This post is going to be a bit more of a rant than it probably should be, but it’s been weighing on my chest for the last few months since I saw the damned movie. I need to let it out. This is an OPINION piece. Just remember that.
X-men: Days of Future Past was a pretty good movie overall. There were parts I didn’t like, parts I liked, and parts I loved. I was truly impressed with it considering I had no hope going in to see it. My expectations were virtually nonexistent.
Like I said, the were parts of the movie I truly enjoyed. Many parts. I won’t go into specifics because I feel it’s unnecessary. However, there is one scene that I would like to go over in detail, more in theory, because of how much I disliked it.
That is the epilogue scene at the end of the movie.
Now, before that scene showed up, I was pumped. It had been a great movie and I was excited to go home and write a review article about it. Then the damned epilogue had to show up. That epilogue actually kept me from writing my review article because it spoiled the whole movie like a poison.
X-men: Days of Future Past was created as a movie so as to erase everything that happened in the original X-men trilogy. However, Bryan Singer just fucked himself in the ass with that epilogue and made essentially everything impossible to rid himself of.
Let me point out that Singer left himself the perfect opportunity before that scene even came on to just cut it off, leave a cliffhanger, and have audience members go on forums and fight over whether or not they actually changed the future or not. WE DIDN’T NEED THE EPILOGUE! It was entirely unnecessary and felt forced, like a way to get characters we knew back on the screen, or a way to leave the movie on a happy note. The opposite happened for me.
Why?
First of all, like I said, it was unnecessary. If the point of the movie is to rewrite history, then it’s safe to assume that by the end of the movie the great heroes would figure out a way to make that happen. We could have just moved on to the next movie and started everything all over again.
Now, I’m not thrilled with the First Class movies in the first place. Some of the actors were way off, but mostly the character choices were just plain bad in some places. Some of those characters where was a big “Why?” over their heads the entire time, like the writers played darts with X-men characters and that’s how they chose them. If they would have kept the movies closer to the source material, I think we could have had a much better First Class run.
The bad decisions with First Class may actually haunt the X-men movie franchise into the reboot, which sucks since they just wasted a whole movie to essentially hit the reset button. BUT, they could have just hit the reset button and left it all alone, leaving character up for interpretation.
Enter epilogue.
I don’t know if many other people noticed, but how many characters were in that epilogue?
Logan, Charles, Scott, Jean, Ororo, Hank, Bobby, Rogue, Kitty, etc. You name it.
Half of the thrill of being involved with something X is the constant fight with death and danger the X has going on nearly all the time. How are we supposed to fear for these characters if we KNOW that in 2023 all of the characters listed above (and some of the ones that I just didn’t feel like looking up) are all supposed to be alive, well, and happy at the Institute? That’s no fun. Sure, there could be other characters getting that bite of the apple, but the X-men are a team, so if I can watch the movie and be like ‘Well, that guy wasn’t there in 2023’, that’s going make the movie a bit boring.
Not only that, but you’ve just reinforced the idea of all of the same actors and actresses playing these characters back on us.
Before I get a bunch of you climbing down my throat about it, yes, I know some of them were cast really well. Others weren’t, and regardless of how well they’ve been cast, do you realize it’s been 14 years since the first X-men movie was released into theaters. That means all of those actors that appeared in the first X-men movie are now 14 years older than they were in there, and with some of them, that age shows.
If you’ve just reinforced what these characters are going to look like in the future by using the same actors, you can’t just come in and interchange them like legos. We’re going to expect the same people.
Singer, if you would have just hit the damned reset button and left everything alone and started over in the 80’s, that would have been fantastic, but instead you’ve just reinforced everything that you were hoping to get rid of, and have created more plot holes for you to avoid.
I don’t have much faith in anyone involved in the planning of these movies anymore. I don’t think there is a way to fix the damage they’ve done. It might seem insignificant now with some of you taking a coin from Jenna Marbles bag and telling me to “Pipe the fuck down”, but I won’t. A small crack in the road isn’t bad until the middle of winter when the elements turn it into the grand canyon.
All I’m trying to say is that no matter how small the epilogue’s flaw was, it’s there and it’s going to fester over the next 40 years of X-time they have left to surf in the franchise. I hope they’ll fix it, but I doubt it.
X-men: Days of Future Past was a pretty good movie overall. There were parts I didn’t like, parts I liked, and parts I loved. I was truly impressed with it considering I had no hope going in to see it. My expectations were virtually nonexistent.
Like I said, the were parts of the movie I truly enjoyed. Many parts. I won’t go into specifics because I feel it’s unnecessary. However, there is one scene that I would like to go over in detail, more in theory, because of how much I disliked it.
That is the epilogue scene at the end of the movie.
Now, before that scene showed up, I was pumped. It had been a great movie and I was excited to go home and write a review article about it. Then the damned epilogue had to show up. That epilogue actually kept me from writing my review article because it spoiled the whole movie like a poison.
X-men: Days of Future Past was created as a movie so as to erase everything that happened in the original X-men trilogy. However, Bryan Singer just fucked himself in the ass with that epilogue and made essentially everything impossible to rid himself of.
Let me point out that Singer left himself the perfect opportunity before that scene even came on to just cut it off, leave a cliffhanger, and have audience members go on forums and fight over whether or not they actually changed the future or not. WE DIDN’T NEED THE EPILOGUE! It was entirely unnecessary and felt forced, like a way to get characters we knew back on the screen, or a way to leave the movie on a happy note. The opposite happened for me.
Why?
First of all, like I said, it was unnecessary. If the point of the movie is to rewrite history, then it’s safe to assume that by the end of the movie the great heroes would figure out a way to make that happen. We could have just moved on to the next movie and started everything all over again.
Now, I’m not thrilled with the First Class movies in the first place. Some of the actors were way off, but mostly the character choices were just plain bad in some places. Some of those characters where was a big “Why?” over their heads the entire time, like the writers played darts with X-men characters and that’s how they chose them. If they would have kept the movies closer to the source material, I think we could have had a much better First Class run.
The bad decisions with First Class may actually haunt the X-men movie franchise into the reboot, which sucks since they just wasted a whole movie to essentially hit the reset button. BUT, they could have just hit the reset button and left it all alone, leaving character up for interpretation.
Enter epilogue.
I don’t know if many other people noticed, but how many characters were in that epilogue?
Logan, Charles, Scott, Jean, Ororo, Hank, Bobby, Rogue, Kitty, etc. You name it.
Half of the thrill of being involved with something X is the constant fight with death and danger the X has going on nearly all the time. How are we supposed to fear for these characters if we KNOW that in 2023 all of the characters listed above (and some of the ones that I just didn’t feel like looking up) are all supposed to be alive, well, and happy at the Institute? That’s no fun. Sure, there could be other characters getting that bite of the apple, but the X-men are a team, so if I can watch the movie and be like ‘Well, that guy wasn’t there in 2023’, that’s going make the movie a bit boring.
Not only that, but you’ve just reinforced the idea of all of the same actors and actresses playing these characters back on us.
Before I get a bunch of you climbing down my throat about it, yes, I know some of them were cast really well. Others weren’t, and regardless of how well they’ve been cast, do you realize it’s been 14 years since the first X-men movie was released into theaters. That means all of those actors that appeared in the first X-men movie are now 14 years older than they were in there, and with some of them, that age shows.
If you’ve just reinforced what these characters are going to look like in the future by using the same actors, you can’t just come in and interchange them like legos. We’re going to expect the same people.
Singer, if you would have just hit the damned reset button and left everything alone and started over in the 80’s, that would have been fantastic, but instead you’ve just reinforced everything that you were hoping to get rid of, and have created more plot holes for you to avoid.
I don’t have much faith in anyone involved in the planning of these movies anymore. I don’t think there is a way to fix the damage they’ve done. It might seem insignificant now with some of you taking a coin from Jenna Marbles bag and telling me to “Pipe the fuck down”, but I won’t. A small crack in the road isn’t bad until the middle of winter when the elements turn it into the grand canyon.
All I’m trying to say is that no matter how small the epilogue’s flaw was, it’s there and it’s going to fester over the next 40 years of X-time they have left to surf in the franchise. I hope they’ll fix it, but I doubt it.
