X-Men: Days of Future Past

Following the release of The Wolverine, the next film in Fox’s X-Men series, X-Men: Days of Future Past (DOTP), returns to the greater ensemble cast. Released in 2014 while the concurrent Marvel Cinematic Universe was in the middle of Phase Two (both figuratively and literally), this film notably beats Marvel Studios to the time travel punch by five years, serving as a soft reboot of the X-Men films (while incidentally serving as the literal middle of it) by setting up an alternate timeline. While I was aware of this film as it came out, I did not end up watching it until I began my earnest viewing of the series as a whole, though I did know about the timeline reset going in. While it actually does a good job with this premise, there are places where it gets a little muddy.

X2

Note: This review contains spoilers for X-Men

Like many other superhero films, both past and future, 2000’s X-Men proved so successful that Fox immediately commissioned a sequel, X2 (also marketed as X2: X-Men United). While the production didn’t proceed without its own hiccups, including budget cuts, rewrites and on-set disputes, Director Bryan Singer’s concept of a more personal angle and having a human villain persisted throughout the writing process, with the initial outline based on Chris Claremont’s X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills graphic novel (which we haven’t read at the time of this writing). When X2 finally released in 2003, it received rave reviews, with critics considering it a rare time when a sequel surpassed the original (although this sentiment wasn’t universal). As a modern viewer experiencing the full X-Men film series for the first time, I found myself agreeing with the critics of the time and thought the film actually aged pretty well and felt like a breath of fresh air from other superhero films from recent memory.

X-Men

The early 2000s proved to be quite the boon for superhero films, with the Spider-Man and X-Men films proving that the genre could be financially successful if put into the right hands. While I did grow up during this time, I didn’t have much of an interest in X-Men at the time outside of the X-Men: Evolution cartoon on Kids’ WB (I was more interested in Spider-Man at the time), only ever feeling motivated to watch a select few of the X-Men films years later. After recently watching all three X-Men cartoons at the time of this writing (X-Men The Animated Series, X-Men: Evolution, Wolverine and the X-Men) in their entirety (with X-Men: Evolution still being my personal favorite), I felt more motivated to actually watch the film series in earnest from the beginning, with additional motivation from the upcoming release of Deadpool 3 as well as Spider-Man: No Way Home setting a precedent for the MCU now requiring intimate knowledge of outside film continuities. After rewatching the original X-Men film from 2000 that started it all, I found it to be a solid beginning for the series, one that is still enjoyable over two decades later.