The past is prologue

JLaw

The X-Men storyline called “Days of Future Past” appeared in issues 141 and 142 of The Uncanny X-Men in January and February, 1980. I first read it in mid-1980s when I was 12 or so and had just discovered the comic about outcast mutant superheroes. The story has haunted me ever since. It is set in horrifying dystopian future of 2013, when giant robots called the Sentinels have started a world war after slaughtering or enslaving all the mutants they can find. Among the few remaining are a handful of aging X-Men and their progeny. Kitty Pryde, who in 1980 is the newest and youngest of the X-Men at 13, is one of the survivors and she and Rachel Summers, the daughter of Cyclops and Jean Grey, have a daring plan to fix the world. They are going to send Kitty’s consciousness back to her 1980 body and convince the other X-Men to stop the assassination of anti-mutant demagogue Senator Robert Kelly, whose death at hands of shape-shifting Mystique and her Brotherhood of Evil Mutants justifies the anti-mutant hysteria and leads to the building of the Sentinels. “Days of Future Past,” as created by writer Chis Claremont and artist John Byrne, inarguably the greatest X-Men storytellers, was extraordinarily dark and full of death and existential dread, which was almost unheard of in mainstream comics at the time.

“Days of Future Past” is considered one of the most influential narratives in not just comics but science fiction in general, and it was adapted twice for animated X-Men televisions in the 1990s, and it is the basis for Bryan Singer’s latest X-Men movie, his third and the franchise’s seventh since 2000. While “Days of Future Past” is as perfect a story as any in comics history, Singer and screenwriter Simon Kinberg drastically changed it for their film, partly because the Singer had decided (and was inexplicably allowed) to recreate and remythologize the X-Men for the first film, X-Men, back in 2000. In the latest film, it is franchise star Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) who is sent back, and this time it is to 1973, when Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), by herself, is going to kill Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), the inventor of the Sentinels.

Wolverine is sent by Professor X (Patrick Stewart), Magneto (Ian McKellen), and Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page), who somehow has developed the super-psychic powers needed for the time shift. He is tasked with convincing a young and depressed version of Professor X (James McAvoy), the Beast (Nicholas Hoult), and a superfast juvenile delinquent named Peter (better known as Quicksilver, played Evan Peters) to break young Magneto (Michael Fassbender) out of prison and stop Mystique, who at a younger age was the Professor’s adopted sister and Magneto’s lover. Meanwhile, in the future, the surviving X-Men, including Storm (Halle Berry), Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), and Bishop (Omar Sy), must battle the Sentinels to protect the Kitty and Wolverine’s entranced body.

If it sounds a bit overstuffed with superheroes, it certainly is, but Singer and Kinberg manage it well by making sure that only the drama in 1973 has any emotional heft, and giving the future’s characters barely any lines. (Oscar-winner Berry, for instance, is fifth billed and speaks maybe four times. Anna Paquin, another Oscar-winner, is seventh billed and doesn’t even speak during her one-second appearance, as her one real scene was cut from the film. No wonder the movie cost $200 million to make) McAvoy’s Professor X, who must find a way to escape wallowing in self-pity to save the world and mutankind, is the only character with a believable arc, since Fassbender’s Magneto changes his mind for unwritten and perplexing reasons, Mystique’s motivation never wavers, and Wolverine is always the same: kick ass, save the world, smoke a cigar, have mournful thoughts about Jean Grey.

Despite the thinness of the characters and the continued bastardization of the X-Men’s best stories, X-Men: Days of Future Past is still a pretty great action film, and undoubtedly the best of the franchise. Singer and Kinberg keep the adrenalin pumping from the first scene and only let up for scenes of exposition that are probably only too short for film critics. The massive superhero battles are choreographed well, and the production design, of both the 1970s and the dystopia, is impeccable. I have a hard time cheering for Singer, who is embroiled in a sexual assault lawsuit that few in gay Hollywood find remotely surprising, but X-Men: Days of Future Past is a triumph for him, his best film since his classic The Usual Suspects.

X-Men: Days of Future Past
Directed by Brian Singer
Written by Simon Kinberg
Starring Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, and Michael Fassbender
Rated PG-13
At your local multiplex
Unnecessarily in 3-D

Beneficent

Angelina-Jolie-as-Maleficent1-1024x682

A few times in these pages I’ve criticized the marketing departments of film studios for advertising films as the opposite of what they really are. There was 50/50, a movie about cancer that was sold as a comedy because Seth Rogan is in it and says a few funny things. August: Osage County was marketed as a dramatic comedy; it’s a tragedy that is occasionally funny and not always deliberately so. Those are relatively low budget bait-and-switches, however. I think the advertising campaign for expensive Disney blockbuster Maleficent is the biggest lie in quite some time. The billboards have all featured Angelina Jolie dressed as one of the most iconic screen villains of the last century – the evil fairy Maleficent from Disney’s 1959 Sleeping Beauty – and the commercials and trailers feature her sneering, battling armored armies, swooping through the sky with creepy wings. And Jolie is perfectly cast as an evil demoness. Her beauty is otherworldly, and her most famous roles, from her Oscar win as the dangerously crazy Lisa in Girl, Interrupted to the assassin in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, are fierce, violent antiheroes. Maleficent was sold to us as Sleeping Beauty from the perspective of the villain, with Jolie vamping about and camping it up. It’s not: It’s a complete rewrite of the fairy tale, in which our villain becomes the hero.

If you have fond childhood memories of Sleeping Beauty, forget them. In Maleficent, the story is structured by two neighboring kingdoms, one human ruled by a nasty king, the other peaceful and communal full of happy, magical creatures. One day, in the latter, a teen boy is caught trying to steal a jewel from the fairy kingdom, and a winged and horned teen girl save him from the anger of some tree creatures. The girl is Maleficent, and the boy is Stefan. They fall into a teen love before Stefan grows up to become an ambitious, vicious lapdog (crazy-eyed Sharlto Copley) to the king. One day, the king inexplicably decides to invade the fairy kingdom. Maleficent is now an adult and the protector of the realm. She and the tree warriors handily beat back the human army.

The king says that anyone who defeats her will be made his successor, so Stefan rekindles his romance with Maleficent as a trick. He drugs her and cuts off her wings and is made king. She’d not pleased and in her anger becomes, for about 20 minutes, the villain we were promised. She forcefully becomes queen of the other fairies and then, per Sleeping Beauty, curses Stefan’s baby daughter Aurora (an uncharacteristically vapid Elle Fanning): she will be pricked by a spindle on her 16th birthday and fall into a sleep that she can only be woken from by the kiss of true love. Stefan has three good fairies hide Aurora in the forest, but Maleficent and her werecrow henchman Diaval (Sam Riley) find them immediately.

And here’s where it all goes sideways. Spoiler: While spying on Aurora, Maleficent becomes enamored with the beautiful, sweet girl. She tries and fails to remove her own curse, and the final third of the film is a reformed Maleficent trying to save Aurora while battling the vengeful forces of Stefan. The plot hole is gaping here. If Maleficent just told Stefan she was trying to save his daughter from the curse, the whole final confrontation would have been moot.

I expected a great deal more from screenwriter Linda Woolverton, who also wrote the impeccable Beauty & the Beast and problematically racist but perfectly structured Lion King. Jolie only has a few snarky lines, and nothing really for even a low-rent drag queen to work with. I appreciate the feminist reconstruction of the story, making the central bond about mothering and sisterhood and not about a mythically perfect prince. But this was done much better in Brave and Frozen, and not at the expense of drama. Director Robert Stromberg, who won Oscars for the production design of Avatar and Alice in Wonderland, does a passable job with the action and a brilliant job with the visuals, even if the fairy kingdom does look a little too much like a magical Pandora.

Maleficent
Directed by Robert Stromberg
Written by Linda Woolverton
Starring Angelina Jolie, Elle Fanning, and Sharlto Copley
Rated PG
At your local multiplex
Unnecessarily in 3D