Deadpool & Wolverine

Penny Deadpool

Deadpool & Wolverine
Directed by Shawn Levy
USA/Canada/Australia/
New Zealand 2024
Marvel
UK cinema cut.

Warning: Some very slight spoilers.

Well, Deadpool & Wolverine isn’t terrible.

Sadly, that’s one of the most complimentary things I can say about it. Discounting the appearance of Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (reviewed by me here), for me this new one if the weakest of the Deadpool films. It has its problems but, it moves so fast that a lot of people probably won’t notice and I’d be surprised if this wasn’t one of the biggest box office openings of the Marvel Cinematic Universe films (yeah, I’m sure this one will be quite popular with people).

Okay, positive things first because, as much as there are negatives there are good things to say too. So Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman as the title characters have great chemistry and the film is filled with great actors and also some interesting cameo appearances from past Marvel characters (not all of them from the MCU versions of the movies). And there are some funny one liners dotted around which Reynolds delivers in his usual Bug Bunnyish manner and it’s all good fun, to a point.

It’s got a very strong opening... and a very strong first half hour it has to be said, including a title sequence battle royale where, after digging up Wolverine’s rotting corpse from the grave left after his death in Logan (reviewed here) and finding he hasn’t regenerated, he gets into a fight with a weird time agency (I think the same one from the Loki TV show) and kills many of them in very gory ways using various bones from the skeleton of Logan as weapons.

We then get embroiled in a story where Deadpool is tasked with helping to kill off his dwindling timeline (which is decaying because of the death of Logan, who is apparently that timeline’s ‘anchor being’ )... but instead he grabs a Wolverine from another timeline to save is own universe and friends while trying to fight off the film’s two villains... played for laughs by Matthew Macfadyen as Mr. Paradox and played startlingly seriously, by the scene stealing Emma Corrin as Cassandra Nova.

Right from the outset the film is loaded with constant swear words and lots and lots of Marvel and non-Marvel pop culture references... and sometimes these hit really well and other times they don’t. But here’s the thing... while the film starts off as charming and it certainly has its heart in the right place, all the endless allusions to other movies and the constant fighting seem to be there to distract from the simplicity of the story and... well... it all felt like padding, to be honest. The first three quarters of an hour or so of this kind of thing is great but, yeah, after that initial set up it just gets, um, kind of dull. And while there are a lot of characters from the previous two films (along side some other notable appearances), my favourite character from the second movie, Domino, is curiously absent.

So, spectacular for sure and there’s certainly a lot of CGI blood spilled... yeah, I prefer practical effects myself but with a film with this much gory action, the alternative would have taken far too long and really hurt the budget (is my guess)... but, no.

Also, there are a lot of needle drop songs in this (and also melodic references to scores like Silvestri’s one for The Avengers) but it would have helped me personally if I’d have recognised more than just a couple of them, I think. I mean, I recognised Jimmy Durante and I think one of them maybe Madonna. That's kinda it on the song references for me.

And, truth be told, although I certainly liked the film, I did find myself checking my watch long before the end. Now, the film didn’t turn out to be the big ‘MCU reset button’ I was expecting it to be and part of me is glad and part of me isn’t. I mean, okay, we now have a variation of Wolverine that can be recalled when the big tentpole Marvel features start coming again (which is not necessary now we have the concept of a multiverse carried into the movies anyway) but ultimately, despite lots of rumblings that this would change the shape of the MCU, it really does seem to be a movie with no real stakes or consequences. This coupled with the fact that Deadpool’s regenerative powers seem to work in an entirely different manner to how they worked in the last two movies really left me cold, if not a little confused.

The trailer campaign didn’t help it much either. When I was watching it I felt like I’d already seen most of the scenes referenced in the last few months. So there were some surprises but... not so many of them. Where the trailers really let it down, though, is in the big, climactic scene where two of the lead characters (look, I’m trying to skirt around the danger zone with this in terms of spoilers, okay) appear to have met their matter/anti-matter end and died. However, in the trailer there are scenes where they appear together in it which haven’t turned up yet so you know... you kinda do know... that these two are going to make it out alive and kicking. So they kinda killed that one themselves.

And, yeah, that’s me done with this one, I think. Deadpool & Wolverine is going to hit big and will make a lot of people happy. Sadly, I didn’t get on with it nearly as much as I thought I would but, there’s always a chance that it might grow on me at some point in the future, for sure (I might find it easier to process the second time around). So, yeah, I’ll try it again when it comes out on Blu Ray (and goes into the sales), I think.

Free Guy

Ready NPC One

Free Guy
USA/Canada 2021
Directed by M. Shawn Levy
Walt Disney

Warning: Plot spoilers so, if you didn’t see the trailer,
probably don’t read the paragraphs here dealing with the story.

Okay, so Free Guy is one of those nicely made action fantasy movies with a lot of heart. It’s not exactly original but it’s presented in a way slightly differently to most movies that take on this kind of theme and, I’d say it more or less does it’s own thing so, I’m not going to criticise it on the ‘originality’ stakes.

After explaining to the audience the difference between the Heroes who wear sunglasses and those who don’t, Guy (played by Ryan Reynolds), wakes up every morning in Free City, grabs his blue shirt from the cupboard and heads off over to the coffee shop for his morning drink before going to work as a bank teller. A bank that’s robbed every day, one of a series of largely violent incidents barely blinked at by Guy and his friends because this stuff is happening all the time. Then he becomes somewhat aware of a girl, Molotov, who inadvertently inspires him to break out of his established routine and he steals a pair of sunglasses. The glasses help him see the world for what it is... a game in which he can evolve and raise his character level in order for Molotov, who is really Millie (played by Jodie Comer), to take him seriously.

And when I say she’s really Millie, Free City is just a big, global online video game but Guy, without any forehand knowledge of this, is an NPC (which, to those of you who don’t play video games, stands for Non Player Character). So the non-evolving, collateral damage characters who are there to interact with players and get punched, blown up or otherwise injured before re-spawning for another glorious day in Free City (much like the characters played by movie extras, I guess). However, Millie and her ex-partner Keys (played by Joe Keery) are trying to find the evidence inside the game that proves that Key’s boss, who distributes the game and who is played by director Taika Waititi, has illegally used their game engine as the basis for Free City. And once she realises what’s going on with Guy, she needs the assistance of the first evolving AI character, which itself is a remnant of that original software, to help her locate it before the sequel game is released to the public and the original version is overwritten... effectively ending all the NPC’s lives in the game (as far as Guy is concerned).

And I won’t say anymore than that but it’s a really nice action comedy with a side helping of romance and a big heart. It does, honestly, resemble Ready Player One (reviewed here) a lot. Actually, the film shares a screenwriter with Ready Player One so, perhaps that’s not so surprising. And the plot also has similarities to Disney’s earlier 1982 hit Tron in some ways... although the way in which it’s presented here is certainly a lot different.  

Reynolds is absolutely perfect in the role of the up beat NPC Guy and Jodie Comer is... well I’ve only seen her be brilliant in everything she’s in so far and she has good on-screen chemistry with Reynolds, for sure. There are also a heck of a lot of cameo appearances in the movie, too many to mention here... some quite overt like Channing Tatum and Chris Evans, others more hidden like Hugh Jackman. Also, there are loads of video game references (most of which went completely over my head because I’m not a big game player, although I did pick up that Free City was based a little on Liberty City from some of the Grand Theft Auto games) and a load of pop culture shout outs too... fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars and a couple of their scores are in for a treat too, it has to be said.

The film hurtles along at a rapid pace but there’s still time to pack in a ‘double love story’ (kind of) and even a nice, very welcome reference to the problematic and insane lack of gun control laws in America, it has to be said. It’s a morally uplifting film in a lot of ways and it’s all packaged up in a world filled with hot cars, health power ups, exploding buildings and all the things you might expect from a modern, action oriented video game. However, it also pushes the idea that playing games with a violent content is not necessarily the way to go and there’s a nice moment when it’s shown that everybody around in the ‘real world’ has come to love the main NPC, known globally as Blue Shirt Guy, because he goes around trying to save people and promote the idea that everyone should be nice to each other... which is also a sensibility which has grown in him from the original source code of the unreleased game hidden somewhere in the world of Free City. It’s a nice concept and the brisk pacing and non-stop comedy shenanigans of the main characters means the idea never outstays it welcome.

And that’s pretty much all I’ve got to say about Free Guy. This film is another hit for Reynolds, as far as I’m concerned and Comer proves she has what it takes to be able to help carry a huge studio tent pole movie too. Absolutely brilliant fun and this is one I’ll definitely be picking up on Blu Ray to show my nearest and dearest. Definitely worth catching this one.

Reminiscence

Remembering
It Wholesale

Reminiscence
Warner Brothers USA 2021
Directed by Lisa Joy

You know, I suspect this movie is probably going to invite comparisons to Blade Runner from some critics and, thinking about it, I wouldn’t blame them if they do. Written and directed by Lisa Joy, Reminiscence is a beautiful, beautiful film which has exactly the kind of soft science fiction concept at its heart that was the speciality of the literary giant Philip K. Dick. And, added to this, the writer has built a nearish future world, shot in a convincing and breathtaking way, feeding directly into the viewers imaginations and then done the cool 1980s thing, by using the concept and the world to tell a classic 1940s style film noir thriller. Complete with a voice-over running narrative provided by the main protagonist, no less.

The film is set mostly in Miami (with a dash of New Orleans thrown into the mix) in a future where the water levels of the Earth have risen significantly... which brought a war along with it as humanity tried to cope with the new way of living. The post-war result, beautifully rendered in the film, are cities which live on top of water. The levels of the water sloshing around on the walkable streets are also used to suggest the distinction with the class divisions in this future... with the super rich actually living in ‘dry lands’... city complexes protected by huge damns to keep the water out. It all looks fantastic and quite gorgeously inspiring, like the worlds built in movies like the aforementioned Blade Runner (reviewed here) or Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (reviewed here).

The film stars the brilliant Hugh Jackman as Nick Bannister who, along with his business partner, ex-army buddy Watts, played by equally brilliant Thandiwe Newton, is a memory broker of some kind. That is to say, he uses a special tank and a mixture of chemicals to allow people to revisit past moments in their lives, for a price. The special pods they use were originally designed for interrogation in the war and so the two are also employed sometimes by the city’s DA, to churn up memories to help acquit or convict various suspects in legal cases.

Then one day, in the best film noir tradition, a femme fatale called Mae, played by the always amazing Rebecca Ferguson, walks into Nick’s life on the pretext of needing a quick memory fix to locate some misplaced keys she can’t remember losing that morning and then, well, I don’t want to give the terribly convoluted and, thankfully, fairly impenetrable and surprising plot twists away but it’s a wonderful noir concoction which manages to juggle a bleak outlook with stunning cityscapes in a convincing and addicting manner.

Not content to let the central concept kick start and guide the impetus of the story, the writer/director has the confidence to use the memory trips of various characters to shape the context of the viewpoint of the story and to use as reveals in certain places in the narrative structure. There is absolutely no lazy writing in this one and it really is one of the best modern noirs I can think of. It’s first rate science fiction which stretches back to movie genre ancestors such as Soylent Green through to recent genre successes like Hotel Artemis (reviewed here). It certainly holds up to its predecessors and possibly is more successful than some of those classics, even.

The special effects are flawless and so are the actors here. Rounding out the cast is a ‘bent cop turned freelance villain’, so to speak, played by Cliff Curtis... who appeared, like Rebecca Ferguson, in the big screen adaptation of Doctor Sleep. He’s playing a much more ruthless and unforgiving character than I’m used to seeing him playing here though. The actors manage to keep their character’s secrets until the reveals and, this perhaps says as much about their performances here as it does about the writing.

Another nice element of the world depicted here, which certainly highlights and maintains the ‘film noir’ atmosphere in which the story line marinates, is the fact that in the future depicted here, the days have become much too hot to do much of anything. So mankind’s solution is to flip their lifestyles to suit the new globally warmed planet. People sleep during the day and work by night, for the majority of the time. It’s a neat trick to have all the action take place in an intriguing world of wispy, smoky colours and shadows and it certainly works a treat. Ramin Djawadi’s score which is, alas, unavailable on CD at time of writing, is just another element which merges perfectly with the shadow world depicted here.

Reminiscence is definitely one of those films where all of the elements seem to come together in the best way possible to serve the story (including the quite beautiful sentiment behind it) and wrap everything up in a wonderful package. If you are a fan of science fiction, especially the kind of ideas you’d find in the softer areas explored by writers in the 1950s to 1970s, then you should really go and check this one out. I hope this one comes out on Blu Ray before Christmas as I would love to show it to the people I love.

The Greatest Showman

What a P.T.

The Greatest Showman
USA 2017 20th Century Fox
Directed by Michael Gracey
Blu Ray Zone B

Ahh, Christmas time. That magical time of the year when you’re confronted by the ghost of watching films you really didn’t want to see because you bought them for relations who did. Such is the case with the musical motion picture The Greatest Showman, which stars Hugh Jackman as P. T. Barnum in what I can only describe as a somewhat sympathetic, rose tinted humbuggery version of that man’s life. I think the last time I saw a production about Barnum it was also big on sentiment and less enthusiastic about selling a more genuine embodiment of the spirit of the man but, that’s okay, I guess that kind of sensationalist pursuit is, in some ways, doing just that... in a roundabout way.

That previous time I saw a Barnum musical it was in 1981 at the London Palladium in a stage musical which was literally just called Barnum... and it had Michael Crawford in the title role (I think ex-Carry On star Jim Dale did it in America, if memory serves). And, though it’s not completely fair, especially since The Greatest Showman is in no way an adaptation or remake of that production, I shall do the obvious and make my one and only comparison to the stage show and say... I still remember some of the songs from the 1980s show. The songs in The Greatest Showman seem, somehow, a little flat and unmemorable in comparison.

That being said, I’m going to hedge my bets here and remember I gave a disasterous review to another recent musical, La La Land (you can read it here if you like), only to discover that, once the songs were stuck in my head, I absolutely loved the movie from my second showing onwards and would happily screen it for myself every year if there weren’t so many other movies to watch. And, seeing as I didn’t hate the songs in The Greatest Showman, I’m guessing that they will soon grow on me if I heard them again so, although I’m not likely to get to it anytime soon, I suspect that if I’d waited and wrote this review after a second viewing, it would be more favourable than what I’ve got to say about it this first time around. So sorry but... first impressions will just have to do.

Those impressions being that... it’s not a bad film. It has some nice segues from one scene to another and some clever choreography on some of the musical numbers... such as the scene where Jackman’s Barnum is trying to persuade Zac Efron’s character to join forces with him in a dance at a bar with flying glasses and bottles... or a sequence where Efron dances with his love interest, played by Zendaya using the ropes of her profession as a trapese artist.

And the performances are all fine too... especially Hugh Jackman, who I always find is worth the price of admission, so to speak. Michelle Williams is equally sparkling as Barnum’s wife Charity and Rebecca Ferguson fairly twinkles as famous singer Jenny Lind. There’s also an edge to the writing in terms of giving the characters a less predictable nature and by far my favourite character was a critic who seems to have hated Barnum but here, it seems, is given a little more three dimensionality in terms of the way he reacts to situations and he’s wonderfully brought to life in this by some guy called Paul Sparks. So all well and good and... combined with some nice colour palettes and some beautiful sets... part of me thinks I should maybe have gone to the cinema to see this one.

However, my main problem... and I can see how this could always be a problem when cinematic fantasies have one foot in reality such as biographical pictures... is that the plot seems absurdly simple. This film has less twists and turns than a Roman road and, while I should probably be applauding simplicity in modern cinema... I don’t know, it just seemed to me like there was no real drama to get my teeth into here, no matter how good the performances were. And they were very, very good.

I guess that, while I did invest in the main protagonists to some extent, I never felt like there was much at stake for any of the characters and I just didn’t feel the need to root for them enough. Which is a shame because there was obviously a lot of time and care put into this production. However, that being said, I’m one of only three people I know who didn’t think it was all that people had said it was (my two viewing companions were of the same opinion as me on this one) and everywhere else... well, I’ve not heard a bad word said about it and it’s been very successful. So I’m kinda glad about that since there’s obviously no small amount of work gone into bringing this tale to the screen.

And that’s me done, I’m afraid. The Greatest Showman didn’t really inspire me as much as it might and I wouldn’t whole heartedly recommend it to anyone... much less those who don’t like musicals (I love musicals myself). Not, quite, my cuppa tea but I suspect I may get turned around on that if I ever find myself plonked down in front of it again. Sometimes first impressions aren’t always right and, like I said... hedging my bets.

Logan

Citizen Shane

Logan
USA 2017
Directed by James Mangold
UK cinema release print.

And here we go again with what is probably the last of the X-Men movies to feature the popular 1970s creation Weapon X, aka Wolverine... at least with Hugh Jackman in the titular role and before 20th Century Fox start on the inevitable reboots to retain the options on the characters (one would suppose). That being said, Logan doesn’t quite feel like the majority of the X-Men movies out there, although it does have some of the feel of The Wolverine (reviewed by me here), which is to be expected since that movie was also directed by James Mangold.

This movie has a harder 15 rating over here and an R rating in America (and is on its way to becoming the biggest earning R rated movie they’ve had, by the looks of it). What that means in terms of the central character is that the violence is exactly as grim as you might expect from some of the comics and the tone is quite downbeat. The story content, for example, exactly matches that grimness, giving us a film set ten or so years in our future where there are no more mutants being born and, out of the few who are left, the two we are most concerned about here are both dying. It’s been said that this is Patrick Stewart’s last go at the Professor X character too and, for this one, he impressively lost a lot of weight for the role so he could play a very sick version of his iconic character... one who is prone to brain seizures which, if they are left unchecked and without medication, are capable of killing everyone around him. So we have a future where Wolverine and a mutant called Caliban are looking after the Professor but are also in hiding due to an incident in their past. You do get to hear what this incident, roughly, is but a lot of it is left to the imagination and no real details are revealed... which is a shame because I would have liked to know a little more.

And then, into this grim world comes a mutant child who has been genetically injected, along with other children, and raised from the DNA samples you may remember being ‘retrieved’ in the post credits scene from the last movie in the series, X-Men: Apocalypse (reviewed here). And the government programme that created this group of pre-teen killing machines, as shown in the film in no uncertain terms, wants them all back as they escaped before they could be murdered in favour of another programme. And so, in the case of one of the children, Laura (played nicely by Dafne Keen), it kind of falls on the reluctant Logan and the enthusiastic but extremely cranky Professor X to get her to a place called Eden... the origins of which I won’t spoil for you here.

And that’s that. The movie is a road trip film with certain X-Men-like events happening and a kind of bonding between Logan and Laura as the three main characters are thrown into the mix together. The director also exhibits a certain passion for showing one of his key influences, the old Alan Ladd version of Shane, up on the screen and, I have to say, it was kinda nice to see Jack Palance shoot Elisha Cook Jr on a large screen again. I have to say, though, that the references dotted about all over the place in reference to this movie are not exactly subtle and I think they could have been a little less overt and seemingly important than they are made out to be here.

But it’s not a bad little film, to be honest. It didn’t quite hit all the marks for me and I think I preferred the other two Wolverine-centric movies over this one but... it’s still a pretty good movie and much better than, say, the third movie, X-Men - The Last Stand, and the relatively recent X-Men - Days Of Future Past (reviewed here). I think it does the main character a little less justice than he deserves and it seems like he’s not learned anything from the arc which has brought him to where he is in this one but, maybe he’s as confused at the cracked continuity of the series of films as his audience, perhaps?

I hate to break it to anyone but this film in no way attempts to fix the completely bonkers lack of joining up and co-existing of various elements of the X-Men franchise, which seems to have been compounded and made worse with every movie made since the third one (except maybe for the second of the movies featuring Deadpool, from last year... you can read my review of that one here). It doesn’t explain how Wolverine was able to have Professor X in his Patrick Stewart body back at the end of The Wolverine and nor does it explain why, at the beginning of Days Of Future Past, he once more had adamantium claws when we’d clearly seen them stripped back down to bone claws in the previous film. And there are some other obvious errors which I won’t go into here but which make this, once again, impossible to exist with the other films in the franchise... something which can be said for pretty much every movie since The Last Stand.

But never mind... flawed as this movie contnuity is, there are some really nice things in it, not least of which is that the X-Men have also become fictional characters in a series of comics published by Marvel. Actually, although the various comics throughout the movie look and feel like 1970s issues of X-Men, they were in fact created with new artwork for the movie... so if you’re looking for a specific key issue which is used as an important plot point here then please don’t bother, the issue doesn’t exist outside of this movie.

I haven't got much else to say about this one, to be fair, but I did enjoy it and I’ll probably watch it again when it gets its inevitable Blu Ray release. There’s also a nice Marco Beltrami score which gives it a different feel to what I was expecting... almost playing against the tone of the film in some places but still managing to somehow work. There’s also some good song placement needle dropped in on this one so, all in all, the music was pretty good and I’m certainly looking forward to listening to a CD release of Beltrami’s music at some point.

If you’re a fan of the X-Men movies then you shouldn’t have a problem with Logan. It’s not an all out action fest like some of the films but, at the same time, the violence in this is quite intense and, certainly, fans of the Wolverine character from the comic books should enjoy this one. It’s definitely a mature take on the characters and, in this case, it’s also a depressing one so, you know, don’t go to this one expecting to come out on a high. If you go in knowing that from the outset... and I’m sure most people can figure out what’s going to happen in this one anyway, just by looking at the trailers... then you should have an okay time with it.

X-Men: Apocalypse

Mystique’s Roadshow

X-Men: Apocalypse
2016 USA Directed by Bryan Singer
UK cinema release print.

Partial Warning: The only spoilers in here
are already revealed in the trailers for the film.

I was fulling expecting to have to title this review Apocalypse, No! and to really give this movie some stick. Well, as it turns out, X-Men Apocalypse, the 12th X-Men movie in the series, is actually one of the more entertaining, technically competent and dramatic of the movies in the franchise. What a shame, then, that the writers still find themselves unable to correct the glaring continuity errors thrown up by the movies following the third film in the series, X-Men - Last Stand... something which everyone was pretty much hoping they would have been able to finally put to rest with the ‘time fixing’ previous, mostly awful installment in the franchise, X-Men - Days Of Future Past (reviewed by me here).

The way I see it we’ve got two main problems in the cinematic narrative that really aren’t taken care of. One is the previous movie starting out from a point where the original timeline version of Professor X, played by Patrick Stewart, is alive and well and somehow still inhabiting a body with the same physical appearance and vocal chords, even though he was killed before Jean Grey died, which Wolverine from that timeline clearly remembers happening. So they shot themselves in the foot straight away as far as I can tell.

Next we have them journeying back to a time after the Cerebro machine was already built in the X-Men First Class timeline, therefore not correcting the fact that Professor X and Magneto were supposed to have built it together.

Thirdly, we have the X-Men Origins - Wolverine movie (reviewed by me here) fairly compromised in various ways and... I’m not even going to attempt to go there and unravel the fallout on that.

Most of the other ‘seeming’ continuity errors are, for the most part, explainable but it’s really a shame that the same writers who have given us a script as interesting and entertaining as this one can’t be bothered to solve these issues properly. This is what happens when you don’t properly follow the franchise bible folks... this is pretty much the ‘George Lucas’ way of ‘ignoring stuff writing’ that’s going on here... and it’s only twelve films in!

Alas, not only does it not correct these errors... it seems to compound them further in some sequences. Also... what gives with the actors in this trilogy (this film and the previous two X-Men badged movies) being set in three different decades of the timeline? The 1960s (X-Men - First Class... reviewed by me here), the 1970s (X-Men - Days Of Future Past) and the 1980s (X-Men - Apocalypse) are all covered by the same actors playing mutants and humans alike who... somehow... don’t seem to age at all in the movies between decades. Okay, so in the case of Wolverine and Mystique you can kinda understand it but everyone else? This is not good time-lining, people? I guess that’s why Magneto’s son is revealed as Quicksilver perhaps (no spoilers here folks... it’s in the trailer) but a certain other mother/son relationship is kept under wraps still (as it was in X-Men 2). Michael Fassbender still looks a little too young but can maybe get away with it. The other two... people might not find it all that credible, methinks.

Also... it’s interesting that we have Quicksilver’s sister absent here but, she’s all over the ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe’ Avengers franchise... with her origins somewhat different to the comic and with Quicksilver already killed off in that franchise. I’m wondering why more casual viewers to these films aren’t questioning this, to be honest. Or maybe people just don’t care?

Anyway, I suppose I’d better mention some of the good stuff about this movie now, right? Since I liked it so much.

Apocalypse is played absolutely brilliantly by Oscar Isaac, who manages to play a pretty shallowly written character with the amount of conviction necessary to make these cardboard bad guys stand out and seem way more interesting and vital than they perhaps usually are. You believe in him and his power to galvanise his ‘four horsemen’ and I really appreciated the Egyptian tint to the proceedings in the earlier part of the film. A very strong opening set in ancient Egypt satisfied my own penchant for the iconography of the time and place and, amazingly, the rest of the film lives up to the amazing opening sequence... not just in spectacle but in the way the characters interact. And that includes a lovely opening title design which matches the style of a lot of the previous films but with a load of entertaining ‘historical colour’ thrown in for good measure.

Michael Fassbender,  James McAvoy and Jennifer Lawrence all do a bang up job and they are ably supported by new and old cast members alike. The continuing drama of Magneto’s back story is extremely moving and takes us right back to reminders of the opening sequences of both X-Men and X-Men - First Class, building on the inherent, rich material of the character’s troubled legacy and adding to the psychological motivation of the character, explaining why he is who he is, still, and why he does what he does. It doesn’t quite explain the way in which the character veers towards the end of the movie, I think, but the choice he makes doesn’t break the boundaries of credibility too far and I think they just about get away with it without compromising Magneto too much, to be fair.

Evan Peters’ Quicksilver is great again in this one. He’s written well and his big set piece, which took some months to shoot and which involved him being on the set longer than any of the other cast members, by all accounts, is another triumphant one... with the quirky humour of the character coming out in a high pressure situation. Singer catches a repeat trick stylistically too, with composer John Ottman’s magnificent score stopping dead as the character is backed up again with a famous pop song for the entire sequence. Which is something which I suspect audiences will subconsciously get a lot of enjoyment out of... even if the sequence isn’t quite up to the calibre of the previous movie (which was one of the few good things about X-Men - Days Of Future Past).

And that’s about it for this one. If you like X-Men movies then this is certainly a good one... I’d say it’s my seventh favourite in the series so far. So don’t miss out on this one unless, like me, the screaming continuity problems of these films drives you absolutely mad. Then you might have a problem.

X-Men - Days Of Future Past

Future, Past Caring

X-Men - Days OF Future Past
2014 USA/UK
Directed by Bryan Singer
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: Big spoilers in this one and I’m not even going to apologise for them... this is no more than this dreadful movie deserves to “call it out” to people.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” It’s strange but, I’ve only ever heard that quoted, usually incorrectly (from people who have remembered it wrong), by film-makers trying to defend the outrageous continuity errors evident in their films which their audience has had to point out to them. I have to say that, in terms of the context within which people quote this about their big screen stories, I have to disagree and bring my own inner hobgoblin to the table, in this case.

I believe that a film franchise succeeds or fails on a lot of different factors on a film by film basis but, one of the things which is really important, and which can kill a whole franchise if you let it, is consistency... in this case, the consistency of continuity. And, unfortunately, the X-Men franchise has now, as far as I’m concerned, sacrificed itself for a quick buck on the altar of the hobgoblins who were really only interested in having a good time at the movies but, instead, are forced to hold a mirror up to the movie and say... “Seriously? You think your audience are all this stupid?”

Before I rip into this awful mess properly, I just want you to know how I stand on the previous films in the franchise, so you can see where I’m coming from and judge my thoughts on X-Men: Days Of Future Past (or X-Men: Days Of Screwing The Continuity Even Further While Pretending To Solve It And Hoping Your Audience Doesn’t Think About The Movie For Too Long, as I now call it) so you can either agree or disagree with my thoughts in terms of this movie’s place compared to the others.

X-Men: Bryan Singer’s first movie was pretty much the first movie based on a Marvel comics property that was actually any good. Not just good, pretty damned brilliant, as it happens. It almost made up for not having the proper characters from the 1960s in it and changing the costume design... well... yeah, almost makes up for it. Something to note: Professor X and Magneto built Cerebro together, when they were friends, in this continuity.

X2: X-Men 2: This was at least as good as the first movie. Another brilliant piece of modern fantasy action from Bryan Singer with a strong opening and a strong ending leading into something very dark and with a consistent tone throughout. Basically, an epic feeling movie to set up the Dark Phoenix character arc.

X-Men: The Last Stand: This was awful. Brett Ratner took over the franchise and basically used every great set up from the previous films and managed to make them pretty boring and unwatchable for, pretty much, most of the film. A lot of people haven’t forgiven this movie for being so bad, as far as I can see. Something to note: Young “bald” Professor X and his friend, Young Magneto, go to recruit Jean Grey together. Professor X can both walk and simultaneously use his mutant powers. In this movie, Charles Xavier is killed/disintegrated, although his mind seems to have jumped into a “different” human being... if the post credits sting is anything to go by.

X-Men Origins - Wolverine: A lot of people didn’t dig this movie but I thought it was okay. A lot of fun and very much like an old 1980s or 1990s “straight to video” kind of B Movie.... but with an A Movie budget to play around with. Thought this was much better than the reaction it got. Things to note: Professor X is in this one too, at the end. My review is here.

X-Men: First Class: Absolutely brilliant. Had a lot of continuity errors which could not be explained as a hangover from the previous films but since it was technically a reboot of the franchise, I was happy with this when treated as a stand alone sequence of movies. Things to note: In this timeline, Magneto and Professor X did not build Cerebro. Professor X is crippled by the end of their first big adventure and way after he and Magneto were still friends, confounding the opening of X-Men: The Last Stand totally. My review is here.

The Wolverine: Nice little movie. Not as fun as the last one but different and kinda interesting. Things to note: Wolverine's adamantium claws are severed and are no longer something he has in this “continuity”. Instead, he has reverted back to the bone claws he was born with as a result of the events depicted in this film. Jean Grey haunts his dreams after he killed her in X-Men: The Last Stand. Also, Professor X and Magneto confront Wolverine in an airport in the post credits sting of the movie. Wolverine looks shocked because, obviously, Professor X is dead, isn’t he? At least, his body was destroyed. My review of this one is here.

Okay. Recap over.

So here we have X-Men: Days Of Future Past. And all I wanted from this movie right now is for it to fix all those stupid continuity holes from the clashes between the awful X-Men: The Last Stand and the amazingly cool X-Men: First Class... and in a fairly fun manner, if possible. And, if only the writers would have thought about it a little more, maybe they would even have nailed that because, frankly, while a bit silly, the central premise they use to wipe out the history of the characters in this one really works well... except it fails before they even start using it.

I can see how the idea here was maybe “borrowed” from the rebooted Star Trek films from a couple of years ago. In the first one (reviewed here), the Spock of the regular timeline is catapulted back into his past, which then changes the future of the younger versions of himself and his friends... thus giving the franchise new life to go back to the days of Kirk, Spock and McCoy in their prime for a movie series without having to worry about contradicting anything that came before. Revelling in that, in fact, by having a half remake of Star Trek II - The Wrath Of Khan for their sequel (reviewed here) and totally having their cake and eating it at the same time. And why the older version of Spock didn’t just wink out of existence because his timeline didn’t actually happen anymore, I’ll never know. Oh, yes I do... because they don’t care about the logic at the heart of the theory of time travel. Okay, whatever.

Singer’s approach in X-Men: Days Of Future Past is to have Wolverine’s “mind” sent back to his younger body in 1973 and get him to change the past then, to split everything off into a new timeline which doesn’t result in the death of mutant kind... and you know what? That could have worked out really well, and the film-makers obviously seem to think it did.. or they never would have released this shambles into cinemas in this form. But the thing is, to have someone sent back from the future to change that timeline... you need to have that future actually be a possibility in the first place. That reality has to have existed before you go back and change it... and there’s no way the point in time that Wolverine is sent back from could actually have happened within the continuity of the previous films without a lot of explaining away of certain things... and there’s absolutely no concession to this, nor concession to audience intelligence, in the movie.

It starts off well enough with concentration camp imagery of imprisoned and dead mutants (and potential mutants) and this is, of course, a nice echo of the World War II Nazi concentration camp sequences which open both the original X-Men and X-Men: First Class. So a really nice idea there from the director. Then we have a fairly cool fight which is basically just a set up to explain the major time travel element  in the film. And then we see the last surviving mutants holed up together, awaiting the coming of the deadly Sentinels. Among these mutants are Kitty Pride, Ice Man, Professor X, Magneto, Storm and Wolverine. They are, of course, the X-Men... well... err... X-Men and X-Women... except... woah... hold on a minute... who’s in that line up again?

I got really excited by the post-credit sting at the end of The Wolverine because the story confronted us with something that was just so impossible within the actual X-Men timeline... Professor X and Wolverine existing in the same continuity after the events of X-Men: The Last Stand... that I figured they must be really confident about undoing the mess they’d made of the consistency between the movies. If they could throw something like that in to be explained away in the next film then... hey... they could do anything.

But that’s the thing, guys and gals. This opening set up is why the whole premise of this movie fails totally. Not only don’t they explain it... they don’t even refer to the events depicted at the end of The Wolverine in any way, shape or form. They just act like the third film didn’t even happen... kinda. Stay with me here because it’s an important concept to get over. Wolverine’s claws in this version of the timeline are back to being adamantium claws. Yep... that’s right... it’s like the events of The Wolverine, released only last year, didn’t even happen. Except... here’s the rub... The Wolverine refers all the way through to Logan’s guilt at having to kill his beloved Jean Grey to save humanity and... err... mutantanity from certain doom. So we know that happened in that continuity. However, in this film, Wolverine also has painful memories of killing Jean Grey (or Dark Phoenix or even, my favourite, Marvel Girl) in that third movie... they actually use clips from it as flashbacks in this one. So then... Professor X is dead isn’t he? This makes no sense. And you can’t try to justify/explain this version as being a version in which the events of the third movie never took place, because they refer to that movie a number of times.

And that’s basically why this movie is screwed before it’s even started. Because the point in time from which our intrepid hero is travelling back from in his mind is absolutely not a reality which could have happened and no attempt is made to explain this. What, they thought we were going to be all overjoyed that most of the old crew were back that we wouldn’t notice the thing has no logic or reason to it at all?

Not only that but, at the end, Wolverine’s mind snaps back to the version of himself fifty years later in a timeline we haven’t seen and all his memories of those fifty years are replaced by his old ones (which is why he’s astonished to see people like Jean Grey and Cyclops back in his timeline). This also makes no sense... his mind didn’t have anywhere else to snap back to... his timeline was destroyed. Serious clangers all round here folks.

Okay, so now I’ve reiterated why the film just totally falls apart and screws the entire franchise sideways into a cocked, adamantium hat... what’s the movie like apart form the huge plot holes?

Well... it’s kinda okayish, in some ways. It’s got a good buzz about it early on but, ultimately, it all just felt a bit “by the numbers”. Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Halle Berry and Ellen Page were all fine... but that was it for them. They were all just fine... and who can blame them in some ways. Their dialogue wasn’t exactly special. Ditto for most of the First Class team. Michael Fassbender is always damned watchable but he honestly didn’t seem to be present in most of his scenes, apart from when he loses it at Charles Xavier on the plane... that was pretty good. Jennifer Lawrence’s take on Raven/Mystique was okay too but she’s flying more or less solo in this one and, although she’s a bit of a stand out character, she’s mostly just seen beating people up.

James MacAvoy is fantastic and just like his Xavier character in X-Men: First Class. Absolutely a consistent and brilliant performance. However, asides from the cool acting, theres another basic continuity problem with this one. We saw him crippled at the end of the last movie but, in this one, Hank/The Beast has made him a serum which gives him his legs back every time he has his fix. However, this also has the side effect of relieving him of his mutant powers... further highlighting the absolute impossibility of the opening sequence of X-Men: The Last Stand as a path from this reality... except we know all that must have happened because Wolverine’s mind was just sent back from that future reality. Not very well thought out, is it? It’s like the writers kept painting themselves into a corner and then were trying to distract you with things to cover up the fact that they couldn’t address the issues this throws up. But hey, who cares, the audience won’t be paying attention will they? Um, whatever dudes.

There were some other nice things about the movie. The idea that Magneto was implicated in the murder of JFK but was actually trying to save him because he was a fellow mutant was nice. Some, not all, of the action sequences were nicely handled too, the really good ones being the opening fight scene and the sequence where Quicksilver saves them all in the Pentagon jailbreak scene. Which is a pretty great scene... except... oops. Now that’s another confusing thing for audiences who don’t understand that the rights to certain Marvel characters reside with more than one company...

So here you have Quicksilver who is played by Evan Peters in X-Men: Days Of Future Past.... which is a Marvel/20th Century Fox picture. However, we just saw him portrayed by Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the first mid-credits sting at the end of Captain America: The Winter Soldier (reviewed here), made by Marvel/Disney, and will see him portraying that character again in The Avengers: Age Of Ultron next year, also for Marvel/Disney. What’s worse is, the 20th Century Fox version of the character and the Marvel/Disney version of the character are not allowed to share the same history, The ones locked into the S.H.I.E.L.D timeline is not even allowed to mention “mutation” apparently. This is going to confuse a hell of a lot of audience members who don’t know the ins and outs of the situation, folks. All they’re going to know is you’ve got the same character played by two different actors with contradicting histories co-existing at the same time in cinema history. Probably not a great idea guys.

Okay, what else. Well, the music is okay. This one marks the first time that an X-Men movie has had the same composer twice and John Ottman’s score here reuses the X-Men theme he used for X-Men 2. Wait, what? Yeah, you can see the problem here, right? Even the music is, for one of the few rare times in a Marvel movie, insisting on a continuity which is already shot to hell. Which is a shame because Ottman’s score does the job here. It’s not as cool as his earlier X-Men 2 score, or even his two Fantastic Four scores, but it does it’s job and I’ll be grabbing a copy when the CD comes out in a couple of weeks.

And... what else? Um... the special effects are okay, if you like that kind of thing, and the film is competently shot and edited. So, some nice work there... but none of this goes anywhere near making up for the fact that this movie screws up the continuity even worse than X-Men: First Class did.

When the four sequels to Universal’s The Mummy were released in the 1940s, these sequels formed what was supposed to be a single continuity. However, some of the films took place decades after the previous one and in all that time, they were all set in contemporary America, give or take a few years. Worse, in one film, Kharis The Mummy gets buried in a swamp in one country and, when he rises from the swamp to live again in the next movie, it’s somehow relocated to another country. Now, it’s my belief that the majority of those 1940s audiences didn’t question these huge plot holes because, frankly, these were the decades well before anything like commercial home video viewing could even be imagined and re-release cinema screenings were less of a thing then. The movie played, you saw it, and it wasn’t until commercial television started out in the 1950s that these movies would get shown enough again to be able to spot stuff like this. However, note to people in Hollywoodland expecting a gullible audience to swallow the scripts they turn out with more holes in them than a Swiss cheese... your audience is no longer living in the 1940s. It’s not like somebody isn’t going to notice all this stuff somewhere along the line. You need to write smarter than this!

When I went to buy a ticket for X-Men: Days Of Future Past, for a performance a few hours later, there were a lot of firemen in the cinema and when I got to the front of the queue I was told that they were only giving out refunds. It turns out the cinema in question had been struck by lightning less than ten minutes before I’d arrived and it had knocked all the projection rooms out. When I tried again a few hours later, they’d literally just managed to get the cinema rebooted up and were selling tickets again. All I can say is... I should have taken this as some kind of omen, maybe? X-Men: Days Of Future Past is my joint, least favourite X-Men movie, tying with X-Men: The Last Stand in last place. This was not how I was hoping the latest film in a, mostly, fairly strong film series would play out and the only audience I could possibly recommend this to is an audience who haven’t seen any of the previous movies in the franchise because, honestly, this one just makes no sense. And it’s such a shame. It feels like Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (reviewed here) all over again. It just didn’t address the issues it needed to address... and these directors/writers/producers need to make a smarter product to keep the percentage of their audience interested in these things satisified, I’m afraid to say. The hobgoblins are loose... and their small minds are out to tear apart your inconsistencies.

X-Men: First Class

X-Rated Entertainment

X-Men: First Class US 2011

Directed by Matthew Vaughn

Playing at cinemas now.

Warning: There be some mild/light spoilers here that probably won’t pack as much punch as an adamantium right hook but certainly may be a little more than you want to know before going into the movie.

I’ve had kind of a hit and miss reaction to the X-Men all my life. My first experience with them was with a few reprints I had in a British annual in the early seventies which reprinted old Marvel comics called Fantastic annual. It basically reprinted almost exclusively Avengers and X-Men comics from what I remember in my hazy recollections of a dim and distant past. In fact, I believe these reprints were from the very early sixties and possibly one of them was even a reproduction of the first issue, which originally debuted in 1963. I didn’t mind this original line-up of Professor X, Marvel Girl, Cyclops, Angel, Iceman and Beast... in fact out of all the line-ups that came after, these are probably about the only X-Men I could probably handle reading today. And, of course, to me they were never the X-Men... they were always known by the title which they’d originally gone under in their early days. Much like The Amazing Spiderman, The Fantastic Four, The Mighty Thor, The Incredible Hulk and The Invincible Iron Man, these guys were... and always shall be in my mind... The Uncanny X-Men.

So when a desperate sea-change hit the title with the Giant-Sized X-Men of 1975, one last bid to actually sell these comics before total cancellation - which, given the success of the line-up introduced in this issue and their continued popularity in the medium, may surprise some people - I was never really that interested. Most of the original line-up had been dropped and Weapon-X had been rechristened Wolverine and... really... I was just as oblivious to these guys' existence as I had been to anything but those early reprints I used to read and I stayed that way, pretty much, until the first of the big budget X-Men movies hit our screens back in 2000. And to be honest I wasn’t much interested in seeing them on film either but I went to take a look anyway.

I was glad I did because that first X-Men movie was the first movie to actually take a Marvel comics character, or a set of characters in this case, and actually make a genuinely entertaining and fairly credible and coherent movie out of them. This was nothing like going to see a double bill of Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger featured with Spiderman and the Dragon’s Challenge! And when the money came in from this first one and the X-Men became a franchise... it turned out that the second movie was as good, if not even better than the first movie. The director Bryan Singer did a really good job on these two movies and had set up everything for a brilliant third installment.

Alas, a brilliant third installment was not in the cards. Singer was kinda... well not exactly fired from the franchise due to personal differences with one of the “suits with money” is my understanding but he certainly felt discouraged enough with the ensuing “lead swinging” that he eventually left to work on a superhero project for a rival company (both character-wise and studio wise... DC and Warner Bros) and another director was brought on board. The end result of all this shilly-shallying around was unfortunate... we ended up with both a really terrible dud of a third X-Men movie and... surprisingly... a not so hot Superman sequel too.

After that, everyone had thought the X-Men "juggernaut" (see what I did there?) had come to a halt but we got a little surprise with a prequel in the form of Wolverine: X-Men Origins with Hugh Jackman reprising his role as the titular character. Now Wolverine wasn’t a great movie but it was certainly several notches up on the washability level than that third X-Men film and even though it basically had the feel of an early eighties B-movie exploitation flick to a degree, albeit with a tidy sum of money thrown at it, it didn’t completely let down the franchise in the way its predecessor did (my review of that one is here if you’re at all interested).

But seriously, did we really need a fifth X-Men movie (or a Wolverine movie for that matter). Well the answer, honestly, is no! We did not. Conceptually it’s just a money making exercise trying to capture those original two lightning strikes that Singer gave the studio back at the start of the 21st Century (wow... I keep forgetting we’re all living in the 21st Century now... where’s my rocket pack?). But then follow that up with another question and you have yourself a different perspective on things.

So then, Question Number Two is... Do I mind there being yet another sequel, or in this case prequel, to the X-Men movies? And the answer to that one has to be... well, no I don’t mind as long as it’s any good. But what are the chances of that after the last big screw up on the series. A lot of people are going to be put off showing up in cinemas on account of that third movie (they have, apparently... it’s not made its money back yet... it’ll probably get there and it came in at Number One in the charts but... a disappointing Number One box office take by all accounts).

And of course, the inevitable question arising from those last two questions is this? Is it any good?

Well that’s why I write reviews like this and waffle on for a page or so before I even get to the point of writing the damned thing is my answer to that. Or to put it another way...

Yes. It’s good. it’s very, very good. But allow me to be a little more articulate in my annunciation of said conclusion...

Actually... I’ll use a tactic I’ve adopted a couple of times just recently and tell you one thing it isn’t first. It’s not a bloody reboot!

Nor is it a remake or in any way a re-imagining of the initial series... and don’t let anyone tell you it is. This one here is definitely a prequel and... not only that... but it’s a prequel in the very best sense. It’s a prequel that actually works with everything that’s been established within the chronology of the previous movies and without resorting to any George Lucas-like jiggery pokery and wild leaps of the imagination. This one is the real deal and the only retro-fitting which had to be done on this one was to set it in the sixties (during the Cuban missile crisis, in fact... which is a part of the plot) and sell that period with a certain amount of style and verisimilitude... and get it accepted by an audience that might get turned off by a period piece.

The movie starts off with the World War 2 concentration camp opening sequence of the original X-Men movie reshot (but using the late Michael Kamen’s score from that sequence from that movie) but this time you stay with the very young Erik Lehnsherr for a while and see what shaped his life choices before cutting to the very young Charles Xavier and his first encounter with Raven, aka the future Mystique. Then we skip right into the sixties and we have Charles played by James MacAvoy... who surprised me by being quite brilliant in a genre film and Erik as played by Michael Fassbender... who has more than enough screen presence to carry the whole movie on this one... except he doesn’t have to because, well I could go on but everyone on this movie was brilliant.

Fassbender starts off as pretty much a hit man, hellbent on a quest for vengeance against Kevin Bacon’s evil bad-guy and joins up almost accidentally with Xavier when Xavier rescues him at the tail end of a mission for which he’s been recruited by the CIA. The two join up with the aforementioned CIA and some other mutants and start the equivalent of Xavier’s future school to train up a group of mutants for a dangerous mission... a dangerous mission which should gain Erik access to the target of his revenge fuelled killing spree.

Frankly, for a movie with something like a 12A rated certificate, X-Men: First Class certainly doesn’t pull its punches, too often, although the revelation of a female version of Angel looks like it’s had a little censorial tinkering, for example. There are scenes of implied sexuality and more than implied violence that had my eyebrows raised at their inclusion in a family orientated movie. The scene towards the end of the movie which involves the very slow manipulation of a Nazi coin, for instance, may have been a bit out of place for the rating... but I should worry. I’m not complaining and I love on-screen violence and sexuality (and I also love off-screen sexuality so can have my cake and eat it... if I get lucky) but I do think parents contemplating taking their children to see this one should take a look at the movie first.

There’s a lot to like in this movie including some shrewd iconic references to films like From Russia With Love (if I’m not mistaken about a certain helicopter arriving at a certain kind of Manor House) and possibly a little nod to Doris Day in Caprice? There’s also a couple of great cameos from folks from previous installments... namely Hugh Jackman as Wolverine/Logan and Rebecca Romijn as Mystique. “What?” I hear you ask. “In a prequel?” Yeah, I’d be worried too... but I wasn’t because I didn’t know they were coming and as it turns out, Jackman’s appearance makes a perfect punchline to the first of two unusually lengthy montage sequences... the first is a series of Mutant spotting trips undertaken by Charles & Erik and the second is a get-a-handle-on-yer-powers training sequence. And then, the Rebecca Romijn as Mystique cameo is really cleverly done... and it involves sexuality so I’m all for it anyway.

One cameo which was missing and which felt bad to have been left out was Stan Lee. This must be the first Marvel film in the last ten or eleven years in which he hasn’t had a little appearance and that makes me sad. Apparently Twentieth Century Fox didn’t ask him to do one for this movie. He seems to roll with it though. On a Q&A panel I saw on the internet with him he jokingly said that it’s a ploy on the part of Fox to get everyone to think they’ve missed Stan’s cameo... and then go buy another ticket to see it again and try to spot him. Stan’s still "the Man" when it comes to being a true figurehead for the comics industry. A real trooper and I can’t wait to see his favourite cameo appearance in the upcoming The Amazing Spiderman later in the year.

But that’s not what I’m here to discuss... let me get back to it before I lose the plot completely.

X-Men: First Class has a real good sense of pacing and never once feels like its 132 minute running time. It explores the universe of the characters it deals with in an imaginative and satisfying way but also holds some stuff back while alluding to them in a way that leaves you intrigued rather than bored. More than enough material for a sequel and I’d really want to see one (although the box office return on this one so far makes this less likely than I’d hope for). Heck... it even has genre favourite Michael Ironside in it... although he seems to have been thrown away to very near the bottom of the credits and just credited as M. Ironside (what up with that?) but hey, he’s in it.

Also, the musical score by Henry Jackman is minimalist but quite driven and pounding and reminded me of Bernard Herrmann's technique of using small cells of melody repeated over and over for effect. This is not necessarily a bad thing and minimalist genius Philip Glass has made a decent living out of writing this kind of repeat style for decades now so I’m certainly not complaining. You’ll either love it or hate it in terms of the scoring I reckon.

X-Men: First Class definitely gets a solid and frankly, surprising recommendation from me but I do, however, feel compelled to give you final few readers who have actually made it to the end of this unexpectedly long article a final word of warning which may aid you if you see the film. If you are planning on sitting through every last second of the end credits on this one so you can watch the post-credits tag sequence which most of the other Marvel movies (the X-Men franchise included) usually have on them, then you’ll be disappointed. By all means watch the credits but don’t expect any added extras on this one... you’ll have to wait for the DVD for the bonuses this time around.