Films I Loved - X-Men: Days of Future Past

Directed by: Bryan Singer, who had previously directed all the truly great X-Men movies

Starring: James McAvoy, Hugh Jackman, Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender

Gosh, Days of Future Past was so good. The X-Men movies never got better than this. I knew it wasn't gonna be topped from the moment I saw it. Logan is equally good, but it's a Wolverine movie, not an X-Men movie. They're good in different ways. 

DoFP just took everything you liked about the original films, everything you liked about the 60's reboot,  everything you liked about the central characters, and just blended it together into a smorgasbord milkshake of action, special effects, good scripting, coherent themes, stunning character work, awesome spectacle, and relatability. 

The ending -  which, spoilers, effectively cancels out the poor and mediocre entries in the franchise - is an absolute masterstroke and a love letter to anyone who's ever loved X-Men. The placement they give Wolverine - the focal character for the entire film franchise - lets him be central while really letting the film be about the people around him. The characterization of Charles Xavier - who, I will be honest, completely failed to be properly plausible in X-Men: First Class, although Magneto was guilty of that too - works very well. The characterization of Magneto as an anti-establishment radical has never been more understandable. The thrust of the mutant-human conflict - which, let's be honest is usually a pretty two-dimensional and terrible metaphor - has never been more powerful and well-explored. The period setting - the 70's this time - infuses the story with a kind of retro style that works great. The neo-future setting that the story starts from is awesome yet not overdone. The opening of this film is good enough to be an excellent short film in itself. I talked about how good Edge of Tomorrow was, but I'm willing to say that this honestly feels slightly better when it comes to building up suspense behind the time travel gimmick, although they've had about six films to build up your investments in the characters, so perhaps that's not fair. 

I'll maintain that this movie had one of the best trailers ever. If you're not familiar with the franchise, it's merely vague but very cool-seeming. If you're a long-term fan of the films or even better the comics, it's like seeing all your reading come to life. The X-Men have endured because they're a story that incurred real pathos. It's about the feeling of being part of something special, of being worried about what's out there in the world, of discovering new things, of finding out new things about yourself, about being worried about what's inside you but coming to the conclusion that you can do something good with it. It's about everything growing up and living is about. And the characters in particular are just avatars of those feelings; you see Cyclops or Nightcrawler or Kitty Pryde, and you think of all the things you know they've gone through.

The thing about peak X-Men is that it was never just about one character. It was never just about Professor X or Wolverine or Storm. It was about all of those characters coming together in this harmonious blend, where it's a little Wolverine and a little Kitty Pryde and a little Nightcrawler, and the effect is that you get the feeling of a community and of a wide variety of viewpoints coming together to say something bigger. Just as any team isn't defined by one player's experience, the X-Men was about the team experience. And DoFP managed to capture all of that at its best. Super-recommend.