'X-Men: Days of Future Past' a good reason for mutant pride.

AuthorRooney, David
PositionLiving

Byline: David Rooney

'X-Men: Days of Future Past'

Unstarred review

A 20th Century Fox release

Rating: PG-13 for sequences of intense sci-fi violence and action, some suggestive material, nudity and language

Running time: 2 hours, 11 minutes

LOS ANGELES -- Matthew Vaughn and a superb cast reinvigorated the franchise with cool retro style and globe-trotting intrigue in 2011's "X-Men: First Class.'' The series' original director, Bryan Singer, continues that momentum in the vigorously entertaining "X-Men: Days of Future Past.'' While it's more dramatically diffuse than the reboot and lacks a definitive villain, the new film is shot through with a stirring reverence for the Marvel Comics characters and their universe. And it ups the stakes by threatening nothing less than the genocide of the mutant population, among them faces old and new.

Hard-core followers will have a geek field day dissecting the challenging pretzel logic of writer-producer Simon Kinberg's screenplay, from a story by Jane Goldman, Kinberg and Vaughn, who had originally planned to direct. The central premise comes from the 1981 Uncanny X-Men comic "Days of Future Past,'' in which Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) uses the consciousness transference powers of a psychic teammate to go back from a dystopian future and rewrite history.

Echoes of the Holocaust have rippled throughout the series, and Singer opens with present-day scenes of a desolate, burnt-out New York, where mutants and mutant-sympathizing humans have been rounded up in internment camps.

Jumping to a similarly devastated Moscow, we watch Kitty, Iceman (Shawn Ashmore) and a small band of mutants face an attack from the deadly Sentinels. Dropped in from airborne carrier ships, these robots are designed to track and destroy the mutant gene. They resemble towering, muscular versions of the aliens from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind,'' constructed out of magnetic plates that allow them to change shape and adapt to whatever force is unleashed against them.

The mutants escape and regroup in the rubble of an ancient Chinese monastery with Professor X (Patrick Stewart), Magneto (Ian McKellen), Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) and Storm (Halle Berry). The movie is missing an explanation of how traditional adversaries Professor X and Magneto reached a collaborative truce. But within the elastic boundaries of comic-book mythology that seems no big deal, and it's nice to see their bromance rekindled.

Threatened with extinction, the...

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