling mutant-on-Sentinel action sequences that remind us what a firm grasp he has on the power and motion of the Marvel mutant heroes. It’s a rush to see Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) grab Bishop (Omar Sy) so they can run through objects as they prepare to fight an army of lethal Sentinels. Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), Storm (Halle Berry) and Colossus (Daniel Cudmore) get to show off their skills. Newcomer Blink (Bingbing Fan) is a surprisingly exciting additon for the way she teleports X-Men around the battlefield. The future-set scenes give Days of Future Past a grim bookend, but they allow Singer and his cast to hit the ground running at a full sprint.

The movie rarely slows down, which is exhilarating for X-Men enthusiasts, but might be too much for casual fans seeking the next eye-popping thrills of the summer blockbuster season. With Wolverine as a guide, Days of Future Past rallies through a number of dizzying plot turns that are executed with hairpin precision, including: a prison break from a Pentagon cell; a violent confrontation at a Parisian peace summit; the creation of the Sentinels at the hands of human antagonist Dr. Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage); an offbeat explanation of the Kennedy assassination, followed by an attempt on the life of President Nixon (Mark Camacho), which won’t make it into any noted history books.

Parts of Days of Future Past can be reductively dismissed as one-note. Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) is treated as a significant threat to this on-screen universe, but her motivations are muddy, at best. The series also has yet to conjure a credibly complicated human villain, and Trask – despite some sinister flair by Dinklage – doesn’t reverse the trend. The human race, in general, has always been the main obstacle in the X-Men movies, and the blind fear we’re supposed to feel when confronted by those who are different continues to be the underlying theme that connects all of the action in Singer’s latest epic. The presence of outlying characters like young Bill Stryker (Josh Helman) feel like unnecessary reaches to previous chapters in the X-Men saga, and add little here.

That being said, James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender dominate Days of Future Past with immense portrayals of extremely complicated individuals. The men continue to probe the psychological tortures that come with playing younger versions of Professor Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr, aka Magneto. McAvoy’s Charles, in particular, stands at a crossroads between wanting to help his fellow mutants but feeling unable to betray the ones he once considered allies. The fact that the future of the X-Men series appears to be in the hands of these towering performers gives me tremendous hope, because they play through the inherently campy tones of the X-Men universe to find real pain and hurt in the missions of these mutant heroes.

The third leg of the Days of Future Past triangle is occupied by the largest star in Singer’s universe: Hugh Jackman. And there’s a totally different dynamic to Jackman when Wolverine is able to steal scenes as part of a larger mutant ensemble. That playful magic, which has been missing in the Wolverine solo films, is back in full force for Days. Jackman’s take on Wolverine – his seventh portrayal of the character – is forceful, funny, casual, arrogant and effortlessly cool. It’s a breathless reminder of all of the reasons we love Wolverine as a character, and it’s the best use of Wolvie in a movie… possibly ever (though I still love his tremendous debut in Singer’s wonderful 2000 X-Men film).

There’s plenty more to talk about in X-Men: Days of Future Past, but the rest of it should be experienced and enjoyed in the theater. Evan Peters’ Quicksilver, for example, is a fantastic addition to the ever-growing mutant stable and a terrific use of Singer’s mutant-friendly imagination. And the film’s coda nostalgically places a well-earned bow on the outcast-driven series. X-Men: Days of Future Past pays fitting tribute to the history of this impressive franchise. It plants more narrative seeds that could be cultivated by either Singer or other vested directors with an interest in Marvel’s mutants. And as it stands, it is the best, most complete and most entertaining X-Men movie we’ve ever seen.


Reviewed By: Sean O'Connell


movie reviewed rating : 4.5 stars out of 5

[jo]

From EMPIRE --

www.empireonline.com/reviews/reviewcomplete.asp?FID=138033

X-Men: Days Of Future Past
That ‘70s showdown


Plot
In the year 2023, the weather is really, really bad and killer robots have hunted mutants to the point of extinction. Desperate, the X-Men zap Wolverine’s (Jackman) mind into his 1973 body. Can he change the course of history?


Review

X-Men: Days Of Future Past
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X-Men: Days Of Future Past is a movie about the slippery paradoxes and mutable mechanics of time travel. Or, as James McAvoy’s Charles Xavier winningly puts it: “Future-shite.” Although the storyline was conceived back in the early ’80s for a two-issue run of the Uncanny X-Men comic book, it feels like it was dreamed up especially to solve the problem Fox faced after 2011’s X-Men: First Class: what to do with a franchise that’s been split into two timelines, with two sprawling casts? The answer, clearly, is to put all of it in a big pot and stir. Hence this vast-scaled, decades-leaping blockbuster, which throws in everything up to and including the kitchen sink. Plus the sleeker, leather-jumpsuit-clad kitchen sink of the future.

Marshalling it all is Bryan Singer, who seems to have himself jumped back in time. Whether he’s been recharged by his decade away from the series, or by the prospect of eradicating some of the dodgier plot-turns made by Brett Ratner’s The Last Stand — a movie that could now be retitled The Not Massively Relevant Stand — this is easily the most on-form and playful he’s been since X-Men 2.

Remember the magnificent, bamf-happy Nightcrawler sequence that opened that movie? Wait until you see the mutant melee that kicks off this one. Pitting new heroes, the flashiest of which is Bingbing Fan’s Blink (special ability: being able to play Portal in real life), against a teeming mass of unstoppable Sentinel robots (essentially a cross between the T-1000 and Louis Smith), it’s a thunderous succession of nifty action beats. And that’s just an amuse-bouche. Just as slick and inventive is Magneto’s (Michael Fassbender) escape from a plastic Pentagon prison — one-upping a similar sequence from X2 — and a series of moments involving everyone’s favourite nudie aqua-skinned shapeshifter, Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence).

Jumping between the future (light source: apocalyptic lightning) and the past (light source: lava lamp), the plot teeters on the edge of becoming exhaustingly knotty. Fortunately, the story distracts from any temporal muddles by zeroing in on three of the most charismatic characters in the X-universe: Wolverine, plus the younger iterations of Xavier and Magneto.

Charged with stopping Mystique from assassinating diminutive weapons-maker Bolivar Trask — a deed which will ultimately result in global extinction — Wolverine is hampered by obstacles: his claws are no longer metal, Magneto’s being his usual bastard self, and his serene mentor Charles is now a thirtysomething depressive who won’t get out of his dressing gown.

In fact, the largest throughline of the film is dedicated to the latter (who doesn’t seem to have yet thought up his snappy mutant monicker Professor X) attempting to get his mind-mojo back. Given all that, and the catastrophic peril that hovers over proceedings, there’s a high potential for angst. But Simon Kinberg’s script keeps things breezy; there are quips, in-jokes, Terminator references and, one of the high-points, a callback to the F-bomb dropped in First Class.

Following in the footsteps of Matthew Vaughn, who gets a story credit here, Singer has a blast going period. Richard Nixon is glimpsed on the cover of a National Lampoon magazine well before he becomes a key player in the climactic set-piece. The film deploys Zaprudery handheld footage to jitter up a tense sequence in Paris. And while First Class tied the mutants’ exploits in with US milestones like the Cuban Missile Crisis, Days Of Future Past gleefully rewrites the history books on a massive scale. Most notably by redecorating the White House lawn with the RFK Stadium.

With so much going on, and such a ferocious pace, several parts of the story feel undernourished. There’s not nearly enough Ian McKellen. And it would be nice to learn more about villain supreme Bolivar Trask. What is his background? Given that he’s a dwarf, is it self-hatred that drives him to destroy all mutants? And when the hell does he turn into Bill Duke, as seen in Last Stand?

But what we do get here is largely fantastic, not only re-energising old-favourite characters (and after his two spin-offs, Wolverine was in dire need of re-energisation) but introducing intriguing new ones. Most surprising is the fact that the super-speedy Quicksilver (Evan Peters), whose Ramona Flowers-y appearance did not inspire much confidence in marketing materials, turns out to be the coolest thing in the film. The sequence in which he leisurely takes out a squad of lawmen while stopping to taste soup makes Nightcrawler, in the words of Blackadder, look like an asthmatic ant with heavy shopping.





Verdict : 4 out of 5 stars
The best X-Men film since the second one, this sequel/prequel/reboot trashes the ’70s with élan. Some of the massive cast struggle to register (there’s only a brief Storm), but what’s here is all good. We want X-Men: Apocalypse, now.


Reviewed by Nick de Semlyen

[jo]

From another UK site (Den of Geek)--

www.denofgeek.com/movies/x-men-days-of-future-past/30488/x-men-days-of-future-past-review

X-Men: Days Of Future Past review
.
Review Ryan Lambie 13 May 2014 - 06:03


A bleak dystopia and the 1970s collide in the sprawling X-Men: Days Of Future Past. Here’s Ryan’s review...




You certainly can’t fault the scale of director Bryan Singer’s ambition in X-Men: Days Of Future Past. Here, he attempts no less a feat than to tie together two disparate strands of the X-Men film universe - that of the timeline he began with the first film in 2000, and the 60s-set X-Men: First Class, directed by Matthew Vaughn in 2011, into one decades-spanning opus.

Based on the much loved two-book run of the same name from 1981, Days Of Future Past takes us forward to the year 2023 - a bleak, eternally benighted future where mutants and humans alike have been subdued by advanced robots called the Sentinels. Under the watchful eye of an elder Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart), the X-Men make a last ditch effort to go back in time in order to save the present. This requires Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) to use her unique powers to launch Wolverine’s consciousness back into his younger self (both versions played by Hugh Jackman, but you probably already knew that) and warn the X-Men circa 1973 of the danger that awaits them 50 years on.

There, Wolverine must orient himself in an era of disco music, wide lapels and lava lamps, and convince the younger X-Men - among them an understandably morose Professor X (this one played again by James McAvoy), and Beast (Nicholas Hoult) - that they’re in the midst of a pivotal and deadly year for mutantkind.

This is but one tiny fraction of a continent- and epoch-spanning plot which takes in Richard Nixon, the machinations of anti-mutant scientist Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage, as effortlessly brilliant as you’d expect), an incarcerated Magneto (Michael Fassbender), an embittered Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) and the politically strained climate of the post-Vietnam war. We haven’t even mentioned all of the other returning faces, such as Storm (Halle Berry) and Ian McKellen’s incarnation of Magneto, plus still others we shan’t spoil here (we've been far more spoiler-free than it may appear!)

It’s a lot to take in, for sure, and the sheer number of characters means that, while Wolverine provides a dependable hub for the story, there’s little room for the rest of the crowded cast. James McAvoy’s Professor X gets the narrative’s sole fully-formed character arc, while numerous other returning faces are relegated to mere cameos.

Of the new faces, Evan Peters stands out as Quicksilver - a chipper, devious young mutant who can slow down time, with spectacular results. It’s an entertaining performance, yet Peters' character abruptly disappears approximately 10 minutes after his introduction. Quicksilver is a victim, it seems, of a dense and mechanical plot which races from location to location and forgets about certain characters once they’ve outlived their usefulness.

What’s unusual about Days Of Future Past is that, despite all the things going on, Singer doesn’t overload the film with action. There are major set-pieces at the beginning and end as you might expect, plus a few smaller action sequences peppered in between. Yet the greater percentage of the 130-minute duration is given over to the interactions between the characters, with all their accompanying self-doubt and grudges.

In dramatic terms, Days Of Future Past is effective; Michael Fassbender doesn’t get as much room to stretch out as he did in First Class, but he’s as suave and charismatic as he ever was, and there’s still the same palpable chemistry between he and McAvoy. The themes which make the X-Men universe so compelling are also well served: Days Of Future Past dares to touch on addiction, prejudice, self-acceptance and genocide, all within the framework of a $220m summer movie. Frustratingly, however, the strands of the story take too long to satisfyingly intertwine.

Days Of Future Past has certain things in common with James Cameron’s The Terminator and T2, in that it involves characters heading into the past in order to change the course of history. All three films start out with clear objectives for their characters, but where The Terminator and T2 stick to that objective from beginning to end - rooted as they are in what we’ll clumsily tag the ‘chase thriller’ genre - Days Of Future Past heads off on tangents: crises are averted, only for others to arise straight afterwards. Heroes meet villains in a deadly stand-off, only for the plot to conspire to break them up so they can unite again later.

Fortunately, Days Of Future Past finds its focus in the final third. Actions in one era are intercut with those in the next, and finally, there’s a sense that events are moving in decisive, unpredictable directions. Here, the often astonishing special effects and sets created by Singer and his team finally mesh with the story, and Days Of Future Past builds to a satisfying crescendo.

This new X-Men, therefore, is an entertaining and visually dazzling entry in the franchise, full of amusing period detail and scope for future stories. The first hour or so fails to replicate the assured pace and storytelling of Singer’s earlier X-Men movies, but it rallies for an explosive and crowd-pleasing final act.

X-Men: Days Of Future Past is out on the 22nd May.

[jo]

www.craveonline.com/film/reviews/688611-x-men-days-of-future-past-review-paradox

The X-Men films occupy an intriguing place in the superhero genre. Come to think of it, the comics do too. While most stories about costumed do-gooders with abilities far beyond those of mortal men and women are power fantasies – exaggerated escapism to make audiences feel good – the X-Men stories are persecution fantasies as much or more than anything else: exaggerated escapism to make audiences feel even more oppressed than usual.

Many of us already do feel oppressed, of course (and many of us legitimately are, for one illegitimate reason or another), so the fantasy of being discriminated against for no other reason than because we are totally awesome, and lashing out against our oppressors with said coolness, is of course satisfying but cyclical. The oppression of the mutants in the X-Men stories can never end so long as anyone feels oppressed in real life. So although they score major victories these heroes are always just one plot point away from total victimization. Eternally powerful, eternally powerless. Quelle ironie.



And it is for that reason that I find these X-Men movies tend to work better in the past than they do in the present, where our differences are a little more celebrated than they were in the comparatively socially rigid mid-20th Century. And they make perfect sense in a post-apocalyptic future, when their oppression – taken to dramatic extremes – has resulted in the near-destruction of not only the mutant species, but also of the very land itself. I wonder if all the humans who supported the Sentinel program really think it was necessary to reduce the Earth to a lifeless wasteland just to get rid of all these neat people who can teleport, make their own snowflakes and walk through walls?

Bryan Singer’s first X-Men movie in the director’s chair in eleven years – X-Men: Days of Future Past – works better than most of the films in the franchise because it combines these two settings. The film opens in a desolate wasteland where only a handful of mutants, some old and some new, have survived the robot holocaust. Their situation is so dire that the only way to improve it is to muck up the timestream by sending Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back in time to the 1970s, in order to prevent the moment in history that made all this devastation possible.

X-Men Days of Future Past Peter Dinklage

The 1970s are only somewhat better than the future, of course. Mutantkind is still mostly “in the closet,” although a weapons merchant named Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage) is hard at work on the Sentinels: giant machines of death designed to destroy our sleeping giants before they can awake and rise against what Trask naturally assumes will be their Homo Sapien prey. Unethical government testing is being performed on mutants drafted into Vietnam and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) has been blamed for the John F. Kennedy Jr. assassination. The typically benevolent Professor Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) has resorted to drug use to make his days more manageable and rid himself of all the pain of being special. What a drag.

And yet against this dreary backdrop director Bryan Singer has set one of the most exciting and satisfying of comic book tales. Again, that’s the point and the appeal of these X-Men stories in the first place: to emphasize the dehumanization of these heroes and anti-heroes and deify them at the same time. As tension mounts, and history changes dramatically and heroes rise and fall, even the tiniest of victories is made more satisfying, and even the tiniest of jokes is a welcome relief. Wolverine on a waterbed is a gag that ends up going nowhere, but fish back into water jokes about Pong and Star Trek are funnier than they probably should be. And the sudden injection of frantic energy into the cast, courtesy of a deliciously smug Evan Peters as the silver speedster Quicksilver, is a wonderful action centerpiece. Which makes it all the more disappointing when Quicksilver suddenly and unceremoniously leaves the film for no reason whatsoever.


Bryan Singer’s greatest strength as a filmmaker is arguably his ability to keep multiple plates spinning at the same time – a must in films about superhero teams – but his strength is also a weakness: it only calls more attention to the things that X-Men: Days of Future Past is lacking. The story is all exposition and yet never exposes quite enough, leaving many important and distracting questions either unanswered or answered in incredibly dumb ways. The mechanism that sends Wolverine back in time completely changes the powers of an existing character and makes no sense whatsoever. The event he goes back in time to change contradicts every single event from X-Men 1, 2 and 3. Wolverine’s claws are inexplicably adamantium in the future even though they were cut off in last summer’s The Wolverine. And the conclusion, without spoiling it, suffers from Time Travelitis: a rare but unfortunate condition that renders the head so damned itchy that it has to be immediately and forcefully scratched.

But before the scalp can be threatened with an apocalypse of its own, X-Men: Days of Future Past proves itself to be one of the best films in this admittedly slapdash series. Even the best of the X-Men movies tend to be good in spite of themselves: so many plot holes throughout the series and so many characters reintroduced in different timelines and at different ages only lends credence to the theory that nobody at the studio has been paying attention to the story of these films as a whole, and that they have been treating every single movie like a soft reboot where nothing that happened before or could possibly happen later matters. But one doesn’t get that sense from X-Men: Days of Future Past. This latest film may ignore the past (pretty ironic for a time travel movie) but it does seem to be laying groundwork for future films that may work better than ever before and finally right this ship.

The future looks bright indeed… unless you’re a mutant, of course. So here’s to 15 more years of man’s inhumanity to superman played as blockbuster matinee entertainment for children. The X-Men universe is now and probably always will be a contradiction, but when done right, it’s still a fun way to spend an afternoon.

craveonline_ratings_set_: 80 of 100


William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline's Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @williambibbiani.

[jo]

Another review from a UK filmsite --

www.heyuguys.co.uk/x-men-days-future-past-review/

X-Men: Days of Future Past Review

May 13, 2014 By Amon Warmann Leave a Comment



After Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class rejuvenated the series original director Bryan Singer returns with the daunting task of uniting two timelines and two casts in the ambitious X-Men: Days of Future Past. With both new and old characters to introduce and re-introduce, as well as the tricky mechanism of time-travel, there was tremendous potential for it to go horribly wrong. Which makes it all the more impressive that Singer gets it mostly right.

Taking inspiration from Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s beloved comic book storyline of the same name, Days of Future Past begins with a chilling battle in a dystopian future between powerful mutant-hunting robots – known as Sentinels – and a motley cadre of mutant survivors. In order to avoid extinction, Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) uses her powers to send Wolverine’s consciousness back into his younger body in 1973 (both versions played once again by the ageless Hugh Jackman) to alter past events and change the course of history. To do so, Logan must enlist the aid of both a younger Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Erik Lensher aka Magneto (Michael Fassbender), whose friendship is on the rocks.

The opening minutes are heavy on exposition, but once Logan wakes up to the lava lamps and waterbeds of the 70’s Days of Future Past is near perfectly-paced, and the absorbing narrative has a great sense of urgency when in the past timeline. Sadly that urgency isn’t shared in the future, and in that regard there is a certain amount of movie-logic that is hard to accept. It’s revealed at one point that Logan’s consciousness has been in the past for 2 days, yet in the future the scene cuts to we find Ian McKellen’s Magneto and Stewart’s Xavier in the same positions we left them in, with time differences left unclear.

Simon Kinberg’s screenplay also does a fantastic job of weaving in and building on themes established in the very first X-Men film and X-Men: First Class with a deft touch. Indeed, viewers with long memories will remember that one of the very first sequences in the franchise’s flagship film sees Stewart’s Xavier rooting around in Magneto’s head for ‘hope’, and that comes full circle here in a superbly acted scene between McAvoy and Stewart, the only meeting between past and future versions of characters. That’s not to mention the matters of self-acceptance and prejudice, both inherent in earlier entries in the series, effectively cropping up here once more. Most impressively, while there is still a satisfying amount of action, the emphasis is always on its characters, and the organic manner in which the story unfolds mean that action sequences are not missed even in long stretches of character interaction.

X-MEN-DAYS-OF-FUTURE-PAST-chess-game

It helps that every single piece of action is in service to the narrative. The future is packed with a slew of mutants both new and familiar, but almost all get ample opportunity to show off their skill-set with Blink (Fan Bingbing) and Shawn Ashmore’s Iceman standing out from the pack. However, Omar Sy’s Bishop is notably underused (and severely depowered from the comics), as is Halle Berry’s Storm. The most memorable action set-piece though transpires in the past, with Evan Peters’ Quicksilver staging an elaborate breakout at the Pentagon. It’s enormously fun to watch, and gives the film a welcome injection of pace in more ways than one. The only minus is that there isn’t more of him, with the lack of a proper explanation for his hasty exit (other than the unsaid snag that his presence would solve a lot of problems very quickly) proving mildly frustrating. All eyes will now be on Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s portrayal of the character in next year’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, and the bar has been set high here.

At the core of Days of Future Past is a quartet of very strong performances from McAvoy, Fassbender, Jackman and Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique, here given a more significant role in what is the best use of the character to date. All do a fantastic job of portraying not only their characters’ complexity, but also the history they all share even though much of it has taken place off-screen or in decade-old movies. When Logan first meets a dejected young Xavier, for instance, you feel his disappointment. When Fassbender’s Magneto talks of lost mutant brothers, you buy into his anger. The performances help fill in some of that narrative tissue, and will be especially rewarding for franchise newcomers. Speaking of franchise newcomers, Peter Dinklage is predictably brilliant as Sentinel-creator Bolivar Trask, utilising his screen time to the fullest.

Striking in its ambition, assured in its execution, and compelling throughout, X-Men: Days of Future Past is comfortably one of the best blockbusters of the year so far and arguably the best instalment of the franchise to date. “We need you to hope again”, muses Stewart’s Xavier, and with the film effectively functioning as a system reset and freeing up story avenues that were previously closed, there is much to be hopeful for.

(4/5)

[jo]

From SuperHeroHype --

X-Men: Days of Future Past Review


Edward Douglas May 13, 2014



X-Men: Days of Future Past ReviewCast:
Hugh Jackman as Logan / Wolverine
James McAvoy as Charles Xavier
Michael Fassbender as Erik Lehnsherr
Jennifer Lawrence as Raven / Mystique
Halle Berry as Storm
Nicholas Hoult as Hank / Beast
Anna Paquin as Rogue
Ellen Page as Kitty Pryde
Peter Dinklage as Dr. Bolivar Trask
Shawn Ashmore as Bobby / Iceman
Omar Sy as Bishop
Evan Peters as Peter / Quicksilver
Josh Helman as Maj. Bill Stryker
Daniel Cudmore as Colossus
Bingbing Fan as Blink
Adan Canto as Sunspot
Booboo Stewart as Warpath
Ian McKellen as Magneto
Patrick Stewart as Professor X
Lucas Till as Havok
Evan Jonigkeit as Toad

Directed by Bryan Singer

Story:
In the near future, mutants are hunted and killed by giant robotic Sentinels, able to modify their techniques to counter any mutant power they face. Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) realizes the only way to put an end to the war is to send someone back in time to stop the event that caused it, the perfect candidate being Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) who was present in 1973 and can have his consciousness transferred back in time to recruit the younger Xavier, Magneto, Mystique and the Beast to stop the birth of the Sentinels at the hands of Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage).

Analysis:
If you've read Chris Claremont and John Byrne's two-issue X-Men story from thirty years back, you already know the general conceit behind the latest installment of Fox's mutant franchise which uses time travel to fix a damaged future, while also giving the fans what might end up being the ultimate X-Men movie.

At first, it may feel like director Bryan Singer is trying to have his cake and eat it too, bringing back many of the actors he hired during his initial run on the series, while continuing what Matthew Vaughn started with "First Class." Like other superhero movies, it's not a direct adaptation of the storyline from the title with obvious changes necessary to make it work, and ultimately, the future (or present day) X-Men are relegated to bookending the continuation of the story about the early days of mutantkind, which is once again tied into actual historic events such as the "revelation" that Magneto may have had something to do with the bullet that struck JFK.

Make no mistake that the reason "X-Men: Days of Future Past" works as well as it does can be attributed directly to the return of Singer behind the camera, not only because he knows the material and characters so well, but also because he brings back the same cinematic flair that made his previous X-movies so grand. Singer know what makes the original comics work with a mix of drama and humor and balancing the mutant battles with soul-searching exposition.

In terms of the latter, Singer brings the best out of the his cast, further expanding on the relationship between the McAvoy-Fassbender Xavier and Magneto, even if it doesn't seem nearly as novel a second time around. When you add Hugh Jackman's Wolverine presence into the mix, he tends to overshadow the rest of his cast, other than maybe Jennifer Lawrence's Mystique as she edges closer to the kick-ass anti-hero from the original trilogy. Her make-up effects are vastly improved over "First Class," as are those used to turn Nicholas Hoult into Beast, Singer even throwing in an homage to "The Wolf Man," a clear inspiration for the character.

With so many returning mutants in "Days of Future Past," one wouldn't expect there to be much room for introducing new characters though it's done far more organically than the way new mutants were introduced in "The Last Stand." You rarely feel as if you're being hit over the head with a lot of unnecessary characters even with the mix of familiar faces with new mutants during the opening battle sequence. (The one exception is a Vietnam scene of Mystique gathering new mutants for her cause, although some of these may be set-up for the next chapter.)

Easily, the new character that stands out and will win audiences over is Evan Peters as Quicksilver, a brash lightning-fast upstart the team calls upon to help Magneto escape from his jail miles below The Pentagon. Peters brings just the right amount of humor to his scenes, particularly one that is easily one of the movie's best moments.

Yet, something overall still feels slightly off about the "Days of Future Past." Maybe it's just one's desire to see more interaction between Stewart and McKellen–the best thing about Singer's earlier X-films–or wanting to feel more for their X-Men as a whole. Or maybe it's the uncharacteristically drab and forgettable performance by Peter Dinklage as Sentinel mastermind Boliver Trask. These all seem like minor things once the third act explodes with both timelines of mutants fighting against their own era's Sentinels, a burst of big screen action that more than makes up for some of the moments that get dragged down with scenes necessary to explain things. (Make sure to stay to the very end of the credits for a teaser for the next movie in the franchise.)

The Bottom Line:
A perfectly fine follow-up to "X-Men: First Class" and a nice way to offer some closure for Singer's earlier X-men movies, "Days of Future Past" does a good job upping the ante on the superhero movie while at the same time learning how much harder that is while trying to get out from under the shadow of "The Avengers."

Rating: 8/10

[jo]

From someone who has a full appreciation of the entire series and their comic book origin...and has a strong feel of what works with cinema or not. Drew McWeeny ( who used to write as "Moriarty" for AIN'T IT COOL NEWS) writes his review ( long!) for HITFIX --

www.hitfix.com/motion-captured/review-x-men-days-of-future-past-gives-the-franchise-a-new-lease-on-life

Review: 'X-Men: Days of Future Past' gives the franchise a new lease on life


HitFix

B+




Singer's in fine form as he returns to the series he helped create

By Drew McWeeny Tuesday, May 13, 2014 12:20 PM



Over the last month, I've re-watched every entry in the series that Fox has produced since "X-Men" in 2000 as my kids worked their way through the films for the first time. What I found most interesting about the revisit is how my reactions to the films as they were being released and my reactions to them now aren't really the same. Each film was on a specific point in the larger continuity of comic book related movies, and the only way to judge them was how they stacked up to everything else that was being done in the genre at that time. Now, though, looking back at them all is illuminating, especially since it feels like "X-Men: Days Of Future Past" is the end of everything up to this point and the beginning of whatever comes next.

One thing has been very clear since this series began: while they are drawing on comic continuity for suggestions, they have not been bound by any particular rules of adaptation. In fact, they have almost exclusively altered things. I don't think you can point at any particular run of the series and see a direct correlation between what's onscreen and what was on the page. Sure, "X2" and "X-Men: The Last Stand" nodded to the "Dark Phoenix" storyline, but barely. I would find it a little ridiculous to actually call those films an adaptation because of how loosely they line up to the motivations or the characterizations of the books.

That's fine, of course. I think the only way to truly build a film franchise that works on its own is to do what they've done and try to do something that has its own arc, its own internal logic, its own voice. One of the inevitable side effects of making a film like "Days Of Future Past" where past folds into present is that you almost have to look at how this works to set everything that's come before into a new context, and the success or failure of the film is predicated in part on how well it binds everything into a coherent whole.

While this is no more slavish in the way it incorporates story ideas and character beats than any of the earlier films in the franchise, it feels like the single most successful attempt to pull the shape of one of the beloved comic stories into the film world. It also feels like Bryan Singer has finally figured out how to shoot an action scene where the X-Men actually look and feel like the X-Men, and where the fantastic is handled the right way.

Singer was certainly at the forefront of the current glut of comic book movies, but looking back at those first two films now, it feels to me like he was never fully comfortable with the things he was shooting. Part of that came from Tom Rothman and 20th Century Fox. Rothman was famously dead set against many of the trappings of the comic book, including Sentinels and the original costume designs, and one of the reasons that it seemed so hard for them to commit to the most fantastic elements of the series in those first few films was because of Rothman's influence.

Continuity has always been a little iffy in this series, and if you try to somehow align the ending of "The Wolverine" with the start of this film, or you are worried about how Professor Xavier got from his location at the end of "The Last Stand" to where we find him in this film, you will probably drive yourself crazy. I admire the almost defiant way they don't even try to explain many of these things. They are so focused on telling this particular story that it feels like they don't want to waste the time or energy trying to fill in those details.

As the film begins, we are in a dark future where mutants have been hunted almost to the extinction point and where even regular humans have seen their numbers decimated by the terrifying Sentinels brought to life by Trask Industries. We see how the last remaining members of the group once called the X-Men are struggling to survive and stay a few steps ahead of their pursuers. Kitty Pryde has become a key part of that struggle, using her ability to project someone else's consciousness back in time to constantly send Bishop (Omar Sy) back to just before each attack so he can warn them and they can move locations, making it so each attack didn't happen. We're shown how this works in a tight, succinct opening sequence, and it works both as an exciting action beat and a set-up for what has to happen to drive the remainder of the movie.

The older versions of Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) have an idea for how they might manage to put an end to the cycle, but it's going to require Kitty Pryde to do something she's never done before, and it's going to push Wolverine (Hugh Jackman, who somehow looks better now than he did when he first played the character 14 years ago) to the breaking point, even in a best-case scenario. Sending someone's consciousness back decades will push any mind past what it can sustain, but thanks to Logan's healing factor, he should be able to recover and somehow bear the pain long enough to make a permanent change in the timeline, one that will permanently erase the Sentinels completely. In order for that to happen, though, Logan is going to have to undo the timeline that already exists, and that involves getting both Charles (James McAvoy) and Erik (Michael Fassbender) to work together. It also involves finding and stopping Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) as she crosses the moral line that permanently pushes her into the shadows.

It sounds complicated, but one of the things that works so well about the script by Simon Kinberg (working from a story that was hatched with Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn, who pumped such vital new energy into the series with "X-Men: First Class") is that it makes it all feel simple. You get how they're going to do what they're going to do, you get what the stakes are, and you get a strong sense of the ticking clock. This is the last time Kitty will be able to do this. If Wolverine fails, there is no more reset button. Everyone will die, and there will be no way back for any of them. With all of that in motion, Wolverine makes the jump, and the film effectively becomes a sequel to "X-Men: First Class" for the majority of its running time.

I like that the majority of the film deals with the younger cast. While I like the cast they put together for the first three films, I think McAvoy, Fassbender, and Lawrence brought a huge new energy to the series, and picking up with their stories is, I think, the most compelling place for the films to go at this point. Sharp-eyed fans have been wondering for months how Charles is walking again since we saw him catch a bullet in the base of his spine at the end of "First Class." Rest assured, there is a reason, and while I don't quite follow the logic, it's obviously meant to work as a metaphor for addiction and the way it sidelines someone. Hank (Nicholas Hoult) has also found a way to suppress his Beastly nature, but it's imperfect, and from the moment Logan finds the two of them, he's poking at this fragile peace they've tried to make for themselves.


The one weak link, script-wise, is Bolivar Trask, played here by Peter Dinklage. It feels like Dinklage does as much as he can with the role, but there's really no weight to him as an antagonist. At this point, the franchise has pretty much thrown one movie after another at us in which there's somebody who wants to cure/exterminate/subjugate mutants simply because they're mutants, and this one's no different. Trask is a military contractor who has the big idea of developing a technology that can not only identify a mutant but that can target them exclusively, and it feels like they should have gone deeper in terms of giving him some sort of personal investment, some reason he decided to create the Sentinels. It doesn't help that we've got a young version of Bill Stryker, who has inexplicably become the most important person in the entire X-Men universe, running around and learning his hatred/fear of mutants here. I may be tired of Stryker at this point after having seen him show up over and over, but at least there's some attempt made to motivate him, and in this film, we see the seeds of what would eventually become the Weapon X program.

When you pack a film with dozens of super-powered characters, not all of them are going to get to play out a full dramatic arc in the film, and it's safe to say that there are a lot of characters who just bounce by in the film without us really getting to know them. I was a huge fan of "The New Mutants" during its original run, and the Bill Sienkiewicz era of that book is still one of my favorite runs of any comic, so seeing Sunspot show up, even if it is just for a moment, was a kick. I would imagine there will be a lot of comic fans who get excited to see this mutant or that mutant go by. What's nice is that even the characters like Blink (Bingbing Fan) or Warpath (Booboo Stewart) or Bishop get to show off a little bit of what they can do before they are hustled offscreen for the rest of the film, and characters like Colossus (Daniel Cudmore) and Iceman (Shawn Ashmore) are closer here than they've ever been before to their comic-book counterparts. There are a number of characters who barely register, like Havok (Lucas Till), who had a much larger role in the last movie than he does in this one, or like Toad (Evan Jonigkeit), who is immediately interesting on a visual level but who basically is an unusual extra and little else.

The new character who makes the strongest impression is Quicksilver, played here by Evan Peters. He's recruited by Logan and Professor Xavier to help in a jailbreak. The way the scene is shot and staged is dynamic and interesting and a very funny use of his powers. This sequence serves as a challenge to not only Joss Whedon, who is also using Quicksilver in next summer's "Avengers: Age Of Ultron," but also to whoever ultimately makes a "Flash" movie. There is a real sense of play to the Quicksilver scenes, and when he leaves the film, it's a shame. I'm still not sure about the visual design of him, but Peters does a nice job of playing him as a sort of gleeful weirdo, and I hope they bring him back for "X-Men Apocalypse."

This is ultimately about three people and the tensions between them that threaten to make it impossible for Wolverine to save mutant-kind. McAvoy and Fassbender play this like they're playing Shakespeare, and because of the way Jennifer Lawrence has approached her portrayal of Mystique, the entire franchise now plays different in hindsight. These are people who have been hurt by one another, and when they lash out, it is a dangerous situation. The best scenes in the movie are the moments where Charles and Erik struggle to find a way to relate to one another and to not let the hurt run their lives. Yes, I dig the action scenes in the film, but the reason I feel like the series has new life is because these actors are treating the material so seriously. The fear, the hurt, the doubt… these are the things driving them, and they make the emotional material feel raw and real.

By the time the film wraps up, it's obvious that this is the end of the first major act in the history of "X-Men" on film. Some major adjustments have been made to the timeline, and suddenly at least one of our heroes isn't burdened by the same angst that has driven him for so long now. Certainly, this doesn't mean they live in a permanent state of acceptance, but they can work towards that, and the series can go pretty much anywhere now. Do yourself a favor. Avoid spoilers. While I think the last act of this film pretty undoes everything Logan learned in "The Wolverine," I don't mind. The series needed this transfusion, and for the moment, it's exciting to see how far this franchise (and the genre as a whole) has changed in the 14 years that these movies have been in production. Even if Singer never makes one of these again, he can leave knowing that he delivered something that showed real growth, something that makes me think this series has plenty of stories left to tell.

[jo]

www.ign.com/articles/2014/05/13/x-men-days-of-future-past-review

X-Men: Days of Future Past Review

User_image
Jim Vejvoda

Tomorrow is Yesterday.

May 13, 2014 Some SPOILERS follow.

Loosely adapted from the classic Chris Claremont comic storyline of the same name, X-Men: Days of Future Past sees the big screen’s original X-Men (Wolverine, Professor X, Storm, Kitty Pryde, Iceman, Colossus, and even their one-time enemy Magneto) and their latest members (Bishop, Warpath, Sunspot, and Blink) living in a dystopian future where the massive mutant-hunting Sentinels have practically exterminated mutants, incarcerating the surviving ones in concentration camps with the humans who helped them. The only way for the X-Men to survive is to send one of their own back in time telepathically in order to stop the assassination that paved the way for the mutant holocaust.

As you likely know, the comics had the older Kitty transfer her consciousness into her younger self in order to warn her teammates. In the film, the initial argument is that only Professor X is a strong enough telepath to do the job, but since he can’t physically handle such a long trip back the mission falls to Wolverine.

Waking up in his younger body in 1973, Logan seeks out the younger Xavier (a bedraggled James McAvoy) who has become a shambling version of the man we met in


X-Men: First Class. Taking a page from Bruce Wayne’s Dark Knight Rises playbook, Charles has spent the better part of the last decade moping around his mansion in his robe and pajamas brooding about what he’s lost. The only one who’s still with him in the now closed, dilapidated school is Beast (Nicholas Hoult), whose miracle serum for Xavier’s paralysis has robbed Charles of his psychic powers. But that’s fine by Charles, who no longer wants to hear all the voices and suffering and who has lost hope since losing his “sister” Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) to Magneto’s (Michael Fassbender) side.

Mystique becomes the key to changing the future as she’s out to assassinate Sentinels creator Dr. Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage; in the comics the target was Senator Robert Kelly). In order to help them track down Mystique, Logan, Xavier, and Beast will need help from Magneto – imprisoned at the bottom of the Pentagon for the role he allegedly played in the JFK assassination – and a thieving young speedster named Peter Maximoff (Evan Peters), aka Quicksilver. From there it becomes a race against time to stop Mystique, restore young Xavier’s hope, and prevent the X-Men of the future from being wiped out.

This is a very plot heavy sci-fi/time travel tale with lots of moving parts, so it’s a credit to both director Bryan Singer and screenwriter Simon Kinberg that they balance all those elements with relatively little confusion. There are some clunky moments where you can feel the gears of the plot machinery churning, but overall Days of Future Past does a great job in keeping the storytelling concise and clear.

It does get a bit repetitive at times when characters have to recap the whole "in the bleak future" scenario, a decision clearly made so general audiences remain clear on why everyone’s doing what they’re doing. It’s also kind of amazing that the younger characters take the whole “I’m from the future” thing pretty much on face value, but I suppose when you’re surrounded by super-powered mutants then a guy saying he’s from the future doesn’t sound all that crazy.

As with the best Star Trek movies, Days of Future Past gives each of its core crew of characters something important to do. It’s pretty clever how the story manages to make the movie’s biggest stars – particularly Lawrence, who had not yet done Hunger Games or won an Oscar when she signed on to star in three X-Men films – integral to the plot. Xavier’s arc from self-pity to the hopeful leader embodied by Patrick Stewart is moving, and while the overall story is grim it's not devoid of humor. Yes, Days of Future Past can be amusing at times, with much of the humor stemming from Logan’s Back to the Future-style scenario.

The movie’s biggest surprise is actually the character that’s been the greatest object of scorn online: Quicksilver. Yes, Quicksilver’s not only awesome here, but he pretty much steals the show at one point. Chalk it up to yet another example to not judge a book by its cover, or in this case a character by his publicity shots. It's also surprising how mundane Dinklage’s Bolivar Trask turns out to be. He may be played by an awesome actor, but Trask never manages to be that compelling a villain despite the huge stakes hinging on his survival.

The film's action sequences are well-done and engaging, from its opening scene of the future X-Men falling to the Sentinels to the Paris standoff through to the climactic battle in Washington D.C. But the standout set-piece is the Pentagon prison break sequence, which nicely balances humor, visual effects, character, and tension.

Is Days of Future Past a game-changing, transcendent entry in the comic book movie genre the way The Dark Knight and Captain America: The Winter Soldier were? No, but it’s a solid movie that completes the mission of redeeming the tarnished X-Men film franchise begun by First Class and continued in The Wolverine.

X-Men: Days of Future Past also allows for the series to be re-set in the wake of the disappointing X-Men: The Last Stand even as it raises many big questions about where the X-Men, past and future, can go from here.



The Verdict

X-Men: Days of Future Past is the most ambitious entry in the franchise and also the most rewarding, allowing fans to see the casts of both the original trilogy and First Class join forces in one action-packed, high-stakes, and surprisingly witty adventure film. Professor X asks at one point if the past can be reworked to alter the future. In the case of the X-Men movie franchise, the answer is yes.


8.8

Great


The epic and exciting X-Men: Days of Future Past is the biggest & best entry in the franchise since X2. RT

Jim Vejvoda 13 May 2014

[jo]

Only 29 reviews have been submitted to ROTTEN TOMATOES.

It seems many of the reviews are awaiting the lifting of the general embargo ( when the movie finally opens) but at the moment, the movie is basking in all its excellent superhero hype --

www.rottentomatoes.com/m/x_men_days_of_future_past/

93%, with 27 Fresh and 2 Rotten smiley-happy036

Many of course expect this rather high rating to go down as another 200 or so ratings come in -- but it looks like it will be certified FRESH fairly soon, given the current trend.

Jo

[jo]

From THE ECONOMIST

www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2014/05/new-film-x-men-days-future-past

New film: "X-Men: Days of Future Past"

X-rated

May 20th 2014, 15:12 by F.S.




MERGERS can be tricky. The biggest challenge facing "X-Men: Days of Future Past", which brings together the illustrious cast of the first batch of films—Sir Ian McKellen as Magneto, Sir Patrick Stewart as Professor X, et al—with those of the 2011 reboot, "X-Men: First Class"—Michael Fassbender as a young Magneto, Jennifer Lawrence as Raven/Mystique and James McAvoy as a disillusioned Charles Xavier—was always going to be how to slot what are essentially two different stories into just over two hours, without doing a disservice to one era, or indeed both.

On the whole, it succeeds. It is still rather too complicated at points, and suffers from an imbalance all mergers fear, where one side—in this case the "future"—is less well treated. But this is a thrilling, often whimsically funny and very finely acted comic-book film. It is in this future that the film starts: a dystopian nightmare where menacingly realised robotic fighters known as Sentinels have ravaged the earth, bringing mutants to the brink of extinction. Long-time enemies Professor X and Magneto have joined forces, together with Storm (Halle Berry), Bishop (Omar Sy), Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) and others. They send back Wolverine (Hugh Jackman, Herculean as ever), or more specifically his mind, to change the precise events of the past that led to the Sentinels' creation. It's a nifty time-travel device that plonks us in the middle of a gleefully stereotyped 1970s mise–en–scène, replete with sideburns, flares and even a rather pot-bellied President Nixon. It's tribute to the allure of the 70s that fleeting scenes of the future feel more like weighty exposition than a story in their own right.


The story comes from a 1981 two-issue special of the comic series, in which it is actually Ms Pryde who goes back to rewrite history. No doubt studio execs felt that Mr Jackman would be more of a draw on billboards. Whatever the motive for the switch, Mr Jackman makes it work. His charisma is crucial to persuading both his fellow X-Men, and the audience, of the plot's central premise, particularly since that premise can feel muddled at times, overcrowded with cameos and plot strands and superfluous references to Vietnam.

The key, as the studio Marvel knows, is to concentrate on the characters. A high number of top-notch performances enliven what could have been just a run-of-the-mill franchise flick. Mr Fassbender, whom viewers first see unable to exploit his metal-manipulating talents imprisoned in a metal-free bunker (something to do with a JFK assassination conspiracy, naturally), is all simmering rage and misplaced mutant pride; as a teary drug-addled Xavier, Mr McAvoy brings much-needed emotion to a plot that could easily have been top-heavy with action. There's so much gravitas here, especially in the Stewart/McKellen/McAvoy/Fassbender face-offs, that you sometimes feel you're watching the Royal Shakespeare Company rather than a 3D blockbuster.

Also worthy of special mention is the all-too-brief appearance of the super-speedy Quicksilver, played by Evan Peters, who manages to upstage even Mr McAvoy and Mr Fassbender in a visually stunning slo-mo sequence where he rearranges bullets with his headphones on. Quicksilver will reappear in Joss Whedon's "The Avengers 2", due out next year.

Bryan Singer, director of two previous X-Men films, has done a clever thing: he has managed not to take himself or the whole time-travel minefield too seriously, yet has taken full advantage of the unusually high calibre of his cast. It's complex, certainly, but this latest X-outing is still a great deal of fun.

"X-Men: Days of Future Past" is released in Britain on May 22nd and in America on May 23rd

I thought this review from such a publication as THE ECONOMIST ( which is a very well-respected publication on international business and world affairs information) is insightful on the success of this film.

he has managed not to take himself or the whole time-travel minefield too seriously, yet has taken full advantage of the unusually high calibre of his cast. It's complex, certainly, but this latest X-outing is still a great deal of fun.

I hope Hugh gets to see this review, as he is supposed to be a reader of THE ECONOMIST, according to that recent cover story from The Hollywood Reporter


Jo

[jo]

From Richard Roeper --

‘X-Men: Days of Future Past’: Sometimes confounding, always exciting


By RICHARD ROEPER Movie Columnist May 21, 2014 4:20PM

‘X-MEN: DAYS
OF FUTURE PAST’ ★★★1⁄2

Logan/Wolverine Hugh Jackman

Charles Xavier James McAvoy

Erik Lehnsherr Michael Fassbender

Raven/Mystique Jennifer Lawrence



20th Century Fox presents a film directed by Bryan Singer and written by Simon Kinberg. Running time: 130 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for sequences of intense sci-fi violence and action, some suggestive material, nudity and language). Opens Friday at local theaters.


Updated: May 21, 2014 9:41PM



Say what you will about Richard Nixon, he’s the only character to have a speaking role in “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” and “X-Men: Days of Future Past.”

If only John Cusack had played Nixon in both movies!

The weird thing is, Nixon’s actually less of a caricature in the “X-Men” movie than he was in the somber biopic.

While you wrap your mind around that, I’m still processing all the plot machinations and a timeline with some real head-scratchers in this sometimes illogical (even within the X-Men universe), periodically confounding, occasionally profound and consistently exciting sci-fi thriller.

Nearly a decade and a half after the release of the first big-screen “X-Men” adventure, the franchise has been energized. For a while there, it felt like this complex and densely populated franchise had run its course. (Hello, “X-Men Origins: Wolverine.”) But thanks to the first-class special effects, a star-packed cast, screenwriters who know just when to inject some self-aware comic relief without getting too jokey and director Bryan Singer’s skilled and sometimes electrifying visuals, “X-Men: Days of Future Past” is flat-out big-time, big summer movie fun.

That said, if you start quizzing me about every character nuance that surfaces in this chapter, every script-flipping plot development and “Hey look!” cameo, I’d probably get booed right out of Comic-Con.

Here we go. “Days of Future Passed” opens in an apocalyptic present day, with Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page), Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), Storm (Halle Berry) and a few other mutants fighting valiantly but badly outmatched by the seemingly unstoppable machine-beasts known as Sentinels, who were specifically designed to take them down. It appears as if the mutants (and any human who sympathizes with the mutants) are on the verge of extinction.

At this point in the “X-Men” timeline, Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) seem to be old friends, battle-weary and wondering why they wasted all those years at odds. After another close call with the Sentinels and with time running out, the two great titans gather with a few of the aforementioned mutants as well as Hugh Jackman’s Logan/Wolverine. (It’s a good thing Jackman remains in remarkable shape because his character has been bouncing around all over the place through the course of all these “X-Men” films, and we pretty much believe that’s the ageless Wolverine we’re looking at no matter where we find him.)

Apparently the X-Men are fans of the “Terminator” movies, because they come up with a time-travel solution to their dilemma: Kitty will send Logan back to 1974 (all of a sudden those sideburns don’t look so ridiculous!), when Jennifer Lawrence’s Raven/Mystique killed the architect of the Sentinel program, unwittingly setting off the chain of events that led to their almost-certain demise nearly a half-century later. Yes, it’s the old, “Let’s alter the time-space continuum” approach, which inevitably leads to some potholes in any plot.

Logan’s mission: to reunite the younger versions of Professor X (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender), get them to believe he’s a visitor from the future and persuade them to stop Mystique.

(At this point I’d like to encourage you to see this movie in regular-D and not 3-D. As usual, the 3-D effects aren’t all that great, and as you no doubt have surmised by now, there’s more than enough in this plot to keep your head spinning.)

The 1970s section takes up the bulk of “Days of Future Past,” and to great effect. Director Singer (and his cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel) switch from the high-level video-game look of the modern sequences to a style that resembles the movies of the time. (Singer even shows us some key moments at public events as witnessed through the home-movie lenses of bystanders.)

Peter Dinklage is magnetic as Dr. Bolivar Trask, the scientist who heads up the Sentinel program. Like so many characters in the “X-Men” saga, Trask is either a deeply flawed sorta-good guy who believes he’s doing the right thing, or a villain who actually makes some pretty good points.

There’s not a bad performance in this film (though Jennifer Lawrence doesn’t make as much of a imprint as you might expect, in large part because she’s lost in that Mystique blue most of the time). Jackman does most of the heavy lifting, and he carries the film most of the way.

But even Jackman, Fassbender and McAvoy nearly disappear from the screen during the extended cameo from Peter Maximoff a.k.a. Quicksilver (Evan Peters), who can move much faster than the human (or mutant) eye can comprehend. In one of the most inspired sequences in the film, Singer goes with a bullet-time, super-slow motion style (and a hilariously perfect period-piece hit single) to show us exactly what Peter does in a split-second while everyone else is essentially frozen in place. It’s hard to imagine any audience not applauding at the end of this scene.

“X-Men: Days of Future Past” is a great-looking film with a dozen first-rate actors taking the material seriously but also having fun flexing their superhero powers.

Somehow even the Nixon stuff works.

Email: [e-mail]

[jo]

I thought this review was particularly interesting --

X-Men: Days Of Future Past Review

by Simon Gallagher


20th Century Fox
source // 20th Century Fox

Rating: ★★★★☆

How do you solve a problem like the X-Men continuum? If you’re Bryan Singer, charged with marrying two casts and two timelines in a converging comic book epic, you just sort of don’t. Rather than wasting time attempting to atone for the plot-holes and errors created by the franchise’s careless time-keeping, Singer instead challenges the audience just to accept the film as a by-product of its source material. After all, nobody cares in the comics when details are retconned and origins changed in the same timeline, so why should they when it is translated to screen?

Had Singer got lost in that particularly hopeless quagmire, we would not have got to see this hugely intriguing, highly entertaining affair that trades off some of the socio-cultural tension of First Class to embrace a Godzilla like nuclear age allegory, even with a direct nod to Oppenheimer himself.

Though exposition is initially the over-riding aspect of the first act, that isn’t to the detriment of the film’s pace or more appropriately its ability to captivate the audience, and as the two timelines work on establishing the important story steps, we leap through entertaining set-pieces at a pace. But it never feels like Singer wants to justify his twin casts by trotting out action moments that show off their mutant skills: after all, the characters are all familiar now, and this is not The Expendables.

Singer clearly cares a lot about his characters, including those who he’s taken control of from Matthew Vaughn, and though the cast is unprecedented and the requirements to satisfyingly share focus likewise, none of the main characters feel like diluted versions of what we’ve seen so far. Some of the acting is a little uneven – predominantly from the perpetually frowny Jennifer Lawrence – but the sombre tone is lifted nicely by some smart gags (mostly from unlikely clown prince Wolverine, and the surprisingly excellent Quicksilver).

In some ways, Days Of Future Past feels like the Forest Gump of X-Men movies, bouncing through characters and showcasing their abilities and historical events in a similar sort of knowing way, and though there was infinite potential to over-stuff the plot with mutants who just aren’t necessary (the reason Nightcrawler was apparently left out), the result is well balanced.

And for all the strong set-piece moments and the successful gags, it is the balance in the end that deserves the most praise: yes, the X-Men timeline is now further confused, and attempting to keep track of it is a quick way to a migraine, but there is clearly a diligent desire to give both casts the right amount of focus. At times it does feel like Magneto and Mystique have their own spin-offs within the film, while Professor X and Hank McCoy enjoy a sort of quasi-Withnail And I odd couple relationship, but the way the central plot pulls everything together is an impressive feat.

That central premise, of averting a war to end mutant and human kind by going back in time to wipe out the trigger assassination of Peter Dinklage’s Frankenstein-like scientist Bolivar Trask by Mystique (whose DNA is stolen to create the new super-Sentinels) is brilliantly engaging, even if the script is full of head-slapping idiot moves at times. But that’s sort of the point, as the older mutants wistfully say from their apocalyptic perch – “we were young/foolish/impulsive” – so you can just about forgive Magneto’s self-serving motivation hops, and Mystique’s blinkered determination. And besides, thinking too much about anything isn’t really to be encouraged.

Admittedly some of the lesser characters have been compromised on slightly: Colossus is a muscle-bound mute, Sunspot doesn’t really matter and Rogue’s cut leaves a plot hole that Singer attempts to address by changing the power capabilities of another mutant so nobody notices. It doesn’t work. But that was somewhat inevitable, and just as some of the X-Men have had to make sacrifices to the survival of their species, so too have some of the actors.

The new actors range from living furniture (like the younger mutants of the future mostly) to scene-stealing excellence (Peter Dinklage, of course), and though there wasn’t a great deal of room in the already swollen cast, the new Bolivar Trask cuts a fine Oppenheimer-like villain with his enforcer Stryker in tow.

It might be muddled and confusing to follow unless you know your X-Men lore, but Singer has achieved something that shouldn’t have been possible in meshing the two timelines together, and while it’s very obvious that some things (like all of The Last Stand, apparently) have been jettisoned the end result is something that feels both connected and stand-alone simultaneously. And though it’s not at all probable, the film also opens the possibility that both timelines could now continue in future sequels simultaneously without more accusations of timeline fudging.

It is perhaps best to leave with the idea of Days Of Future Past as the storm that was needed to clear the skies: the First Class timeline didn’t need it, but has been enriched by the added depth in Xavier’s character and can continue on from the short teasing post-credits scene, but it crucially allowed Singer to mend the errors of Last Stand and give his own cast a fitting, fan-baiting farewell.



X-Men: Days Of Future Past is out now.

Read more at whatculture.com/film/x-men-days-future-past-review.php#vHjrGlsE5O5qCreR.99

I have read quite a few reviews -- there seems to be a consensus that Hugh acquits himself particularly well, better than the much-ballyhooed First Class cast. Someone even called this a Wolverine movie - LOL. I think when you have had the chance to see the movie, it will be much clearer why he seems to "steal" the movie once again ( Quicksilver was good for only a few scenes !).

Jo

[jo]

This is the ASSOCIATED PRESS review, which will usually be carried around the USA and worldwide...and will likely be read on mass media press.

Review: 'X-Men' another reason for mutant pride


DAVID ROONEY, The Associated Press
Posted: Wednesday, May 21, 2014, 5:50 PM



LOS ANGELES (AP) - Matthew Vaughn and a superb cast reinvigorated the franchise with cool retro style and globe-trotting intrigue in 2011's "X-Men: First Class." The series' original director, Bryan Singer, continues that momentum in the vigorously entertaining "X-Men: Days of Future Past." While it's more dramatically diffuse than the reboot and lacks a definitive villain, the new film is shot through with a stirring reverence for the Marvel Comics characters and their universe. And it ups the stakes by threatening nothing less than the genocide of the mutant population, among them faces old and new.

Hardcore followers will have a geek field day dissecting the challenging pretzel logic of writer-producer Simon Kinberg's screenplay, from a story by Jane Goldman, Kinberg and Vaughn, who had originally planned to direct. The central premise comes from the 1981 Uncanny X-Men comic "Days of Future Past," in which Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) uses her consciousness transference powers to go back from a dystopian future and rewrite history.

Echoes of the Holocaust have rippled throughout the series, and Singer opens with present-day scenes of a desolate, burnt-out New York, where mutants and mutant-sympathizing humans have been rounded up in internment camps.

Jumping to a similarly devastated Moscow, we watch Kitty, Iceman (Shawn Ashmore) and a small band of mutants face an attack from the deadly Sentinels. Dropped in from airborne carrier ships, these robots are designed to track and destroy the mutant gene. They resemble towering, muscular versions of the aliens from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, constructed out of magnetic plates that allow them to change shape and adapt to whatever force is unleashed against them.


The mutants escape and regroup in the rubble of an ancient Chinese monastery with Professor X (Patrick Stewart), Magneto (Ian McKellen), Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) and Storm (Halle Berry). The movie is missing an explanation of how traditional adversaries Professor X and Magneto reached a collaborative truce. But within the elastic boundaries of comic-book mythology that seems no big deal, and it's nice to see their bromance rekindled.

Threatened with extinction, the mutant holdouts hatch a plan to return to the post-Vietnam Paris Peace Accord of 1973, when Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) killed Dr. Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), a U.S. military scientist developing the Sentinels program. Mystique was captured and experimented on, with the transformative powers of her DNA tapped to perfect the Sentinels.

Wolverine's ability to heal makes him the only one able to withstand the 40-year time jump. Kinberg's script milks welcome humor out of sending the least diplomatic of the X-Men back to convince the younger Professor X (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) to join forces and stop the assassination that triggered anti-mutant hysteria. Having Wolverine awaken on a waterbed staring at a lava lamp and listening to Roberta Flack lightens the mood at just the right moment.

Looking Christ-like with his '70s mop and scruffy beard, McAvoy's Charles Xavier couldn't be less like that of Stewart, with his steely but benevolent authority. Disillusioned, Charles is addicted to a serum produced by Beast (Nicholas Hoult) that gives him the use of his legs but strips him of his telepathic powers. Professor X is the one character whose younger and older selves actually meet, in a scene that is among the movie's most emotionally resonant.

There are also affecting moments when Wolverine encounters Major Bill Stryker (Josh Helman), triggering traumatic flash-forward memories of his painful physical transformation and his love for Jean Grey.

Perhaps the film's standout sequence features the much-discussed new addition of Peter Maximoff, aka Quicksilver ("American Horror Story" regular Evan Peters). The rights dispute that kept the character out of previous films has been resolved, allowing him to appear in both the "X-Men" and "Avengers" franchises, albeit without cross-referencing. His super-speed skills are conveyed by shooting at 3,000 frames per second, notably when Peter runs around the walls during a fabulously staged Pentagon break-in, whimsically accompanied by Jim Croce singing "Time in a Bottle." With his silver shag, Pink Floyd T-shirt and mischievous sense of humor, Peter is a terrific character who breathes playfulness into the movie, and many will be sorry he doesn't stick around longer.

Fassbender's young Erik/Magneto was the revelation of First Class, and the actor again shows riveting self-possession and charisma to burn - not least when he's standing astride the roof of a moving train in bellbottoms while tearing up railway tracks. But this movie belongs to Jackman and Lawrence.

Logan/Wolverine has possibly never been more compelling. In his seventh turn in the role, Jackman brings powerful physicality, laconic humor and depths of sorrow beneath his gruffness that make him an unusually nuanced figure for a sci-fi action movie.

Switching from her honorable Hunger Games heroine into badass mode with supreme ease, Lawrence is sensational, whether slinking around in Mystique's body-hugging blue reptilian skin, displaying the shape-shifter's balletic fight skills or adopting seductive human form. Her romantic friendship with Charles, stretching back to their childhoods, adds poignancy to Mystique's struggle, notably in a wonderful airport scene during which Professor X gets inside her head via random people in the terminal.

It's hard to imagine fanboys having too much to grumble about here, as Singer has pulled together an ambitious, suspenseful screen chapter that secures a future for the franchise while facilitating continued reinvention. Audiences should sit tight through the end credits crawl for an enigmatic signoff scene that provides a taste of the next installment, X-Men: Apocalypse.

"X-Men," a 20th Century Fox release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for "sequences of intense sci-fi violence and action, some suggestive material, nudity and language." Running time: 131 minutes.

___

MPAA rating definition for PG-13: Parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.


DAVID ROONEY
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Read more at www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/movies/20140521_ap_913e21b604ed48969e360586bcd9837e.html#sVujokp7eVJsFMLV.99