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Film

The X-Men Get a Do-Over

Wishing for climate science as resilient as this franchise? Me too.

Dorothy Woodend 31 May 2014TheTyee.ca

Dorothy Woodend writes about film every other week for The Tyee. Find her previous articles here.

There is one interesting idea in the new film X-Men: Days of Future Past -- the notion of a do-over.

We humans could use a fresh start.

It's been a hell of a week: murders, mayhem, Twitter erupting like Mount Etna, Canadian meteorologists denied the right to talk about climate change -- meanwhile people like me trooped off to see a bunch of silly movies in the theatre. It feels a bit ridiculous to watch the latest comic book film when out here in the actual world the battle between good and evil appears to be picking up speed.

The basic premise of the X-Men films has always been the war between us humans and our near-cousins the mutants. With the exception of a few cool abilities (like shape shifting into blue beasties or controlling the weather) the mutants are just like us, only slightly better looking in spandex. But humans being human, we will discriminate on the basis of just about anything.

In the earlier films the mutants were deep in hiding, careful to keep their difference under wraps. But the moment they banded together and got political the trouble really started. The parallels between the mutant folk and any other marginalized groups' rights battles (gay rights, civil rights, women's rights) are easy to draw and innumerable critics have done so. But the end result of demanding social change, as the newest chapter in the X-Men saga would have it, is sometimes total war.

At the beginning of Days of Future Past, the entire planet has been kicked and punched into a blighted Orwellian nightmare. Mutants and any humans who dared to help them are rounded up and exterminated in mass death camps. The world is shrouded in perpetual darkness and the few remaining mutants are on the run, fighting a guerrilla campaign against the humans' newest weapon: giant robot "Sentinels" that can adapt and incorporate the unique abilities of those they're fighting against. Despite their various talents (erupting into fireballs, iceballs or bouncing balls) the end appears nigh for the mutant race. In the face of certain extinction, what is there to do but go back in time and start all over again?

If only genuine social change was so simple. To remake the world, all you need is Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), a mutant with the ability to heal instantly, and the newly-out lesbian Ellen Page playing Kitty Pryde, a psychic with the ability to project peoples' minds back through time.

The characters from different iterations of the X-Men universe are reassembled here, including Magneto (Sir Ian McKellen), Professor Xavier (Sir Patrick Stewart), Storm (Halle Berry) and that other random guy that catches on fire whose name I can never remember. Together this band take a last stand against the human threat.

The Sentinel killing machines are on their way to make mutant mincemeat, and the only way to stop them is to make certain they never existed in the first place. Cue up the time travel motif and away we go to an age before the infernal machines' invention.

That '70s superhero movie

It's the 1970s all over again, when everything was bellbottoms, belt buckles and waterbeds. After a quick stint of somersaulting backwards through time, Wolverine awakens to the dulcet sounds of Roberta Flack on the radio and the sight of a naked lady next to him. Ah yes, the decade of louche, when men were extremely hairy and women were just beginning to ride the second wave of feminism (as well as those hairy dudes). The politics of the era are alluded to, but only briefly, as there's much to be done before the killer robots of the future take over.

First off, Wolverine must track down the younger versions of Charles Xavier and Magneto, respectively played here by James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender, two actors who are much better than the material they're given. Then there's everyone's favourite blue nude Jennifer Lawrence (Mystique), strutting about wearing little more than a bad attitude and thick coat of paint. This crew does what they can with a somewhat ridiculous plot.

To be fair, these early scenes are zippy good fun as Wolverine must find and convince Charles Xavier (deep in the throes of depression and apparent drug addiction) that the only hope for the future lies in an alliance with his mortal enemy Magneto. Magneto, having been caught murdering JFK, is locked inside the bowels of the Pentagon guarded by armies of soldiers.

Springing the prisoner is nothing for our merry mutant band; they enlist the help of a teenage kleptomaniac by the name of Quicksilver. Stop the presses, because here is a character that deserves a round of applause. Even in a few brief scenes he reminds us of the goofy, ridiculous joy of summer movies. One particularly jaw-dropping sequence involves young Silver's ability to go really, really fast -- even as everything else is moving in slow motion. Bullets wafting gently through the air can be casually nudged into a different direction; people can be made to punch themselves unconscious through the correct alignment of fist and face.

Naturally, he must be hustled off, before his show-stopping ways disrupt the long and ponderous plot. But for one brief moment, you recall why movies are fun. It is almost enough to make up for the long slog ahead.

Back to 'save the world' business

The film traipses about from Vietnam to Paris (where peace talks are taking place) to Washington D.C. The gist is that only the combined forces of Charles Xavier and Magneto can stop Mystique from killing a scientist named Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), who will invent the death-dealing robots of the future. Somewhere James Cameron is considering a lawsuit.

There is a great deal of running hither and thither, as the mutants chase each other around the globe. Back in the terrible old future, the death-dealing Sentinels are descending on the last bastion of mutants for one final battle. The race against time is the only genuine threat.

In our future's past, things are similarly lurching towards certain disaster. In spite of all the best efforts of our heroes, the humans have come into possession of mutant DNA and are building the first edition robots to be unveiled by Richard Nixon himself (or a good approximation thereof).

This is where things get terribly ponderous -- quite literally -- as Magneto, for no apparent reason, decides to airlift a stadium and plop it down around the White House. This whole sequence takes a good long while without much effect, although it makes a nice setting for the final struggle between mutant accommodation (as outlined by Charles Xavier) and mutant or human annihilation (Magneto's approach).

Let's cut to the chase. Spoilers be damned! Did you really expect that all the good guys would be dead and gone by the end of the film? I hate to disappoint you, but things unfold pretty much like you would expect. A few tweaks to history and the string of cosmic dominoes fall in line, leading to a pleasant future where everyone gets along, the dead are resurrected and the everyone's hair looks great.

The end. Or is it?

In every recent iteration of a comic book film, like the actual comic books themselves, an Easter Egg awaits at the end -- a scene that portends the next edition of the film franchise. At the screening I attended, the audience duly waited until the millions of tail credits rolled past. It takes a good long while to get through all nine different special effects companies, innumerable hairdressers and production assistants. If you manage to stick it out all the way to the end, you are rewarded by an obscure sequence that probably only makes sense to fanboys.

The next edition of the X-Men franchise is already prepped for launch by 2016. But maybe we'll all be deeply mired in a real war of our own by that point.

Back in the real world (where no one can stop bullets from hitting and killing innocent folk and the drumbeats of doom have grown so loud that we've stopped listening) -- here is where the film's central conceit follows you home and insinuates its way into your brain.

It would be nice to genuinely start over, but how far back would we have to go to forestall human destructiveness? In X-Men, the film makes reference to the notion that the moment Homo sapiens outstripped our near cousins the Neanderthals it was wholesale slaughter. We are a murderous species to be sure, but whether the next evolutionary form of life will be any different is hard to say.

Curiously enough, the movie theatres will soon be crowded with films examining this very idea, from Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, to yet another Tom Cruise science fiction alien epic (Edge of Tomorrow). Time and time again, humanity traipses back through the past to learn some lessons that they didn't pick up the first time around. It's a trope that is so oft used it's become a bit of a joke.

This seeming obsession with rewriting or recovering fictive history has strange parallels in the real world. Sometimes it feels as if history is being erased right in front of your eyes. Even the scandal that was attached to X-Men director Bryan Singer (who was charged with the sexual assault of a minor) is somehow forgotten when the film is raking in money.

Singer got his do-over: an erasure of history and a somewhat clean slate. Other folk aren't given the same luxury. You have to wonder about the forces behind this form of cultural and social amnesia: Forget there was ever such a thing as a strong public broadcaster. Forget the idea that scientists should be free to voice ideas and opinions. And forget that things were quite a bit different a few years ago.

It feels as if a war between just about everybody is about to erupt, or maybe it already has, and we've only just now joined the battle. It's not just the duality of humans versus mutants but men versus women, the rich against the poor, and especially between the past and the future.

Big change doesn't come without one hell of a fight -- I just hope it doesn't kill us all in the process.  [Tyee]

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