X-Men: Days of Future Past

Few action pictures manage to stick the landing quite like X-Men: Days of Future Past, Bryan Singer’s 2014 release that still gets passed around by people who swear it’s underrated. The film’s own tagline — “To save the future, they must alter the past.” — tells you almost everything about the tone it’s going for.

At its core, the plot goes like this: The ultimate X-Men ensemble fights a war for the survival of the species across two time periods as they join forces with their younger selves in an epic battle that must change the past – to save our future. Hugh Jackman takes the lead role and runs with it, while James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Patrick Stewart make sure the margins of the story stay just as alive.

It would be easy to watch X-Men: Days of Future Past purely for its surface pleasures, but there’s more going on underneath. The film keeps circling back to 1970s and based on comic — not as decoration, but as the actual engine of the story. You can also feel extinction and mutant working in the background, quietly shaping how later scenes land even when they’re not the explicit focus.

The action, adventure and science fiction classification undersells it a little. X-Men: Days of Future Past uses those elements as a foundation, then builds something more particular on top — a film that’s easy to categorize and a little harder to fully predict.

Bryan Singer’s handling of tone throughout X-Men: Days of Future Past deserves particular credit — it would be easy for a film juggling this many ideas to feel scattered, but the direction keeps everything pointed in the same direction. Look further down the cast list and you’ll find Michael Fassbender, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, each handed at least one scene that earns its place in the finished film.

At 132 minutes, it never overstays its welcome, moving with a confidence that a lot of longer films could learn from. Behind the scenes, Bad Hat Harry Productions, The Donners’ Company, 20th Century Fox, Marvel Entertainment backed the production, giving Bryan Singer the resources to fully realize the vision. Made on a budget of $250,000,000, the film went on to earn $748,045,700 worldwide — a number that speaks for itself.

Newcomers to Bryan Singer’s filmography could do a lot worse than starting here; it’s an accessible, confident introduction to what makes the director’s work distinctive. It’s the kind of film that rewards a rewatch, revealing small choices on a second pass that get lost the first time through. It’s a detail easy to miss on a first viewing of X-Men: Days of Future Past, but it rewards anyone paying close attention. That kind of craftsmanship is easy to take for granted until you watch a lesser film try the same thing and fail. Little touches like that are why the film keeps finding new defenders long after its initial release. It’s the sort of small decision that separates a good action film from a merely competent one. None of it feels accidental — X-Men: Days of Future Past is the product of choices made with real intention, and it plays that way from start to finish. That’s ultimately the difference between a film people watch once and one they keep coming back to, and X-Men: Days of Future Past lands closer to the latter.