Positive mutation

The X-Men film franchise takes a classic story from the comic book’s heyday, and goes the time-travel route made popular on the screen by James Cameron’s Terminator movies and the J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot. In X-Men: Days of Future Past, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) partakes in a unique form of time tripping, and the results are the best in the series since X2.

Another big contributor to the awesomeness of the latest installment is the return of Bryan Singer to the director’s chair. Singer piloted the first two X-Men films, and he has a nice command of the characters in their old and younger incarnations. It’s good to have him back.

The film starts in the future, where the likes of Professor X (Patrick Stewart), Magneto (Ian McKellen) and Wolverine have been reduced to hiding out in a dark, apocalyptic world where their enemy is a vicious robotic mutant-hunting force called the Sentinels. Things are looking really bad for the mutants, and for the humans.

Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page)—whose mutant abilities include being able to pass through solid objects—has perfected a form of time travel to elude the Sentinels. She can send someone time-traveling in their own mind back to a particular point in their memory when they can mess with the fabric of time and avoid future trouble. She says she can send somebody back only a few minutes or so due to brain trauma, but then it strikes the X-Men that Wolverine has instant healing powers …

So Wolverine travels all the way back to the early 1970s, before the Sentinels have gone into production, and before shape-shifting Raven/Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) commits a murder that will ultimately bring about the doom of the future.

It’s a nice chance to see pre-surgery Wolverine, when his metal claws were still made of bone, and of course, it’s an opportunity to combine the two X-Men casts. Most of the action takes place in the past, so the younger X-Men: First Class actors get most of the screen time. That means more of the terrific Michael Fassbender’s take on Magneto, who is being held in a prison underneath the Pentagon for allegedly having something to do with the infamous “Magic Bullet.” James McAvoy actually steals the show as young Xavier/Professor X, who has found a solution for his crippled legs, but with the side effect of crippling his telepathic powers.

Peter Dinklage has a pivotal role as the creator of the Sentinels, and Dinklage always adds a level of class to any project. The film also allows for a funny take on Richard Nixon (played by Mark Camacho), who finds himself in the middle of a mutant public relations fiasco.

A welcome new addition to the cast is Evan Peters as the speedy Quicksilver. One of the film’s best sequences involves how the world looks to Quicksilver as he rearranges a gunfight with his fingertips in half a second. We see it in slow motion, with much comedic detail. It’s a brilliant scene.

This film basically allows the controllers of the X-Men universe to jettison from our memories X-Men: The Last Stand, a film made by the much-abhorred Brett Ratner and one that was not a favorite with fans. I didn’t hate that movie, but it stands alongside the mediocre X-Men Origins: Wolverine as the weakest movies in the series.

As with the new Star Trek, the whole system has been reconfigured for X-Men, and all options are wide open for future films. We can still get X-Men modern-day stories, we can get X-Men in the past—it’s an open book.

Maybe they could use the whole time-travel thing on the Matrix movies, and fix those screwed-up sequels?