![]() ![]() After his breakout turn as Wolverine, shining out even within an accomplished cast, Jackman must have felt the crushing disappointment at the mess that Origins ended up. The Wolverine, released just one year before DOFP (an easier acronym for short), particularly seems like a project Hugh Jackman *needed* to do. It was riding off the back of two critically and commercially successful films in First Class and The Wolverine, both of which worked hard to banish The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine to a point of non-canonical limbo. The X-Men franchise was in really interesting place by the time Days of Future Past came around. X2 may be the stronger movie by a yard or two, but Days of Future Past could well be my personal favourite for how it satisfies the viewer on multiple levels. This does for the X-Men franchise what JJ Abrams’ 2009 reboot movie did for Star Trek – new life born of old characters. ![]() The script is cleaner, the dramatic through-line more directly apparent (at least in the first half), and it manages to both give the original X-Men trilogy a sense of closure while spiralling the franchise off into a new direction. ![]() Though the plot is driven by Wolverine in his role working to change the past, and it hinges on the historical actions of Mystique, Days of Future Past is as much an origin story for Professor X and his school as First Class was for Magneto. It tackles the core ideological difference between Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Erik Lensherr (Michael Fassbender) that formed the backbone of those first films, as it does in the original Stan Lee/Jack Kirby comics, and naturally evolves that conflict from its foundation in First Class. As the film brings together two different generations of X-Men and these characters, so Days of Future Past unites Singer and Vaughn, who co-developed the story with First Class writer Jane Goldman, in developing a unique fusion of continuation and conclusion.ĭays of Future Past is the most tangibly connected X-Men film to X1 and X2, even beyond Singer back in the director’s chair. ![]() Days of Future Past ends up allowing Singer to both tie-off many of the loose ends left remaining after X-Men: The Last Stand, and continue the rebirth of the saga after Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class. Though ostensibly designed as a new beginning for the X-Men franchise, Days of Future Past oddly works better as an ending.īryan Singer’s return as director of the franchise, after abandoning the third intended X-Men film in 2006 for Superman Returns, gives the film an unexpected level of continuity back to his original first two pictures and allows it to work as a capstone for the original X-Men cast, the majority of whom return for this adaptation of Chris Claremont & John Byrne’s legendary 1981 Uncanny X-Men saga set in a dark, post-apocalyptic future where both humans and mutants have been subjugated by the Sentinels, a force of man-made, mutant-killing robots. We continue with Bryan Singer’s 2014 epic, X-Men: Days of Future Past… With X-Men: Dark Phoenix on the horizon, a film predicted to signal the end of the original iteration of the X-Men franchise, I’ve decided to go back and revisit this highly influential collection of comic-book movies. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |