Great X-pectations

You can’t keep a good mutant down. That’s why Logan — otherwise known as Wolverine, played by Hugh Jackman — is still the heart and soul behind the X-Men franchise. The latest installment, X-Men: Days of Future Past, is loosely based on a 1981 comic book, and it brings back a lot of familiar X-Men names, most notably director Bryan Singer who helmed the first two installments before taking a long break. Here’s he’s back in good form, reuniting the original cast and bridging the previous prequel outing — featuring James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence and a very nasty Michael Fassbender — with a future dystopian tale that has shades of Back to the Future and It’s a Wonderful Life.

How’s that? Well, consider Wolverine as Doc Brown, heading back to the past in his DeLorean to explain to a young Marty McFly (McAvoy as a young, bitter Charles Xavier) that he has to do things differently, or else the future is gonna greatly suck.

Or maybe he’s like Jacob Marley, guiding Ebenezer Scrooge through his misguided past and warning him what will happen if he persists in his miserly ways. Except Scrooge is a very badass Fassbender, hell-bent on war with the humans.

And Logan is just the right X-Man to go back to the past and talk some sense into the feuding Xavier and Magneto, and convince an extremely blue Jennifer Lawrence (Mystique) not to gun down a scientist who wants to build robots to protect humankind from the mutant race.

Does all of this only make sense to X-Men fans? Well, my 11-year-old daughter could easily grasp it, and she’s never read an X-Men comic or seen any of the films before.

What we have is one of those “future dystopia” openings in which the earth is so frakked up, giant killer robots called Sentinels are tearing the planet’s remaining few mutants limb from limb. You see, the Sentinels were designed by the military to guard humans from mutants, but in the way of all dystopian futures, everything goes wrong; Moscow and New York are doom-shrouded craters in which passing Sentinel transports deposit killer robots to kill off remaining mutants. It’s an ugly future that we learn could be prevented — if Xavier and Magneto can unite in the past and turn Mystique from her pursuit of government scientist Trask (Peter Dinklage), who’s using samples of Mystique’s DNA to construct techno-robots who can spot a mutant in any situation. And before you can say “Robocop,” that mutant is toast.

There’s a lot of emphasis on American history in Days of Future Past, how it can be bent and reshaped, that reminds one of Alan Moore’s The Watchmen. There’s even an intriguing theory that Magneto controlled the so-called “magic bullet” that killed JFK in 1963 — with Magneto raising the possibility that JFK himself was a mutant.

Dinklage serves under President Richard Nixon — it’s 1973 — and he has his own conflicted feelings about mutants. He admires their skills, but can only think of using them to build up defense.

Days of Future Past has a lot of fun dwelling in its ‘70s past, inserting everything from Sanford and Son clips of Redd Foxx to a truly mind-blowing sequence set to Jim Croce’s Time in a Bottle — in which super-fast mutant Quicksilver (Evan Peters) helps the older, slower mutants escape from encroaching military weapons in a Pentagon lockup facility by zipping around the room while everyone else is simply frozen in place, rearranging bullet trajectories and giving soldiers wedgies into the bargain. It’s a great scene, and it makes you wonder why they didn’t keep Quicksilver around for the rest of the movie. He’s a trip.

As Mystique, Lawrence trots out a pretty toned bod under all the blue paint and mutant scales, one that she uses to kick the bejesus out of many unassuming assailants, and she also delivers some heart and soul to the mix. McAvoy, too, brings more dimension to his younger Xavier character, one who has pretty much given in to self-pity after Mystique has flown the coop. Fassbender is harder to read, except as a hawkish Magneto who believes humans will never change.

This is a step up from the 2011 prequel, X-Men: First Class, mostly because it brings all the best elements of the series together. That is, it focuses on character and doesn’t overdo the special effects set pieces, though there are some amazing sequences — Magneto levitating a baseball stadium into the air, and using it to encircle the White House, to name one.

The dude holding it all together is Jackman’s Wolverine. It’s amusing to see him sent back to 1973, sporting still-developing, not-quite-metallic skewers from his knuckles (they look more like breadsticks, actually). He has to be the one to give pep talks to Xavier and dispense future wisdom to the cold-as-ice Magneto. A tough job, that.

He even has a Groundhog Day moment. As in the Bill Murray comedy in which Murray wakes up to the same day over and over again, with Sonny and Cher’s I Got You Babe on repeat. Here, it’s Wolverine waking up to Roberta Flack’s The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.

The X-Men universe has expanded so much that other past characters — Halle Berry’s Storm, Anna Paquin’s Rogue — have little to do here, amounting to mere cameos. More time is given to new character Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page), who can pass through solid objects, though this mutant skill sometimes makes you wonder, why didn’t she just open the door or take the stairs? She spends most of the movie with her hands hovering around Wolverine’s skull, in order to send his consciousness back into the past — it kind of reminds you of her gig in Christopher Nolan’s Inception, where she sedated subjects so they could dip into other people’s consciousnesses to extract information. In any case, she doesn’t do much, but is promised a bigger role in the next installment, X-Men: Apocalypse.

As always, the X-Men franchise is one that focuses on outsiders, marginalized people with special talents, whether those talents amount simply to turning blue and growing sideburns (as Beast does), or exhibiting truly awesome power such as Magneto’s or Xavier’s. Almost from its inception in the ‘60s, it was an idea that resonated with comic book fans who often found their strongest powers lay in the realm of imagination. Nowadays, some of those marginalized comic book fans and creators are not only quite rich, they practically control much of Hollywood’s output. Kind of makes you believe the mutants won after all.