Days of Future Past is one of the most iconic stories in X-Men comics, and I’ve spent years assuming nobody would ever try it on screen properly. The Sentinels, the ruined future, the idea that the whole mutant project ends in extermination camps. That’s the storyline the entire X-universe is built around. They tried it. It’s good. I enjoyed this one a great deal.
It’s an adaptation, and that’s the right call
Let me be clear about what this isn’t. It’s not a word-for-word translation of the comic, and anyone going in expecting the panels rendered in order is going to spend the runtime disappointed.
What it is instead is an adaptation of the possibilities in that story. It takes the core engine, a consciousness sent back to prevent the event that dooms every mutant, and rebuilds around it with the pieces the films actually have. Kitty Pryde’s role gets handed to Logan. The date moves from the comic’s near-future to 1973. Mystique becomes the hinge rather than a supporting player.
Purists will grumble. I’d rather have a film that understands why the story works than one that copies its surface and misses the point. This one understands it.
Two casts in one film should not work
The thing I was most sceptical about is the thing I ended up enjoying most.
Having James McAvoy and Patrick Stewart in the same film is genuinely cool. Same for Michael Fassbender and Ian McKellen. On paper that’s a gimmick, the kind of stunt casting that exists for a trailer, and it isn’t played that way at all. Seeing the older and younger versions of Xavier and Magneto on screen together does something the films haven’t managed before: it makes the whole run feel like one story about two men rather than a set of sequels.
The scene where the two Charleses meet is the best thing in the film. One of them has already lived through everything the other is currently refusing to face, and neither actor overplays it.
McAvoy gets the hardest job
The 1973 Charles is a wreck, and it’s a brave thing for the film to open with.
He’s walking, which means he’s taking a serum that suppresses his telepathy, which means he’s chosen to be able to move at the cost of being able to hear anyone. That’s a properly good piece of character writing. The man whose entire identity is built on connecting to other people has medicated the connection away because the noise was unbearable after the war took his students.
Logan’s first job isn’t stopping the Sentinels. It’s rebuilding Charles enough to be useful. McAvoy plays the whole first act as a man who has decided that hope was a mistake he made once, and the recovery is earned rather than switched on.
Jackman anchors it, as usual
Logan is someone you just can’t beat.
Jackman has been doing this for fourteen years now and he’s still the most reliable thing in any X-Men film. Here he’s the messenger rather than the fighter, which is a real change of function for the character, and he handles it without the film needing to compensate with extra action. He’s the calmest person in 1973 because he’s the only one who knows how it ends.
That’s a nice inversion. The berserker is the patient one, and everyone around him is losing their composure.
The Quicksilver sequence is the best scene in the film
The Pentagon breakout. Everyone is going to be talking about this one.
Evan Peters gets maybe fifteen minutes of screen time and walks off with the whole picture. The kitchen sequence, where he moves through the room at his own speed rearranging a fight while everyone else is effectively frozen, is exactly the kind of thing these films should have been doing all along: taking a power, thinking properly about what it would actually be like, and then building a set piece around the answer rather than around a punch-up.
It’s funny, it’s inventive, and it makes the character feel genuinely superhuman in a way that a hundred CGI slugfests haven’t. Quite well done, and I’d happily watch a lot more of him.
The Sentinels are the right villain
The future sections are grim and they should be. Adaptive robots that copy any power they encounter, which means every mutant advantage becomes a liability the moment it’s used.
That’s a smart threat because it can’t be beaten by being stronger. The survivors aren’t fighting, they’re looping time to stay alive a few more days at a stretch, and the film shows just enough of that to make the stakes land without wallowing in it.
Turning Mystique’s DNA into the basis for that adaptability is a good piece of plotting too. The thing that dooms the mutants is a mutant, and the assassination meant to protect them is what causes it.
The ending fixes some things
Logan wakes in a 2023 that has been rewritten. The mansion’s standing. Jean and Scott are alive. Xavier is at his desk.
I’ll be honest that I have mixed feelings about a film reaching back and undoing previous films, and I suspect I’ll be arguing with myself about it for a while. What I’ll say for it is that the mechanism is properly built. The change happens because Mystique makes a choice on live television with the world watching, and Charles talks her into it rather than overpowering her. The world sees a mutant choose mercy. That’s a resolution the film earned rather than a switch it flipped.
Whether it’s a relief or a cheat probably depends on how much the last few years of this franchise annoyed you.
Where it lands
Lots of fun. Good job. I’d put it at 3.5 or 4 out of 5.
Every actor in it acquits themselves well, the two-cast structure justifies itself, and it’s the first X-Men film in a while that feels like the people making it had a plan beyond the next set piece. Set next to The Avengers it’s a colder, more serious film, and set next to this spring’s other superhero effort it’s the more ambitious of the two structurally, if not quite as sharp scene to scene.
The mid-credits sting points at something ancient and Egyptian, and I have absolutely no idea what they’re planning to do with that. After this one I’m willing to find out.