If I don’t write this down I’m going to be pissed off and angry for the next 24 hours so here we are. Days of Future Past is a horrible bad stupid movie. I hated it. I started chuckling at how stupid and naked the premise was in the first 15 minutes. And that feeling never left me. It only got worse as the movie went on. Maybe this is just a thing with me, but, once I turn on a movie it is really hard to get me back. Like once a character does something stupid, I can’t forgive it. Like, the Rape Scene in Game of Thrones. I can’t unsee it. From now on, every time the character of Jaime Lannister does something I’m thinking, “that’s nice, but until you address this, new input is unwelcome.” I can’t just let bad writing that I notice go.
First I’ll talk about what I liked. Evan Peters as Quicksilver. He’s in the movie for like 10 minutes and he gets all the funny awesome lines. We were clearly meant to like this guy and it works completely. You may recall me saying that Aaron Johnson was the worst part of Godzilla. He was cast as Quicksilver in the Avengers movie. There is no way he is going to be able to compete with this performance. Sorry Charlie.
The acting in general is really good. My complaints on this movie are entirely focused on the script. If you want to watch the leads of First Class acting, watch First Class. I liked that movie. And that’s basically the five second synopsis of the X-Men movies up till now. I liked the first two movies when I saw them in theaters over a decade ago. They don’t hold up. And the reason they don’t hold up is that the plots suck. I want to like them and by every account I’ve ever heard, Hugh Jackman is the nicest human being on Earth. But I can’t get past the first three movies being Wolverine I through III. Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan are great, I’ve loved James McAvoy since Children of Dune, and Michael Fassbender is just incredible in everything he does. The characters are simply amazing. The sole reason I can still watch X-Men 3 is Ian McKellan. That scene with Pyro in the woods, “I would’ve killed the Professor” is one of, if not the best scenes in this entire series.
All right let’s get into it so I can go to bed. This is a time travel movie. And when you write a time travel movie, there are obvious plot holes and questions that people are willing to forgive to varying degrees. I found this movie insultingly stupid with regard to its time travel plot. This is a time travel movie where any question about how the early 2000s movies fit with First Class fit with or how the time travel works or attempt to use it in a way that might solve a problem in the plot is met with the question, “do you want to see an X-Men movie or not?”
Why didn’t Charles mention knowing Mystique before now?
Do you want to see an X-Men movie or not?
When did Kitty Pryde learn how to send people’s minds back in time?
Do you want to see an X-Men movie or not?
Is this the first time someone met Wolverine, I mean, why didn’t anyone try to send Logan or anyone else further back in time at any point before this point when everyone dies?
Do you want to see an X-Men movie or not?
Why do we have to send Wolverine back to this point in the late 70s? Can’t we send him back to the early 60s when Mystique and Magneto and Xavier are all together?
Do you want to see an X-Men movie or not?
I’m sorry guys, if this is nitpicking or I’m being an old man, or whatever but I couldn’t get past this stuff. It just felt like it needed so much work to set up the premise of this movie. It’s a series of rules and new powers and things being pulled out of nowhere credible. It doesn’t feel like a sequel, it feels like a “what if” or “elsewhere” story. I can’t buy it. And this is just the first 15 minutes. I literally had these questions 15 minutes into the movie. Then because it started so terribly I wasn’t able to forgive anything that bothered me about this movie.
Xavier and Beast have a drug that suppresses mutant powers allowing Beast to be Nicholas Hoult. But for some reason it also allows Xavier to be cured of the bullet wound that caused his paralysis in the last movie. Sorry guys, I can’t get past it. Krypton is destroyed, Batman’s parents are dead, and Charles Xavier can’t fucking walk. I’m sorry but that’s just how it is. Maybe they could’ve come up with an explanation. The fucking animated series came up with an explanation for the Savage Lands. It could have been ANYTHING. A mutant, technology, something, but not a wonder drug. Charles Xavier can’t walk. He got shot in the cockadoodie spine in the last movie. You lose. Good day sir.
Then the time travel questions pile up. This is more nitpicky but a better movie I wouldn’t ask these questions. Wolverine is in no way willing come back to the future to help solve problems. Because the characters are all there in the future. So they got out of the terrible situations they wind up in the future. So why doesn’t Logan ask Magneto where he runs off to in the 70s or how they got out the problems they encounter? In Looper they came up with a reason for this. I guess there’s some kind of reason because Kitty Pryde isn’t using real time travel. But that’s thin. It’s really thin.
The other thing is, the clock is always running in San Dimas. In Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, the characters have like 12 hours of time to get historical figures for their presentation. Those 12 hours are consistent across all other points of time. In this one point of their history, where the characters began their journey, from this point the characters must return to this point in time to set things right. If the characters fail, they can’t keep going back in time to try again. Except at one point they realize they can put things in the past to help themselves so they do this to break out of jail. What I’m trying to get across is, before they send Logan’s mind into the past, they tell him that the Sentinels are going to find them and kill them at some point. Logan has that amount of consistent time to fix this shit. And apparently preventing Mystique from killing Peter Dinklage is the only thing that will prevent the shitty future or impact the future in any way whatsover. No one in the future has altered memories because Trask is the only thing that can change the future. How does that make any kind of sense? Why don’t they have an unlimited amount of “tries” and as long as they need to change the past to prevent the future. Why does the time travel work this way?
Do you want to see an X-Men movie or not?
