X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)
I went all these years ignoring superhero movies so much that I did not know Peter Dinklage, Jennifer Lawrence, Ellen Page and Michael Fassbender ever starred in them (They are all in Days of Future Past.), only very rarely watching a modern one, and this movie puts me back to feeling like an outsider wondering how people can consume so many of them, denying and plain lying when you point out to them that most of the big budget classics we love never could be greenlit in the current Hollywood structure and that there really is a lack of variety around the tentpoles that take up so much of the studios' yearly budgets. Or they act like it's your fault for not seeking out the low budget and foreign movies, as if that's assumed and as if there is some negative in wanting big movies in that diet as well. The exceedingly high praise of this movie is bizarre. It's overly serious, unconvincing and largely rather dull.
The producers:
We could make the past the present (Have someone from the future come to the present to prevent an event that will cause the war.), but let's instead set the film in the 1970s to build the film's world from events of that time and comfort viewers with nostalgia.
Wolverine did not have his adamantium yet? Doesn't matter, we'll do it anyway. The white bones will come out of his knuckles as if from instinct or something.
We can't find any younger actors who resemble Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in looks or tone? Doesn't matter, we'll do it anyway.
The robots (sentinels) we wanna use are many decades ahead of the military technology in the 1970s, even far exceeding the tech of the 2000s that we already established with three movies? Doesn't matter, we'll do it anyway.
We'll have Ellen Page's character send Wolverine's mind back in time, inhabiting his body from the past, and he will be able to alter the future, somehow. What were her powers again? Doesn't matter, we'll do it anyway.
With all the insanity they planned to put on the screen the filmmakers must have believed that viewers wouldn't think about it. Just as the Jedi from Star Wars became more boring with the power exhibited in the expanded universe, prequels, sequels, video games and spinoffs, Magneto moving the Golden Gate Bridge (Last Stand) and a huge stadium and invading the sentinels' intricate systems without actually seeing them through the walls of the train car as if from photographic memory of the blueprints he saw earlier is too much for me. The curving bullet was kind of cool, before you realize that it implies that he can think at 1000 feet per second. Didn't like the lightning fast guy either. "Don't want you to get whiplash," lol. The cinematic X-Men isn't cartoon enough for this.
Storm's (Halle Berry) haircut downgrade in Last Stand is shortened again to one pretty much like a boy's. It stands, but not in a freaky way like Gozer from Ghostbusters. It's more boring than that. Jennifer Lawrence replaces Rebecca Romijn. Not gonna talk about her looks, but I will say that Romijn's makeup was more convincing because they weren't as afraid of the female form. For one, it sculpted more around her breasts, making her look almost naked and thereby more like a creature, whereas the new design looks much more like a bodysuit.
Their Richard Nixon imitation was bad. If I never saw Richard Nixon in my life, the makeup would still look very strange to me. The previous movies had fictional presidents, for obvious reasons. This one would have too if they had made the past the present, like in the animated series' Days of Future Past and, I would assume, the comic book version.
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