X-Men: Days Of Future Past
“X-Men: Days Of Future Past (2014)”
Text By: Basil Swartzfager
Original Publication Date: August 15th, 2014
X-Men: Days Of Future Past is yet another Marvel film long on narrative and short on story. Bryan Singer’s first two forays into spandex supergroups (X-Men and X2: X-Men United) weren’t super nuanced, but at least they had ideas. X-Men used mutation as a metaphor for adolescent alienation and the body dysmorphia often inherent to puberty. X2 pushed this theme even further, wittily tying mutation to late ‘90s/early ‘00s gay panic (I will never forget when a mother asks her son “have you tried not being a mutant?”), linking social shaming, legislative persecution, and the ridiculous biology/lifestyle debate to provide depth and throughlines to the narrative and action. Even the much malignedX-Men: The Last Stand built its narrative around the ethics of conformity in the form of a drug that could “cure” mutant mutation, raising ideas about the danger of genetic manipulation, and the pressures that people face to fit in, to desire what is seen as “normal.” X-Men: Days Of Future Past briefly touches on one idea, tying a ‘70s variation on Last Stand’s cure to heroin addiction and political disillusionment during the Vietnam era. But Singer never takes the time to develop this into a meaningful character arc, as the narrative must hit so many beats in its already bloated 131 minute runtime that story is freely sacrificed to make sure we get to the next plot point.
Part of the film’s issue lies in its narrative premise. Like a kind of Terminator meets Nazi Germany, the future of this movie world is an apocalyptic fascist state run by artificial intelligences that are programmed to destroy all mutants. Much of the imagery tastelessly recalls the Holocaust, hoping to imbue its fictional setting with the weight of one of history’s greatest tragedies. It seems unlikely that the movie could have ever justified this imagery, but the film doesn’t actually try, hitting the audience with a few awful shots of corpse piles and death camps before offering the solution: go back in time and fix it so this terrible stuff never happens. At this point the premise has already taken away any weight the narrative could have. We, as astute audience members, know that this horrible future can’t be allowed to take place. A movie like this cannot end with failure. So any tension or suspense regarding will they/won’t they is removed from the film. That sense of inevitability gives the film a dullness, a sense of going through the motions, that the lack of subtext cannot pick up the slack for. Most films have to end a certain way. It’s sort of a given. As someone who has seen a lot of films, I don’t necessarily have to be surprised by an ending to enjoy it. I don’t even have to feel suspense about how a story will resolve. But I would certainly prefer that the film’s first five minutes did not give me the answer immediately. And, more than that, I would prefer that a film not belabor itself by pretending that there is more than one option.
Late in the film, Mystique points a gun at Dr. Bolivar Trask, intending to kill him in an act of vengeance. As she points the gun the film cuts back and forth between the 1970s, where the standoff is occurring, and the X-Men in the future who are being overwhelmed and murdered by sentinels. The implication is that if she pulls the trigger, this apocalyptic future will certainly happen, but if she resists the selfish impulse to kill Trask this awful conclusion will be avoided. Singer drags the moment out, using cross-cutting in tandem with slow motion and a sweeping musical score to highlight the importance of Mystique’s decision. Aside from this labored moment being one of the biggest cliches in movie history (and one that I have never seen end with the trigger actually being pulled), I find it hard to believe that even a person who was unfamiliar with the trope would feel any sense of emotional tension in the scene. The entire film has been narratively building towards this moment, and every single person knows in their core that it has been building to end a certain way. Why pretend that it isn’t? Why try to force us to feel a tension that isn’t there?
X-Men: Days Of Future Past occasionally wants to use time travel to symbolize humanity as a shaper of its own destiny. Nothing is predetermined. There is no fate. There are several conversations about this throughout the film. The most direct comes when Beast argues that maybe it’s impossible to change the future, maybe time is a river that flows in one direction. Xavier argues that he doesn’t believe that, and the audience of course believes him. The entire narrative hinges on Xavier being right and Beast being wrong. But the film never ties that argument to any real-world contemporary movement, the way the first three films did, so there’s no sense of any real stakes. Yes the fake superheroes in their fake world will save the fake future, but what does that matter to an audience member sitting in a seat? How can we draw this back to ourselves, to a relevant moment in our own life? X-Men: Days Of Future Past never offers much of an answer.
-Basil Swartzfager, 2014
