Marvel

In my 2014 review I said I had mixed feelings about a film reaching back to undo previous films, and that I’d probably be arguing with myself about it for a while. Twelve years on the argument resolved itself in a way I genuinely didn’t expect. The reset happened, and then almost nobody used it.

That’s the thing that jumps out now. Days of Future Past ends with the timeline repaired: mansion standing, Jean and Scott alive, Xavier back at his desk, The Last Stand quietly erased. Then Logan arrives in 2017 and that world is simply gone. No mansion, no school, the mutants dead or scattered, and a future every bit as bleak as the one this film spent two hours preventing. It doesn’t argue with the reset or explain its way around it. It just declines to be in that continuity at all, and it’s the best film the franchise ever made, so nobody complained. I wrote about Logan at the time as its own thing and barely mentioned this film, which was the right instinct even though I couldn’t have told you why. Logan works precisely because it isn’t carrying anybody else’s continuity on its back. Apocalypse turned up in between and managed to make the timeline messier rather than clearer, which was becoming the house style by then.

Which accidentally turned it into something more useful

Here’s the consequence nobody planned, and it’s why this film matters more to December than it did to 2014. If Days of Future Past had held, the Fox X-Men would now be one continuous timeline with a patch in the middle. Because it didn’t hold, because Logan went one way and Apocalypse went another and none of it reconciles with anything, the whole Fox run ended up being what it always secretly was, which is a set of branches rather than a line.

Deadpool & Wolverine eventually made that official, treating the Fox films as one more universe among many rather than a history that needed tidying up. In fairness that’s the only honest reading of a continuity which never once added up, and the first Deadpool was already breaking the frame years before anyone formalised it. So the repair job was real, the franchise stopped caring about it almost immediately, and the failure of the repair turned out to be more productive than its success would have been.

The popular theory now is that this film explains how Stewart and McKellen walk back on screen in December, since it already established that this franchise can move a mind through time and rewrite what happened. I don’t buy it, and the rewatch made me less convinced rather than more. What this film does is time travel inside one timeline: one history, edited. That’s a completely different operation to pulling actors out of a defunct continuity and dropping them into a live one, which is a multiverse move, and this film has no concept of parallel universes anywhere in it. Using it as the explanation means retrofitting a mechanism it doesn’t contain. My honest guess is that Marvel isn’t going to explain it and doesn’t need to, because the groundwork for characters crossing between universes got laid thoroughly elsewhere and December can simply use it.

The two-cast trick is the actual legacy

This film’s real contribution is smaller and much more interesting than the time travel, and it’s the part I underrated in 2014 when I called it something I’d been sceptical about and ended up enjoying most. It proved audiences will accept two casts playing the same characters in the same film without the story collapsing.

Doomsday is attempting exactly that at a far larger scale: multiple casts, multiple franchises, decades of separate continuity, all in one film. The reason that sounds feasible rather than absurd is that Days of Future Past did the small version first and it worked. McAvoy and Stewart in one film. Fassbender and McKellen in one film. Nobody was confused, nobody walked out, and the reviews at the time treated it as the franchise’s recovery rather than as a gimmick. Get that wrong and you have a mess on your hands. This is the proof it can be done, and it’s held up far better as a proof than as a plot.

McAvoy’s Charles is still the best performance in the run and I’d say it harder now than I did then. The broken 1973 version, walking because he’s medicated the telepathy away, choosing to move at the cost of being able to hear anybody, is the most interesting thing anyone has done with this character on screen. It’s a genuinely good idea about what that power would cost a person, and McAvoy plays the recovery as work rather than as a switch being flicked. Across everything I’ve rewatched for this project, that first act is the sequence I’d most want to show someone who thinks these films are just people in costumes hitting each other.

And the Pentagon kitchen is still the best scene in the film. Twelve years and a lot of imitators later, nothing has bettered it. What makes it last is that it isn’t a power demonstration, it’s a joke with a character inside it, built by somebody who sat down and thought properly about what that room would look like from his side of it. The franchise had a hundred chances to do that kind of thinking about other powers and mostly couldn’t be bothered. Fifteen minutes of screen time, walks off with the entire film, still true.

I gave it 3.5 or 4 in 2014 and I’d leave it exactly there, which is worth saying because plenty of things in this rewatch have moved. It’s not the best Fox X-Men film. It might well be the most useful one. It adapted the biggest story in the comics without embarrassing itself, put both generations of the cast on screen and made that feel natural rather than like a stunt, and demonstrated something about audience tolerance that the entire current strategy is now leaning on. The Sentinels remain the franchise’s best villain, and there’s something quietly funny about the most frightening antagonist in twenty-six years of X-Men films being a robot that wins by copying you.

Watch this one for the two-cast material rather than the time travel. When Doomsday puts Stewart’s Xavier in a room with people from a completely different studio’s continuity, this is the film that established the audience would go along with it. The rest, the careful repair of a broken timeline, turned out to be a road nobody took. Next in the rewatch is Logan, which is where that becomes very clear indeed, and which I already think is the best thing this franchise ever produced.

In December, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen walk back onto a screen as Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr, twenty-six years after they first did it. That’s the whole reason I’m doing this. I’ve decided to rewatch my way to Avengers: Doomsday: running from now until December, working through everything the film looks like it’s pulling from. And I’m starting here rather than with an MCU film, because the X-Men were always my team and it would feel dishonest to pretend otherwise.

I should be upfront about the lens before I start using it. I don’t watch these as a comic book movie fan. I watch them as an X-Men fan, which is a worse way to watch a film and a much more interesting way to write about one. It means I’ve never once seen any of these without the version in my head running alongside. The Dark Phoenix Saga. Days of Future Past. The Mutant Massacre. Some of the Savage Land material. Those stories are extraordinarily well built and every film in this run is competing with them whether it wants to or not, so my love for these comes with an asterisk. I spend a lot of the runtime thinking about what could have been, or how the storyline should have gone. That’s not really the films’ fault. It is unavoidably how I watch them.

Taken as films rather than as adaptations, they were quite fun the first time through. I’ve seen them on and off over the years and they hold up as entertainment. If you’ve somehow never watched them, they’re genuinely worth a watch, and that’s the verdict. Everything below is me picking at it, because picking at it is the enjoyable part.

The first one built the whole genre and gets no credit for it

X-Men in 2000 is a small film. Rogue puts her boyfriend in a coma, runs, falls in with an amnesiac cage fighter, and ends up at a school for people like her. Magneto tries to forcibly mutate the world’s leaders on Liberty Island without realising the process kills them. That’s it. Two hours, modest scale, leather costumes everybody made fun of at the time and which look considerably better now than the alternative would have.

What it actually did was establish that you could take this material seriously on screen at all, and every superhero film made since is standing on it while a fraction of the credit goes anywhere near it. It also set the franchise’s argument in the first act and never wavered from it: assimilate or resist. That’s a real question, and it’s why these films have more on their mind than most of what surrounds them. And the reason it works is the two men at the centre. You cannot beat Stewart and McKellen. Not for gravitas, not for sheer ability, not for the sense that both of them have thought their positions through and arrived somewhere they can defend. Magneto isn’t wrong. He’s a Holocaust survivor who has already watched one society decide a category of people shouldn’t exist, and when he says it will happen again he’s speaking from evidence. Xavier’s optimism is much the harder position to hold, and Stewart plays it as a discipline rather than a temperament. Put those two performances in a room and the film improves regardless of what the plot is doing, which turned out to be extremely useful over the following decade.

X2 is where the run is at its most confident. Stryker raids the mansion, takes Xavier, tries to use Cerebro to kill every mutant alive, and the X-Men and the Brotherhood have to work together. The alliance is the good idea, because it puts Xavier and Magneto on the same problem from opposite ends, which is the most interesting configuration these two have, and the film knows it. The Nightcrawler material is the best writing in the whole run about what it actually feels like to be one of these people. And then it hands the next film the biggest storyline in X-Men history.

The compression is the real fault line

Here’s my main complaint about how these were built, and it applies across the run rather than to any one film. Several of these should have been multi-parters. Not because longer is automatically better, but because the stories they were adapting are genuinely too big for a single runtime, and every time these films compressed one they lost the thing that made it work on the page in the first place.

The Phoenix is the clearest case. That’s a story with a slow corruption at the centre of it, where the horror comes from watching somebody you know get gradually replaced by something else. Give it half a film alongside a completely separate premise about a cure for mutation, and you get neither. Two good stories, one runtime, both damaged. The franchise repeated this mistake later and it cost them the same thing every time. If you want to see what these arcs look like with room to breathe, the source material is right there and it’s the reason I keep being slightly disappointed by films I otherwise enjoy.

Which brings me to my two long-standing complaints, neither of which a rewatch softened. Jean Grey is supposed to be operating at a completely different level to everyone around her and what’s on screen never sold me on that. I’m genuinely unsure whether it’s the casting or the writing and I’ve gone back and forth for years. My honest read is she was never given the right story, and possibly never the right actress for the story they were trying to tell, and either way I never believed the ceiling was as high as the character requires. Cyclops is a different problem. He’s a bit of a mistake on screen, though in fairness he’s also a bit of a mistake in the books, so the films were working with awkward material rather than inventing it. Scott is the field leader of the team and the least interesting person in every room he’s in, and putting him next to Wolverine makes that worse rather than better.

Logan doesn’t drift, and the recast worked

The thing that struck me most this time through is that across four films, two casts and eleven years of production, everyone changes except Logan. And it makes complete sense. He regenerates. He doesn’t age, doesn’t accumulate damage, doesn’t get the arc where a character grows into the next phase of their life. Hugh Jackman plays essentially the same man in 2000 and in 2011, and rather than reading as stagnation it lands as the point: everyone around him is on a clock and he isn’t. That’s the loneliest thing about the character and the films manage it without ever stopping to make a speech about it. His best comic material is a different animal to what the films use, but Jackman found something durable in there and held onto it for seventeen years.

I was not sold on First Class going in. Recasting Xavier and Magneto seemed like the kind of decision you make when you’ve stopped caring about the thing you’re making. James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender did quite well. Better than that, honestly. Fassbender gets the strongest version of Erik anybody has written for the screen, a man hunting the Nazi scientist who murdered his mother, entirely justified, becoming something terrible anyway. The friendship breaking in real time on that beach, Charles taking a bullet to the spine, Erik picking up the helmet, is as good as this franchise gets: two positions hardening into permanence while both men are still young enough to have chosen differently. The Cuban Missile Crisis framing is the part that wears, because building real history around your mutants works better in theory than in practice and the film keeps stopping to walk you through the geopolitics. The performances carry it past that easily.

So which pair do I want walking into December? Stewart and McKellen, and when I say you can’t beat those two that’s exactly what I mean by it. No disrespect to the younger pair, who earned their place and then some. But the argument I’ve been watching since 2000 is the one I want resolved, and it belongs to the actors who started it. If Doomsday is putting these characters in a room with the Avengers, let it be them.

That’s the foundation: fun films, real ideas, a couple of performances nobody has improved on, and a habit of squeezing great stories into far too little space. Next in the rewatch is Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which is where the MCU stopped being a run of origin films and became something with an argument of its own.