X-Men: Days of Future Past

Movie Title--  X-Men: Days of Future Past

Release Year--  2014

Running Time--  2 Hours and 11 Minutes

Director--  Bryan Singer

Cast--  Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Halle Berry, Nicholas Hoult, Ellen Page, Peter Dinklage, Shawn Ashmore, Evan Peters, Daniel Cudmore, Lucas Till, Bingbing Fan, Omar Sy

The X-Men led by Professor X and Magneto send Wolverine back in time to stop the "Sentinel" program in a desperate effort to change the future for humans and mutants.

In the future, large robots known as Sentinels have laid waste to cities, exterminating mutants and humans that help them.  A band of mutants led by Bobby Drake/Iceman (Shawn Ashmore) and Kitty Pryde/Shadowcat (Ellen Page) continue to evade the Sentinels in an effort to try to beat them.  They hole up in a monastery in China.  Soon, a plane carrying Professor X/Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), Storm (Halle Berry), Logan/Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) and Magneto/Erik Lehnsherr (Ian McKellen) arrive and they are invited inside.  Bobby and Kitty explain that Kitty sends Bishop's (Omar Sy) consciousness back a few days before the attack to warn them but no one can withstand the trip back in time if it is more than a few days back.  Wolverine volunteers to go back to the distant past, knowing that he can withstand the trip.

Wolverine is told that he is going back to 1973 to get Charles (James McAvoy) and Erik (Michael Fassbender) to work together at a time when they couldn't be further apart from each other to stop Raven/Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from assassinating the creator of the Sentinel program, Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage) and cause the Sentinel program move forward.  Right before Kitty sends Wolverine back in time, she tells him that he needs to keep his mind calm or it will cause him to slip between the past and future and it could destroy their chances of changing things.  She also tells him that nothing will be changed until he comes back from the past.

When Logan wakes up, he is in the year 1973 and in bed next to a woman.  He gets up and looks out the window to see that he is in a vastly different New York City and two men come into the room.  After a confrontation, Logan leaves with one of the man's car keys and drives to Charles' home to look for him.

Logan arrives at what had once been "Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters" to find the placcard at the gate on the ground and covered with weeds, then he is met at the door by Hank/Beast (Nicholas Hoult) where he is told that there is no professor there and that Charles did not want to be disturbed.  He explains to Logan that when the Vietnam war broke out, the teachers and a lot of the students were sent overseas to fight.  After a confrontation with Hank, Charles appears.  He is a broken man and he is addicted to the serum that Hank has created that to help him walk but the side effect is that it limits his telepathy.  Logan tells them that he has been sent from the future to stop Raven and he needs assistance from Charles and Erik in which Charles scoffs and asks if Logan knows where Erik is, then goes on to tell him that Erik is locked in a concrete prison cell underneath the pentagon accused of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  Logan tells Charles that he knows someone that can help.

Meanwhile, in Washington D.C., Trask is unsuccessful in getting the green light on his Sentinel project, while in Saigon, Raven has shape shifted into another form and is saving a group of G.I. mutants from being taken by William Stryker (Josh Helman) to be experimented on by Trask.

Charles, Logan and Hank recruit Peter Maximoff/Quicksilver (Evan Peters) and together, they hatch a plan to break Erik out of the pentagon and once Erik is free, they head to Paris where Raven plans to infiltrated the Paris Peace Accords and kill Trask who is trying to sell his Sentinels to the communist nations.

They arrive in time to stop Raven but Erik turns on her, stating that the only way that all mutants will be safe is if she is dead but she jumps from a window, exposing her existence to the world.  Magneto follows her, trying to finish the job and Hank tries to stop the fight, all of it happening in front of spectators and news cameras.  With the world now aware of mutants, President Nixon decides to give the green light to the Sentinel program and it is once again up to Logan with the help of Charles and Hank to try to stop Raven and now Erik from finishing what they have started.

I think that this film is excellent.  This film ties the new X-Men franchise together with the original franchise which is brilliant because it builds more story options for more X-Men films which for me is a good thing, since I am a big fan of the X-Men; as long as the story presentation stays fresh and inventive that is, once they go stale, they tend to get a little lame.

All the actors in this film were just amazing but I will say, I truly enjoyed Evan Peters as Quicksilver.  I am already a fan of Peters from "American Horror Story", so I was excited to see what he would do in this film.  I wasn't disappointed.  I thought he might be a little one dimensional, since I have never truly seen him in anything that wasn't a little bit on the scary side but I was quite pleasantly surprised.  I think one of my favorite scenes in the entire film is one with him at the pentagon.  I am not going to ruin it for you, I am just going to say, the sequence in the film where Jim Croce's song "Time in a Bottle" plays is just plain excellent.

Get the older members of your family together for the second installment of the X-Men reboot and make sure you stay tuned after the credits.  Like all of the new Marvel films, it presents a little insight to what is coming up next and Don't Forget the Popcorn!