As I said last week, my biggest pet peeve going into the new 20th Century Fox movie was the need of PTBs in Hollywood to replace Katherine "Kitty" Pryde as the time traveller in the story because no one would EVER watch a video with a female protagonist.
Pft!
Anyway, the movie was good. I know, I know. I'm not raving, but let's talk about the good stuff first.
Pluses
1) The writers (Jane Goldman, Simon Kinberg and Matthew Vaughn) integrated Rachel Summer's and Bishop's timelines as the one terrible future. The "M" tattoo over the right eye, which was a mark of pride in Bishop's future is used the same as the number tattoos the Nazis inflicted on the Jews in the concentration camps. Of course, the writers couldn't bring in Rachel because their predecessors killed Cyclops and Phoenix in X-Men: The Last Stand.
2) Also, the previous writers whacked Senator Robert Kelly in X-Men. The alternative target is Bolivar Trask, the creator of the Sentinels, giant robots designed to kill mutants.
3) The movie Sentinels look more like the second BSG-series Cyclons, making them even more scary than the purple and pink originals.
4) Now, we know why 20th Century Fox and Disney/Marvvel got pissy over who had the rights to Quicksilver. Evan Peters' performance as the teen son of Magneto and future Avenger were the highlight of the entire movie.
5) For all my pissing and moaning about Shadowcat's non-participation in any Days storyline after the original, the writers added a nice extrapolation of her phasing abilities, making her the catalyst for the time travel.
6) Roles for a couple of my favorites from the gigantic X-Men comic cast: Sunspot and Warpath
Minuses
1) They tried to write Bolivar Trask as a monster, but Peter Dinklage is just didn't come across as Trask. I'm not sure if director Bryan Singer or the writers were trying to make the character sympathetic in order for the audience to want Mystique not to kill him. I know Dinklage is a first class actor, so I think if he'd been allowed, he would have made the dichotomy work
2).Bringing back Cyclops and Phoenix AGAIN! Seriously, part of the reason I've stopped reading the comics is Cyclops and Phoenix have been killed and resurrected too many fucking times! If you stay for the snippet at the end of the credits, you'll know why they were brought back. I'm not happy because I think this person is THE lamest of the X-Men villains.
I'm only giving X-Men: Days of Future Past an 8 out of 10.
Why? It didn't just work for me as a whole. Maybe the storyline has been adapted too many times. Maybe it's the fact that none of the superhero movies have new, original storylines. They are always variations of something I've read years, sometimes decades, ago.
Maybe I'm getting jaded in my old age. YMMV
