Friday, June 13, 2014

X-Men: Days of Future Past



Positives
* A decently complicated and ambitious plot (that is—for a superhero movie)
* As with all the films in this series, the film does a good job of creating ambiguity between heroes and villains, and giving complicated character motivations to its antagonists
* Does a good job of uniting most of the cast members from all of the previous movies, and not screwing up the continuity too much
* Although it was superficial, the history geek in me loved all the references to historic events throughout the movie
* Despite the fact that I’m pretty sure I caught some anachronisms, the early 1970s setting was a neat retro-environment for the film.

Negatives
* I found this film hard to sit through—it felt a lot longer than it actually was.
* The story lost focus at about the halfway point, after the first initial climax scene, and the film lost its sense of forward momentum.

The Review
          In a world where super-hero movies are becoming increasingly formulaic and predictable, you’ve got to give these X-Men movies credit for some very ambitious stories.  Unfortunately, this is a very clever idea that suffers somewhat in its execution.  The plotting lacks forward momentum, the story lags in the middle, and the climax is not as exciting as it should be.

Rating :
7 out of 10 stars.  (I wanted to give this a 9 out of 10 for the cool concept, but it only gets a 7 for the execution of the idea).

Other Things I Would Talk About If I Wasn’t Limiting Myself to 100 Words
* Musings about continuity at this point in the series—What they’ve done well on, and what they’ve screwed up on.

Links
            My review of X-Men First Class here.
            My mini review of X-Men 3  here 

Link of the Day 
Noam Chomsky: "The Emerging World Order: its roots, our legacy"

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