X-Men: Days of Future Past

First things first: you’re going to want to watch all of the previous X-Men movies before wading into Days Of Future Past, as anyone coming into this franchise cold is going to be left utterly and helplessly bewildered.

Kicking off in the future where giant mutant-hunting robots called Sentinels have effectively wiped out all of humanity, the few surviving X-Men manage to send Wolverine’s (Jackman) consciousness back into the past, to possess his own body in 1973. His mission is to stop Mystique (Lawrence) from murdering Bolivar Trask (Dinklage), the creator of the Sentinels, as killing him turns him into the martyr that gets the robots built en masse in the first place. To do this, Wolverine is going to need the help of Xavier (McAvoy) and Magneto (Fassbender) combined, who weren’t exactly on the best of terms in the 70’s.

It sounds complicated, but it’s essentially Terminator 2; go back in time to stop robots destroying the world. We’re seven films deep into the X-Men universe, and it’s only now that its makers have taken note of The Avengers and decided to follow suit. Simultaneously a sequel to X-Men: First Class and X-Men: The Last Stand, while also doubling up as a giant reset button to right the wrongs committed by that terrible threequel, it’s finally apparent the potential scope this universe has to offer.

However, Days Of Future Past spends just as much time correcting the course of its own series as it does setting up further instalments, that current events have an almost weightless feel to them. Ironically, by spending so much time re-do’ing its cinematic past and plotting its future, everything in the now almost gets side-lined.

That’s not to say DOFP is a bad movie. Every actor is now even further embedded into their roles, with Lawrence a particular highlight, obviously given more screen-time due to her recent rising star status. New additions such as Quicksilver (Evan Peters) and Blink (Bingbing Fan) leave more of an impression than the First Class supporting mutants did, while returning director Bryan Singer balances the action, humour and gravitas equally well.

Ambitious to a fault, there is an awful lot to like and enjoy here, and while it never reaches the giddy heights of X-Men 2, there is a sense that the series is returning to that level of quality again. And stay through the end credits to get a glimpse at the Apocalyptic (geddit?) sequel already in the works.