Review - 'Days Of Future Past' Proves 'X-Men' Still Among The Best; Forbes, 5/28/14

Mark Hughes, Forbes; Review - 'Days Of Future Past' Proves 'X-Men' Still Among The Best:

"If you’ve seen any of the X-Men movies, you know that the general conflict tends to involve humans distrusting mutants, mutants trying to convince humans to accept them, and Xavier trying to convince Magneto to coexist peacefully with humans while Magneto attempts to wage a war he considers self-defense. And much of that dynamic is at work in DOFP. Except it’s all upended, because now they all know Magneto was right that humans would eventually try to exterminate mutants. Except that only happens precisely because Magneto’s hostility causes another mutant to commit a crime eventually bringing about the extermination of mutants. Except Xavier isn’t sure he believes his own rhetoric anymore and is ashamed that Magneto was apparently right all along. Except Magneto resorts to the very actions against his own kind that he has long raged against when committed by humans. And so on.

It’s a story filled with those sorts of exceptions, taking the familiar and finding a new approach that breaths fresh life into age-old themes. And that’s the key, really, to why this franchise has continued to deliver solid stories time after time. The themes it repeats are the sort that always resonate, because they continue to be relevant to our modern lives.

The fear of those who are different, and the fanatical belief that they threaten to destroy us if we don’t destroy them first — this absolutism, this certainty of the righteousness of immoral actions under the belief it is self-defense against those who would do the same to us, drives so much of our more obvious global conflicts, but also more subtly speaks to the underlying cause of many of our social conflicts as well. And as in the film, it is very easy to lose hope, to lose faith, to retreat and refuse to listen to the warnings of what fruit those seeds will eventually bear. The film speaks to the fundamental truth that we cannot afford inaction in the face of such threats — threats arising from the nature of our struggles against one another (and thus against ourselves), threats caused precisely by the nature of fanaticism and absolutism that forever seek an enemy with which to do battle, as such extremes inevitably must.

Those battles between extremists willing to annihilate one another, under the moral certainty that their own immorality is justified, have always threatened the existence of us all, and we will rise or fall, live or die, together. That is the truth at the heart of the X-Men films, and while it’s a theme visited time and again in this series, it has never been so resonant nor so fully realized as in DOFP. We see this theme realized in the arcs of several characters, each of whom examine the theme in radically different ways and end up at different perspectives. Even when certain of them reach the same final conclusions, they arrive there in unique ways and — especially in the case of Mystique — there is a great deal of nuance and inner conflict over the implications of each choice, including the final climactic one. Never before in the series have so many X-Men experienced this level of soul-searching, nor been this alive and defined, which is saying a lot in light of how great most of the other films have been."