Superhero Media: X-Men - Days of Future Past

In my humble opinion, the best team X-Men film is Days of Future Past, it has the best cast, one of the better stories, and some of the best fights in the entire franchise. As well as being the last hurrah for many of the original actors, Days of Future Past sets the tone for what will come after and writes the later films a blank cheque on continuity, which they will use to be great at times. Based loosely on the X-Men comic arc of the same name, Days of Future Past shows a nightmare future where the Sentinels have ground humanity and mutant kind down to a handful of survivors staying alive thanks to the new time-travel powers of Kitty Pryde. Plot convenience means it's Logan that needs to be sent back in time to his younger body to prevent Mystique from killing Bolivar Trask and kick-starting the Sentinel Programme. It's a little disappointing that Kitty is sidelined from one of her few great X-Men stories, but Logan has been the central character of most of the franchise up to this point, so he gets to go. 

Arriving in the 1970s, Logan has to rehabilitate a broken Charles Xavier, free Magneto from prison and track down Mystique before history solidifies and the future dies. It's a solid high-concept basis for a superhero film, which lets Days of Future Past tell a good story, use its actors well and not have to lean too heavily on gimmicks. Yes, the film is set in the 1970s, but unlike First Class, the setting is more about cars, clothes and pop culture references, rather than trying to tie it into historic events, for the most part. The scene where Magneto explains he was trying to save JFK because he was a mutant is garbage, but it's brief and soon forgotten, and I actually like the idea that mutants were used as "Deniable Operators" in the Vietnam War, even if the scene is just an excuse to get William Stryker into the story. While Logan wanders the past, trying to prevent the future, the original X-Men fight the Sentinels to protect Kitty, which means we get a great last send-off for Storm, Magneto, Iceman and Professor X, with the technology finally catching up to make the fight really something special. 

The introduction of new characters, such as Bishop, Blink and Sunspot, is nice, but they never reappear, adding to the list of fun characters in the franchise that don't recur. Then there's Quicksilver, and whilst I'll admit that the sequence in the kitchen is good, the character is really more like The Flash than Quicksilver, and Age of Ultron did a better job overall. Especially considering the Marvel Cinematic Universe Quicksilver was less one-note and didn't overstay his welcome. Again, to my mind, Days of Future Past is the best "team" X-Men film, with the best cast, a last hurrah for many of the original actors and a solid story. What's crazy is that this is kind of half-way through all the X-Men films and that aside from Logan and the Deadpool films, there won't be another good one for a while. Days of Future Past worked, it was genuinely pretty great, but the formula wouldn't work again and Wade Wilson of all people carried it over the finish line to the Disney/Fox merger. Of course, I'll be covering the rest of the series, but if I were just watching these again for fun, I'd probably bail here and jump straight to the solo films.