X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

There's a moment in X-Men: Days of Future Past where young Charles Xavier and older Charles Xavier connect across time, and it genuinely got me. That's the film at its best: emotionally raw, surprisingly tender, earning the weight of everything the series has built. And then, almost immediately, you remember you're watching a franchise machine clicking its gears into place, and you feel the warmth start to cool a little.

The premise is a bold one. Wolverine's consciousness gets sent back to 1973 to prevent the creation of the Sentinel programme, which in the future has led to a near-total extinction of mutantkind. Bryan Singer has to hold two timelines together simultaneously, and honestly, he mostly manages it. The future sequences are genuinely bleak and tense. The 1970s stuff has colour and energy. Watching Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, and Hugh Jackman share the screen again while Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy carry the heavy lifting in the past, that's a lot of charisma to keep in orbit, and Singer keeps it from flying apart.

The Charles and Erik relationship is the emotional backbone here, and Fassbender and McAvoy are exceptional together. Their history, their ideological split, the love and fury between them, it's the most compelling thing in the film. When it focuses on them, Days of Future Past genuinely earns its dramatic ambitions.

But I do have a gripe, and I'm going to own it: I just don't get Peter Dinklage as Bolivar Trask. I think it's a miscasting, full stop. Dinklage is a genuinely talented actor in the right role, but here I found myself watching him and feeling nothing. No menace, no tragedy, no particular presence. For a villain whose decision sets the entire catastrophe in motion, that's a problem that the film never quite recovers from.

The bigger issue, though, is a tonal one. If you fell in love with this series for its willingness to actually grapple with prejudice, identity, and moral complexity, the stuff that made X2 feel genuinely urgent, then Days of Future Past might leave you a bit cold in places. The deeper thematic material gets squeezed out to make room for time-travel mechanics and crowd-pleasing set pieces. There's a slickness to the whole operation, a sense of careful franchise calculation, that brings it closer to the MCU's well-oiled entertainment machine than the grittier, more emotionally honest early films. I'm not saying spectacle is wrong. I'm saying when you trade soul for spectacle, you notice.

That's not to dismiss what it does well. The action is strong throughout, the stakes feel real in a way a lot of superhero films fail to achieve, and the ending genuinely delivers. It's an effective reset button for the franchise, threading the needle between honouring the original trilogy and clearing the decks for something new. Whether that something new justified the gamble is a question X-Men: Apocalypse unfortunately went on to answer rather badly, but that's a separate argument.

Compared to what Hugh Jackman later did with the character in Logan, there's an interesting contrast here too. Wolverine in this film is almost a delivery device, the vehicle through which the real story moves. That's fine, and Jackman is game as always, but it underlines how much more there was still to do with him that this kind of ensemble blockbuster format couldn't quite accommodate.

Three stars. Smart and exciting more often than not, and the McAvoy and Fassbender scenes alone are worth your time. But it's a little too clean, a little too safe, and a little too manufactured to sit alongside the best this series has produced. A great bridge. Just not the revolution it was reaching for.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 2014  | Watched: 2025-09-24

View on Letterboxd →

Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US

Affiliate disclosure: Movies With Macca may earn a small commission on purchases or subscriptions started via these links. It costs you nothing extra.

Related on Movies With Macca

More from Bryan Singer: X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) · X2 (2003) · X-Men (2000)
More with Hugh Jackman: Logan (2017) · Van Helsing (2004) · X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) · The Wolverine (2013)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More action: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · The General (1926) · Hand of Death (1976) · Daredevil (2003)
More adventure: Alice in Wonderland (1951) · The Eagle (1925) · Louisiana Story (1948) · The General (1926)