I may not be the biggest fan of comic books or superheroes, but I love me some X-Men. I’ve enjoyed every movie to date, and the most recent, First Class, was one of the best. When I started learning about Days of Future Past and realized it would combine the casts of First Class and the original movies, I knew I’d be in for a Hell of a ride.

Days of Future Past didn’t turn out to be what I expected, but I am not at all disappointed.

In case you live under an even bigger rock than I do, the premise for Days of Future Past goes something like this:

Despite the best efforts of Professor Xavier and the X-Men, the hatred for mutants boils over, and humanity unleashes on army of unstoppable killing machines called Sentinels to exterminate all mutants. This sparks an apocalyptic war that leaves mutants all but extinct and humans little better off.

In this bleak future, the few remaining X-Men take a desperate gamble to set everything right. They send Wolverine’s consciousness back in time fifty years to the 1970s in the hopes he can rally the X-Men of the day and prevent the murder that forever soured humanity’s view of mutants.

Most of the movie takes place in the past focusing on the First Class cast (plus Hugh Jackman as Wolverine), but there are also flash forwards to the future as the survivors of the X-Men, played by the cast of the original movies (including Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Halle Berry, and Ellen Page), as they fight to protect Wolverine’s unconscious body from the Sentinels.

The movie got off to a slow start at first. I wouldn’t call it boring, but I wasn’t on the edge of my seat, either. But then things changed in a big way. I won’t give away specifics, but there’s a scene early on where things go very wrong, and that’s when things start to get interesting.

And that gets to the heart of what is most compelling about Days of Future Past: Things go wrong. Spectacularly, and often.

The problem with superheroes is that they’re, well, super. It’s all too easy to turn them into divine figures, invincible and infallible. They cease to be identifiable as characters at that point, and there’s no drama when they’re too powerful to be defeated.

What I like about Marvel superheroes in general, and the X-Men in particular, is that they’re not like that. They’re not perfect, or unstoppable. They have great powers, but they’re still essentially people. They have flaws and fears, and they make mistakes.

And that fallibility is on full display in Days of Future Past. We see Charles Xavier at his lowest end, rejecting his powers and consumed with regrets over what he’s lost, and as he goes, so go the X-Men. It doesn’t take long for Wolverine’s plan of a simple resolution to history’s mistakes to go wildly wrong, and things just spiral downward from there.

Days of Future Past isn’t nearly as action-packed or epic as I expected it to be. There’s still plenty of action, but I was expecting a cosmic war and pew pew from start to finish. At times, it almost doesn’t feel like a superhero movie, even as the super powers are on full display. There isn’t even a supervillain, really.

Instead, Days of Future Past is a much more emotive and character-driven tale, and you know what? I’m not complaining.

The clever thing about Days of Future Past is that it takes full advantage of the personal, not quantum, implications of time travel. It’s a movie about regrets, and trying to set right the wrongs of the past.

This ties into what I said earlier about the X-Men being more human and approachable than other superheroes. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have blue skin or can’t read people’s minds. If you’ve ever felt regret, you can identify with the characters in this movie.

The emotional weight of the film is further helped along by the once again excellent acting of the cast. I apologize for the small spoiler, but there is a scene in which both the past and future versions of Professor Xavier have the chance to interact, and thanks to the mighty acting chops of both Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy, it is amazing.

(As an aside, this movie has banished any doubts I might have had about James McAvoy playing Yarnig in the hypothetical World Spectrum movie.)

I think I may have actually admired Days of Future Past as a writer more than I enjoyed it as a viewer. It’s a very inspirational tale of redemption, but it never comes across as preachy or sugar-coated.

That’s not an easy balance to achieve.

I have only two complaints about this movie, and they’re both very minor.

One is that this is another case of continuity being thrown out the window. For instance, the elder Professor Xavier appears in Days of Future Past, despite being killed in the third movie. This is not explained in any way. But comic books and continuity have never really mixed, and it doesn’t bother me that much.

The other is that I can’t see how the next movie is ever going to live up to this one.

Overall rating: 9.4/10 Almost certainly the best X-Men movie to date, and one of the best superhero movies of all time. Even if you haven’t seen the previous X-Men movies, even if you’re not into superheroes, you should see Days of Future Past.

It’s probably bad for readership to give away the main thrust of my review in the first paragraph, but going into this movie, I said all they needed for it to be a good movie is to find decent actors to play Magneto and Xavier. I was right, they did, and it was.

Plotwise, this movie is nothing special. It’s a very generic “mean guy with superpowers tries to blow up the world for his own self-aggrandizement” story. It’s strength lies with the characters and the acting.

James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender are both absolutely stellar in their respective roles as the younger versions of Proffessor Xavier and Erik Lensherr/Magneto. Both are just as good in the roles as their predecessors, Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen. And considering that Stewart and McKellen are probably my two favourite actors of all time, that is no small piece of praise from me. But that said, they are not aping the performances of their forebears. There is no imitation or impersonation; they make the roles their own and bring fresh takes to the characters.

I found Xavier’s character to be an excellent argument for the merits of the old idea of showing versus telling in writing. So often in prequels, we are repeatedly told that characters are natural born leaders and heroes, but it never quite rings true. (*Glares at JJ Abrams.*) But in First Class, we are simply shown, all through the movie, what a natural leader Xavier really is in the way he inspires everyone around him. His natural charm and charisma is a delight to watch and the perfect counterpoint to Erik Lensherr’s dark, brooding intensity. All of the best scenes in the movie are of these two interacting, and it’s worth the price of admission just to see their relationship evolve.

There are many other fine characters in the movie (including young versions of Mystique and Hank “Beast” McCoy), also played by good actors, but enjoyable as they were, they were almost completely eclipsed by Xavier and Magneto most of the time.

All that said, this is not a perfect movie. It’s biggest problem by far is the villain, played by Kevin Bacon. This is no disrespect to Bacon; he did the best he could with the hand he was dealt. His character, Sebastian Shaw, is simply a bland, forgettable villain that adds nothing to the plot beyond someone to fight. One of the things I love about Marvel villains is that they often have a sympathetic side to them; many are essentially good people whose lives have gone off the rails. Shaw, however, is given virtually no backstory, so all we know is that he’s a mutant and he wants to blow up the planet. It’s boring.

Furthermore, having a mutant for a villain did serious damage to the movie’s theme of mutants struggling to be accepted in the greater world. All of Magneto’s paranoia about humanity tended to ring hollow when the humans just acted helpful and all the danger came from a fellow mutant. Without spoiling things too much, this is remedied somewhat by the final few minutes of the movie, however. But on the whole, I think it would have been better to have some William Stryker-esque human villain, potentially redundant though it may have been.

Another problem is some fairly major continuity issues with the other movies. Wait, wasn’t Emma Frost in the Wolverine movie, and, like, a teenager? Wasn’t Magneto supposed to have assisted in the construction of Cerebro? Mystique is Xavier’s sister? What?

Mind you, fifteen years of Warcraft fandom have given me a superhuman tolerance to retcons, but even I found these a bit distracting.

Still, taken all in all, the strength of the characters and the acting outweighs First Class’s flaws by a fairly wide margin. This probably isn’t the best X-Men movie to date, but I think it may be worthy of second spot behind X-Men United.

Overall rating: 8.8/10