Review of X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) by Pur__0_0__ — 14 Apr 2021

I'm gonna be a little too honest here: I bingewatched all the X-Men movies, so I often forget about this movie. Many times I get confused when someone mentions a scene from this movie, and I'm like, "wait, it happened in THIS movie? I thought it happened in First Class/Apocalypse!" And I'd prefer admitting that it's my fault than it being the movie's fault.

X-Men: Days of the Future Past is what I'd call the movie that bridges X-Men: First Class with the other canonical movies, and at the same time also helps in eliminating the bad movies like The Last Stand and Origins. The movie begins with, as usual, mutants being attacked and eliminated. So to save all of them, Wolverine goes back in time and stop Mystique from killing Bolivar Trask, a defence contractor. Wolverine reached the 1970s, when he was still a mutant without vibranium. And to set planes in motion, he has to find Charlex Xavier, Magneto, Beast and Mystique.

Bolivar Trask used Mystique's powers to create Mutant Hunting Robots. In the beginning they were only meant to be used to fight in the Vietnam war, but seeing how Mystique and Magneto revealed themselves, they decided to use the robots to hunt down the mutants itself. They didn't see whether mutants are also sentient beings or not, they just wanted to have them eliminated. And that's when the roles of money and power play. It was on the order of President Nixon that Bolivar decided to make those robots, which President Nixon had ordered only because of Bolivar's influence. So in a way it was a loop of blame.

And when Professor X, Wolverine and Quicksilver reach Magneto to save him, we finally get to see the fabled Quicksilver scene, where he takes down all the prison guards single handedly. It was the most iconic moment from the movie, and no amount of appreciation can praise it as much as it deserves. The modern day scenes were also adding to the tension, and in the end when Mystique is left with the choice whether to kill Bolivar or not, it is a quite tense moment whether the mutants in the modern time will survive or not. In the end we see that all the mutants who had died in the previous movies had also come back to life, and the franchise was brought back to where Bryan Singer had left it in X2.

Normally it is very difficult to reboot a franchise (read Sonic 06). Not only do you have to understant the major events that need to ve removed in order to fix the franchise, you also have to make the reboot-turning movie really good, otherwise it will just contribute to being the hot garbage that the other movies of the franchise are. And that's the reason why I believe this movie is underrated. It single handedly fixed a failing franchise, joined the acclaimed prequel into the main timeline and became a success both critically and financiallly. It deserves to be one of the most iconic X-Men movies.