We begin with the first two pretty good features from Bryan Singer who has returned as director for Days Of Future Past.
Sadly, he did not direct X-Men: The Last Stand. Instead it was given to Brett Ratner, who gave us a disappointing finale to the trilogy that was looking pretty solid.
After a poor showing from Last Stand, it was the beginning of the origin films. We began with X-Men Origins: Wolverine which I thought was better then most people say.
A couple of years later, we got the highly enjoyable X-Men: First Class directed by Matthew Vaughn who has a good track record of summer blockbusters. It takes place after Origins and before the first X-Men. This is my favorite of the franchise.
With those prequels done, it is back to the previous timeline with The Wolverine. This takes place after events of The Last Stand and felt it to be o.k, but nothing special.
With Days Of Future Past originally going to be directed by Vaughn I was quite excited by this. But then Vaughn pulled out of the project and we got the return of Singer which still gave me hope that we can get another enjoyable X-Men film.
As I type this, I am still trying to digest everything and see if it all worked. There is a lot to get through, but through this we get many enjoyable set-pieces and solid performances.
The story is a good one to use, but I just felt exhausted rather than feeling like that I had a lot of fun. I am starting to think that this could be the hardest film to sum up into a few paragraphs.
One thing is for sure is that, I liked it. But I am not just not sure how much yet. I think maybe the complexities of the story might stop it from being great in my rankings.
As for the performances, I felt it was the characters from First Class that shone above the original cast. The relationship between McAvoy and Fassbender is still terrific to watch. Fassbender plays the anti-hero so beautifully and he continues to create a great screen presence. I felt Lawrence was perfectly fine. But I think there was too much air time for her which gave lesser time for story development. Jackman continues to make Wolverine his own. But I think his best days as Logan are over.
For the original cast, Stewart was pretty solid. McKellan felt under-used and the rest of them was given enough screen-time to be noticed and have just about enough contribution to the main story.
As for the rest of the mutants. There were many nice reprisals and some npleasant introductions of new characters. One I particularly liked and I think a lot of people including myself will feel to be the fun part of the movie.
The visual effects are what we expect them to be. The settings looked great and you can easily get sucked into the time periods shown.
One part of the film that is frustrating me is the pacing. As soon as gets going, it suddenly slows down and does something which felt unnecessary. It does it far too often for me and sadly made me annoyed at times.
Despite that, I did like it. There is a great idea in there, but the pacing just let it down enough not be a great film. I really wanted this to be the hit of the summer. Sadly, not in my books.
But I must remind you that there is a lot in there to like, but it just did not suck me in like First Class and X2 did.
With the next X-Men film taking place straight after the events in the past section of Days Of Future Past, it will be interesting to see how long it will take before we are back on one timeline. I certainly hope it is quick, just so we can back to fun X-Men movies, rather then just tying up loose ends.
As this is a Marvel film, there is the usual bonus scenes in the credits. In this one, there is a post-credit scene which at first I thought was quite interesting. But after reading up on some info on the internet, I got it completely wrong, and it is actually not that surprising. It will excite you nonetheless, but it is nothing new as to what is coming up next in the film franchise.
Rating: 7/10
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