A lifelong X-Men comics fan and a comic book dilettante debate director Bryan Singer’s latest film, which finds the mutants traveling through time to prevent their extinction (and the internal logic that comes with that). WARNING: Minor spoilers ahead!
Hugh Jackman, Michael Fassbender, and James McAvoy in X-Men: Days of Future Past
Alan Markfield / 20th Century Fox
Adam B. Vary: We begin our conversation with something of a confession, Jace: I have never counted myself as much of a reader of the X-Men comics books. Nonetheless, I was well aware when walking into X-Men: Days of Future Past with you that I was about to watch an adaptation of perhaps the second most coveted storyline in comic franchise's history. Second, of course, to the Dark Phoenix storyline. And given how furious my X-Men comics fan friends were about how 2006's X-Men: The Last Stand treated the Dark Phoenix story — and, frankly, how bad that movie was in general — I was prepared for this movie to be similarly disappointing, for me, and for you, a major X-Men comics fan.
But I was not disappointed! I wasn't close to being overwhelmed, either, but I did enjoy the movie on its own terms as a piece of well-crafted superhero cinema. Did you?
Jace Lacob: I feel deeply conflicted about it. It is a bit of spectacle, yes, with some nice special effects, but it didn't coalesce into something powerful or moving for me, which is somewhat depressing given the source material. Days of Future Past is definitely up there with the Dark Phoenix Saga and God Loves, Man Kills as some of the most significant and powerful stories in the X-Men canon. But this felt, ultimately, somewhat toothless.
From the cover of the first “Days of Future Past” comic book.
Marvel Entertainment / Via bloody-disgusting.com
ABV: Strong words! I know that the Days of Future Past comic is often enormously grim — and the film certainly starts out that way, with shots lingering on piles of dessicated and decaying corpses amid a concentration camp in New York's Central Park. And there are some shocking deaths in the first reel — which are, no real spoiler here, quickly done away with thanks to some of Kitty Pryde's time-travel mojo. But the film quickly becomes something of a zippy and rousing time-travel adventure, with James McAvoy's Charles Xavier doing all of the angsty heavy lifting with a rather on-the-nose heroin addiction metaphor.
JL: Yes, Xavier's addiction metaphor was way too obviously structured, and provided a way too overt crucible for the man who is meant to be the moral compass of the franchise. I want to address the strangeness of Kitty's new power set in a bit. But what the film accomplishes is diminishing the raw power of the original plot, which is rooted in a Holocaust analogy. The stakes are high in both the comic and the film, and we see that single shot of a concentration camp in the opening sequence, but the metaphor is quickly dissipated. In the comic, we're forced to experience the reality of the survivors in the concentration camp in the future, survivors who are branded with clothes that immediately identify them as mutants, much like the yellow star in Nazi Germany. They're fighting for their very survival and against extinction.
The film, however, isolates this largely by making the Sentinels the symbolic force they're battling: unseen, uncaring automatons with whom they engage in some pyrotechnic-heavy skirmishes before being whisked away… or undone altogether, thanks to Kitty's abilities. (In the comics, they're seeking to prevent a nuclear disaster unleashed by Europe upon the U.S. and battling Sentinels who have taken over North America. Trask here is little more than a figurehead.) Other than that first shot, the concentration camps aren't seen or mentioned. The action is far removed from these places of death, set in Moscow or a cliffside village in China. As a result, there's less of an urgency and a sense that humanity's errors repeat themselves.
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