Days of Future Past

I saw the first two X-men films and barely remember them. I watched this one because of four words: Jennifer Lawrence in body-paint.

Sploilers

X-Men: Terminator is great entertainment, but I found myself getting really, really bored by the future setting. (There's a reason Cameron only did a scene or two there in each of the only two Terminator films ever made.) I really didn't think that, after Logan "goes back," anything except for the scene where Young!X and Old!X communicate was necessary. In fact, I found the constant cutaways to that secondary and tertiary cannon fodder during the final battle really distracting, when what I really wanted to see was Fassbender drop a football stadium on Nixon's head.

Also, this Quicksilver guy's going to be in Avengers 2? Yeah, the Avengers are screwed.

The only other thing I really wanted to weigh in on is Peter Dinklage playing Bolivar Trask, a man who hates all mutants. There's a theory going 'round that says that Trask's hatred of mutants is due to bitterness that he has a genetic mutation that gives him dwarfism rather than being telepathic or able to manipulate metal. Meh; I was a bit preoccupied with "Tyrion's the bad guy!" to think about that as I was watching the film. Dinklage's performance certainly doesn't seem to imply that (he's since come out as opposed to the theory), and it seems like something they could have been more explicit about if they wanted to hike down the road of questionable taste. So there.

Anyway, it's good, mostly. It does keep teasing you as to when exactly the "Darkest Hour" part of the story has come: you keep thinking "okay, now we're in the third act and things are going to pick up... noooo... okay, how about now?" And the ending stretches on for longer than is necessary. But that's true of basically every movie made these days. Captain America 2 arguably had both of these problems (it definitely has the latter, and it has the former if you didn't expect the Winter Soldier's identity to be a wham moment). Hell, The Empire Strikes Back kind of has that problem (doesn't count, as it has a downer ending).

I liked it. End of line.