X-Men: Days of Future Past trailer

When the live-action X-Men film hit theaters back in 2000, it revolutionized the idea of team super hero movies. Up until that point, we had only been given movies based on singular heroes like Batman, The Punisher and Howard the Duck. But X-Men proved that, in capable hands, it's possible to take a group of characters and put them in a movie together and not have it come out a jumbled mess. (Further proof of the stipulation I placed in that statement would come six years later when Brett Ratner forced his jumbled mess that was X-Men: The Last Stand down the throats of fans and movie-goers.)

Now we're going on the seventh installment of movies based on the X-Men franchise (including X-Men Origins: Wolverine and The Wolverine). The newest film, X-Men: Days of Future Past has X-Men fans excited as it's not only based on one of the most famous X-Men storylines ever, written by Chris Claremont, John Byrne and Terry Austin back in 1980, but it meshes the new X-Men movies with Bryan Singer's original trilogy. The full trailer for the movie hit the internet earlier this week which gave me plenty of time to watch it over and over.

The trailer is strange in the sense that is shows a lot but we don't really see anything. Fans of the X-Men comics know what Days of Future Past is about and from what we see the basic tenants of the story are intact. But I can only imagine what a non-comics fan must be thinking when they watch that. It's basically a mishmash of characters and images, mostly going in slow motion. So to be assaulted by that in the span of a little over two minutes is somewhat jarring.

As it stands, I love the idea behind the premise, tying the original trilogy to the new movie series. Fox always intended for X-Men: First Class to really be a prequel to Bryan Singer's film despite the obvious continuity flaws that it contains (though there aren't nearly as many as X-Men Origins: Wolverine). However, the way that gathered the actors from the original films, like Anna Paquin, Ellen Page and Shawn Ashmore, to revisit their roles as Rogue, Kitty Pryde, and Iceman, really shows that they're at least trying to stay true to Singer's vision. But concerning the new characters...

I am really happy that they used Blink for this movie. She has been one of my favorite characters ever since she was grossly underused in "The Phalanx Covenant" back in 1994. And then she showed up as a classic ass-kicker in the "Age of Apocalypse". So to see her on the big screen is fucking exciting. It also makes me wonder if DoFP is setting up a true Apocalypse storyline, kind of how the Wolverine and the X-Men animated series tried to do before it was unceremoniously cancelled. If the filmmakers are trying to lead up to something like that and think they can pull it off, then more power to them.

Also, Bishop is showing up in the movie which, given the time-travelling plot, makes perfect sense. And I also see who turns out to be James Proudstar (as evidenced by this image), but who's that guy before him? Looking at the IMDB page for the movie it shows that that is likely Sunspot (played by Adan Canto). Besides this, there's nothing in the trailer to indicate that. Seeing him and Proudstar/Warpath makes things pretty interesting. With the rumors that the next X-Men film will be based on X-Force, could their inclusion be the precursor to that? Recently X-Force was reimagined by Cyclops to be the X-Men's wetworks team, undertaking missions that would be a little too bloody for the X-Men to be associated with. Naturally, Wolverine led the team, which included Warpath, X-23 (the female clone of Wolverine) and Archangel. Sunspot was a member of the original '90s X-Force team so they may be setting up some sort of hybrid of current and classic.

Speaking of Archangel, we have another interesting hitch as we've seen Angel/Warren Worthington show up in X-Men: The Last Stand. Any comics fan may realize that this brings us back to the Apocalypse theory as Angel was turned into the horseman, Death, by Apocalypse himself. Again, this is all speculation as there is zero information about an X-Force movie but going this route would be pretty damn awesome.

One other great thing about the movie is the villain they chose, Bolivar Trask. In the comics, Trask is responsible for the creation of the Sentinels, the mutant-hunting robots that are always dogging the X-Men. If they wanted to use the Sentinels in the movie then it makes sense that Trask would make an appearance. But what really has me enraptured is who they picked to play Trask: Peter Dinklage, famous for his role as Tyrion Lannister on Game of Thrones. I'm going to be honest; when they announced that Dinklage was signed on for a role in DoFP, I thought he would play the character Puck, a member of Alpha Flight who also happens to be a little person. That was clearly my own short-sightedness blinding me to what could be. Dinklage is an amazing actor, as evidenced by his role as Tyrion, so choosing him to play the bad guy in DoFP is inspired casting, whether it falls into typecasting or not. I couldn't be happier for their choice for Trask and cannot wait to see what Dinklage brings to the film.

With all of that said, I really love the viral trailer for Days of Future Past. The Trask Industries promo trailer boasts a positive message, the propaganda that multi-million dollar companies spew out to the public to make them believe that they are creating the Utopia everyone craves. It reminds me of the Umbrella Corporation commercial that was going around right before the first Resident Evil movie came out. It even has a similar ominous ending, but with the X-Men trailer doing the impending doom in a subtler way. If you haven't seen it, here it is.

I gotta say, with everything I've seen so far, I am really looking forward to Days of Future Past. I mean, really, what X-Men fan wouldn't be? It's one of the best X-Men stories ever written. The only worry I have is the number of characters in it; the last time a director threw this many mutants into a movie it was Brett Ratner making the second shittiest X-Men film of the bunch (yes, I consider The Last Stand to be better than X-Men Origins: Wolverine). But given everything that I see so far, I can't help but to get excited for it.