Being that it was opening weekend for X-Men: Days of Future Past, you can imagine it was pretty packed. I was annoyed by the fact that the parking garage was completely full and had to drive blocks away and walk back. Staring at a theater, dotted with open seats, I walk up to someone and ask if any of the three seats surrounding him are free. He tells me no, they are all taken. The movie is about to start so I look at at the rest of the crowd, stand up straight and yell “Where is there a single open seat? I’m not going to ask everyone individually!” This is my super power. I am so direct that people feel uncomfortable enough to give me what I need.

A nice lady points next to her. I walk over, sit down, and she says “Well done. That’s how to do it.” I meet her son and she offers me a chocolate chip cookie. She’s definitely a mom. Sensing my bad mood she offers me comfort food.

Remember us?
Of course not.

X-Men starts. Blasting right out of the gates we are sent into a battle scene of some lesser known X-Men plus Ice Man and that fire kid. They are fighting Sentinels: robots of the future, designed to wipe out all mutants. They adapt to all the mutant defenses. Like, if your power is fire, they’ll miraculously gain the ability to create ice. If I attacked with my forceful personality they’d counteract it with my personal kryptonite: dating. Eventually all the heroes are killed off. However… one of the new mutants has the ability to send someone’s consciousness into the past to warn their pre-dead selves to take a hike to a new secret location before death arrives. That’s a skill I wish I had.

It all sets up a storyline where by Xavier (who’s alive in his old body with no explanation of how), Magneto, Storm, and the previous mutants send Wolverine’s consciousness back in time to the 1970’s to warn the younger Xavier, Magneto, and Mystique that their actions are going to lead to the creation of the Sentinel program and eventually the ultimate destruction of their own kind. In the meantime, the future versions of themselves will fight the oncoming Sentinel invasion, buying Wolverine as much time as he needs to change the past.

“I only have 5 microns with which to add another character.”
“Do it!”

Did you follow that? Reviews like this are hard. Writers for movies like this pack the script with characters and events like a trash can, then get in the bin, jump up and down to make room, and pack yet more characters and events. Characters like Quicksilver, a dude who can move super fast. In probably the best scene of the film, this counter-culture 70’s teen is recruited to break Magneto out of his plastic prison. His wit and humor punctuates a great moment of bullet time camera work where he runs around a room of security guards, rearranging their fists and bullets to take themselves out. It seems the walkman he wears is capable of playing music at real time so that we hear a long passage of a song while he performs actions in a 1,000th of a second. Meh – who cares if that makes sense or not. It’s still the best scene in the film.

Magneto wants to save the world by killing more people. Xavier is really ticked off at that whole paralyzation thing. And young, blue haired scientist Beast shows back up to control security cameras with a single button attached to an antenna. Quite the invention.

You can imagine where this is all going. Wolverine humorously plays the voice of reason while time ticks towards doom as the Sentinels eventually show up in the future to kill everyone. Can the past X-Men change America’s mind to not make the mutant killing robots in the first place?

The acting is just fine. The effects look great. But when it was all said and done, I watched my own days of future pass and decided meh. I wasn’t bored. I enjoyed myself. But I didn’t care much. X2 blew my mind with its metaphors for minorities, political underpinnings, and grand human drama. And while Days of Future Past is fine entertainment, it is overstuffed to the extent I haven’t even told you about multiple characters and stories because it takes so many words just to cover the basics.

What? You STILL think I’m a bad guy?

The big climax isn’t very tense. Magento and Xavier play the ultimate game of Good Cop/Bad Cop with president Nixon and it falls a little flat. Except Magneto isn’t playing. He’s a bad cop. BAD. And in the face of that, I doubt any president would feel compassion to mutants.

This is better than the two Wolverine films and better than the First Class movie. But by hitting the reset button on the whole franchise’s history, the time travel aspect to affect the future ultimately plays out like an apology for anything that came after X2. This movie effectively erases all of X-Men: The Last Stand.

But is it bad? Far from it. It’s good, even. Just overstuffed and predetermined. I’d have been happier watching a movie where we learn how Xavier gets his body back because I still want to know! They did a movie like that before, it’s called The Search for Spock. Nowadays we apparently just take for granted the things that used to take full length, feature films to explain. At 131 minutes, X-Men plays exactly like its length. I’m not complaining. I just like others in the series much more. When I saw Godzilla, definitely a sillier film, the audience cheered. At the end of this one there was no cheering; the mom next to me simply said, “I liked that more than I expected.”

“Xavier?”
“Hello Magneto. You’re probably wondering why I look like this.”