Twentieth Century Fox
If the main creative issue with superhero movies is figuring out how to make them bigger and more bombastic, Bryan Singer and his mutant friends seem to have found solutions for X-Men: Days of Future Past. At the very least they’ve given sufficient ammo to the trailer editors, because the world they’re portraying is a massive one.
Sentinel armies, time travelling jumps, Magneto’s famous hatred of baseball stadiums. Everything is offered a chance to be pumped full of BGH.
Check it out for yourself:
Of all the largeness, it’s also interesting to see what they’re doing with Jennifer Lawrence’s version of Rebecca Romijn. Mystique was always such a flat (albeit mysterious) henchman, so seeing her team up in the same way that Magneto and Xavier did as friends in First Class should retcon the way we see Singer’s earlier X-outings. Probably even more so than her hopping into Magneto’s bed.
Then there’s the political scope. Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage) looks to expand the ideas of earlier movies by putting action to extermination on a larger scale. This is no longer the threat of a voluntary (and involuntary) vaccine agenda, no longer the fist-slamming of a Senator on a McCarthyistic hunt, but an explosion of outright war on “people who are different.”
The allegory is as clear as it ever was, but it also looks much, much bigger.
X-Men: Days of Future Past is in theaters May 23rd.