X-Men: Days of Future Past opened last weekend with high hopes. After the trilogy ended in 2006, Marvel has released multiple movies based on specific characters and also a prequel. Days of Future Past includes a prequel and sequel in the same movie. This allows director Brian Singer to manipulate the storyline of past movies to add fan favorites like Jean Grey and Cyclops.

Days of Future Past takes place in 2023 where the general public is against mutants, even those who coexist with and help the humans. To defend themselves against the mutants the humans have devised a machine called the sentinel, which can mimic the mutants’ superpowers and easily defeat any mutant. This mutant genocide has been avoided by the use of time travel to warn the other mutants of the sentinel arrival so they can flee or defend. But as sentinel number rapidly increase, the mutants are forced to look to a new method of defense: to go back in time and prevent the sentinels from ever being produced. So the main character, wolverine (played by Hugh Jackman), is sent back to 1972 to reverse this invasion of sentinels. Once he is in the past, he consults many mutants of his rationale for coming and has to bring them all together in great adversity due to social conflicts. Once he brings the gang together, suddenly the power-hungry Magneto (played by Michael Fassbender) goes rogue. This puts much stress on Professor X (played by James McAvoy) and he must fight magneto again, which is the common struggle of the whole X- Men series.

As Wolverine, Professor X, and other mutants come together against Magneto, Mystique (played by Jennifer Lawrence) plans to kill the leader of the sentinel project, which would immediately send them into production. As fate would have it, all of these characters meet on the White House lawn. With Magneto’s overwhelming strength, he dominates the battle of mutant versus mutant, until professor X takes control of his mind, and paralyzes him. Meanwhile, Mystique must choose between her true desire to kill those who try to kill the mutant kind, or let a true enemy live free for the common good of the mutants. While this question poses a true challenge to her, she decides in favor of the mutants and the mutant community is saved, and magneto is summoned away from the metropolis. By the time this is completed, wolverine is launched back to the future to find everything intact and better than before. We also see characters who were killed in previous movies come back like Jean Grey, which provokes the audience to wonder about the romance between Jean and Wolverine, which caused wolverine much stress and depression when he had to kill her in the 3rd movie. At the end of the movie, peace is restored and the X-Men are back in full force.

Although this movie received high reviews, there was much controversy about the shift in plot and characters compared to the other eight movies. For example, when Wolverine is chosen to go back in time, Kitty Pride is given the boot from the actual comic timeline, where Kitty is the one to go back in time. Also, the previous movie, X-Men: First Class, is set in a different time then said in DOFP. The biggest issue with this film was its disregard for all the prior films. Since Wolverine went back in time and altered the past, everything we know from the other movies also could have changed. For example, William Striker, who plays a role in giving Wolverine his metal claws, was killed b3y mystique, therefore he could have been changed. Also, Jean Grey comes back to life, which means that her whole rant in the second movie is now gone. These small things add up to a whole different story, and could be different than Stan Lee ultimately wanted to portray the X-Men idea.

Another significant part of this film was the clip after the credits. The clip reveals a super villain who is being praised my thousands of slaves while he builds the Egyptian pyramids with is super powers. Also, there are four masked horsemen, which could reveal that the next movie could be more religious and contain more allusions to the bible. The Villains’ name is Apocalypse, and he is the oldest mutant known. He is extremely powerful and poses a huge threat to society. However, he is born five million years ago, so the next movie must figure a way to deal with the time difference. Overall X-Men Days of Future Past did live up to the expectations of the other action-packed films, but might be problematic to the plot of the series as a whole.