Fatigued by the monotonous onslaught of superhero spectacle from recent years, I realized while settling into my seat for Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Days of Future Past, I was preparing to hate it. After all, I’ve been writing here for a few months now and have yet to pen anything particularly scathing. So what better opportunity to launch into a caustic, damning rant on contemporary tent-pole banality than with yet another cash-grabbing franchise entry of diminishing returns?
But I guess a few lackluster entries into the series had clouded my memory of the rich, layered density that the X-Men mythology was capable of (and of how adept Singer was, in particular, of wielding it) and my resistance lasted about 20 minutes before I gave up and thoroughly enjoyed myself.
To Singer’s credit, X-Men: Days of Future Past manages to bear the weighted gravity of a definitive series capper, because it’s quite apparent that the film’s existence is almost solely for the purpose of Marvel hitting the Reset button. While the time-hopping premise is more than likely to be about reversing the mincemeat that hack-master Brett Ratner left of the series, Days of Future Past plays like an all-in final chapter anyway; a fleet, funny, thrilling mainstream entertainment that offers fruits like actual stakes and thorny subtext and genuine character development, alongside all the obligatory fireworks.
Photo: Unknown
Distribute the credit as you see fit between Singer’s original duology and Matthew Vaughan’s expertly cast prequel, but Days of Future Past undoubtedly boasts a complex, genuinely compelling character pool like few other franchises. From Magneto’s ruthless conviction to Wolverine’s veiled wounds, there’s a reservoir of insurmountable anguish itching beneath, charging the bulk of the drama; to the point where the X-Men films feel as much studies of the varying ways in which people respond to the horrors of history as they do goofy action movies.
Sir Ian McKellen noted in a recent interview that X-Men, for him, has always represented an allegory for the struggles of homosexual life in contemporary society. Whether or not those parallels completely stick, it’s certainly true that the conceit is malleable enough to represent the struggles of basically anyone who isn’t a white, heterosexual male.
There are obviously other examples of complex characterisation and subtextual subversion to be surfaced elsewhere within the genre, but it’s rare to see such complexity and feeling attributed across a spectrum of ideologies this vast.
Both Professor X and Magneto are victims of the same alienation, but both choose to process this in differing ways.
While the threat of Peter Dinklage’s mutant-phobic inventor and the future’s robotic legion of “sentinels” (sharing their name with the machines in The Matrix and serving a nearly identical narrative function) loom over proceedings, the tension isn’t really derived for them, nor has it ever really been from the moustache-twirling villainy and dastardly plots to end the world that structure efforts in similar veins.
Rather, it all stems from the plight of assimilating into a society that doesn’t value your differences, and from the contrasting moral bearings that form in that void. Both Professor X and Magneto are victims of the same alienation, but both choose to process this in differing ways. And whilst there is a distinct dichotomy between “right” and “wrong”, the recent films have made Magneto’s motivations much more readable, even defensible, to audiences.
On top of all that is just a really solid blockbuster. Singer has never had the most distinct sense of visual panache, but his workman-like approach to shooting action serves competently enough; from the dizzyingly funny bullet-time sequence with a nimble Evan Peters (destined to be remembered as one of the year’s best set-pieces) to the thunderous spectacle of Magneto’s stadium relocation.
As yet another stamp of big-budget studio razzle-dazzle, it’s nothing particularly novel. But as just another reinvigorating injection to a sagging franchise that entertains and provokes and feels with surprising precision, it’s probably worth dishing out your hard-earned pesos for. As for the scathing rant I’m due for, I solemnly swear to see Adam Sandler’s Blended on opening night.
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Cover image: Twentieth Century Fox