Some thoughts about X-Men: Days of Future Past

Hello once again people! (Yeah, just roll with it).

I finally got the opportunity to watch one of the most highly anticipated superhero titles from this season, X-Men: Days of Future Past.

As usual, let's dwell a bit into the background from these movies. The first two X-Men films were categorized as some of the best examples of how the genre should be portrayed in the big screen at the time with a much more realistic vision and taking inspiration from some of the most relevant stories from the comics.

Unfortunately, some of them were not regarded as highly, X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine were some of the worst received series from the saga but thankfully the series started to gain some momentum with the recent releases of X-Men. First Class and The Wolverine which while flawed, still were better received than the previous two entries.

Now comes X-Men: Days of Future Past, the movie is loosely based on the story from the comics with the same name created by Chris Claremont and John Byrne dedicate about a group of mutants from the future trying to save their species from extinction and also serves as sequel to the whole film series. Plus, this time it was directed once more by Bryan Singer, the man responsible for the two first movies. How does this compares to what came before?

I would say that it actually succeeds at what it promises, for the most part at least.

The story has pretty strong points with quite interesting twists during the course of the plot and really good characterization for the members from the cast, although sadly not all of them would be used at their best.

First let's talk about the cast.

Wolverine is the protagonist and of course you would expect this based on the rest of the films, Hugh Jackman portrays him as you would expect, the guy simply has made the character his at this point.

Others like Professor Charles Xavier portrayed by James McAvoy and Patrick Stewart in his young and old versions respectively and it's wonderfully portrayed by both actors. Ditto Magneto, also portrayed as young and old by Michael Fassbender and Ian McKellen, both have been able to give life to a different yet similar kind of character being hero, antihero or villain.

Jenny Lawrence as Mystique does another good performance but I don't think the character was used at her best since I feel that this kind of person should do more than just depending on both Xavier and Magneto.

Nicholas Hoult does a surprisingly great job at portraying Beast and I completely believed that he was a young Hank McKoy. Others like Halle Berry as Storm were wasted since they didn't have really defined roles or strong moments in the movie.

The biggest and pleasent surprise from the film was Evan Peters as Quicksilver, he had some of the best and most hilarious moments from the story, every segment where he appeared was a joy to see and it's pretty disappointing that he only appeared a few times.

Speaking of which, a lot of characters were not exploited to their best. Iceman, Kitty Pride, Colossus, Bishop among others were mostly there for the background, not doing too many relevant things to the plot.

Another complaint that I have is that sometimes the dialogue was bit too predictable, especially the lines concerning time travel, I think I have heard several of those phrases in many time traveling stories.

My final qualm towards the movie is that I think they could have used the ending to create a much bolder direction for the franchise. We're talking about a time-traveling story that had huge ramifications for the X-Men movies that recreated several aspects to be used once again.

Nonetheless, they could have used this film to reboot the whole series and create a completely new storyline with brand new characters and actors instead of depending on the old ones from a line that started more than ten years ago. This was a wasted opportunity.

Other than that, the movie is successful. The characters are pretty enjoyable, the action is engaging, the plot has interesting points and the effects are pretty good.

Overall, this is among the best films based on these characters, but they could have used this to create a much better future.