X-Men: Days of Future Past

On some level, I suppose, Bryan Singer's new "X-Men" film, incomprehensibly subtitled "Days of Future Past," makes sense.  My daughter assured me that she generally understood the plot and could, more or less, follow the frantic gyrations on screen.  Indeed, from time to time, I even thought that I had some glimmer as to what was going on.  But, ultimately, unless you intend to decode the film like a picture by late Godard or Tarkovsky,  -- that is, unless you intend to read reviews and collate the observations of various critics into a sort of synopsis and, then, attend the film once more to verify conclusions and plot points -- you will get almost nothing out of "Days of Future Past" except for some instances of eye-candy, a few pallid jokes, and the spectacle of a beautiful woman wearing nothing at all but blue-painted scales.  My suspicion is that a rabid fan could graph the movie's plot and that, in purely causal terms (a leading to b leading  to c etc.), the thing might have some limited coherence, but the film is dramatically a complete muddle.  The X-Men are mutants.  They all seem to have telekinetic powers and nicknames -- Magneto, Wolverine, Storm and so on.  Their powers all overlap and so it is impossible to tell which mutant is effecting which miracle at any given time.  It suffices to say that they hurl lightning bolts around, jump through dimensional vortices, and continuously wreak havoc on their environment like particularly powerful and humorless poltergeists.  The mutants are given to portentous conversations that go on endlessly -- the film is remarkably tedious for a movie that features such baroque and spectacular special effects.  The dialogue is uniformly stupid and subliterate -- one is tempted to say "laughably' bad, but this would give the movie more credit for wit than it deserves.  Imitating the much better and infinitely less pretentious first "Terminator" film, the plot concerns an attempt to alter the course of history by sending the scowling Hugh Jackman ("Wolverine") back in time.  It seems that a malevolent dwarf (I'm not kidding) named Bolivar Trask (again, I'm not kidding) has invented some kind of robotic mutants that mimic the X-men's powers and are capable of kicking their asses.  Exactly why the so-called Sentinel robots should be capable of whupping the mutant X-Men is complete unclear since the heroes have wonderful skills of undefined scope and extent.  (For instance, Jackman is unkillable -- you can riddle him with bullets and his burly torso just heals itself; but, when he is hurled onto the bottom of the Potomoc, and, pinned there with re-rod painfully stuck through all his joints -- the work of Magneto who is either a good guy or a bad guy or both -- his powers fail him and he seems about to expire.)  The first rule in this film is that there are no rules.  Anyone seems able to do anything at any time.  In the first few minutes, the X-Men are engaged in a deadly blue-screen combat (dark sets with lots of murky explosions) with the Sentinels.  The Sentinels kill each and every mutant in spectacular ways -- one guy is turned into ice, his frozen ice-cube of a head ripped off and that shattered to pieces under the steel boot of a refrigerator Sentinel.  These sequence is spectacular enough and, even, a little bit morbid and I was happy that the movie had ended after only five or six minutes of explosions and bodies being hurled through walls.  But, somehow, the mutants leap back in time and avoid the attack which just killed them all and we are transported to some sort of cheesy Fortress of Solitude, a set that looks like something from a late seventies Kung Fu movie with dreary stained glass, Himalayan peaks and big bonfires for light.  (The title tells us that this Shangri-La, obviously meant to be in Tibet is "China" -- apparently, the people who made this film don't want to offend Chinese audiences.)  The mutants have a council of war, although it seems that the better part of them have been killed, and it is at this point that they send poor Jackman back to 1973 to change the past and, thereby, provide mankind with a happier future.   But here is where the film becomes emotionally incomprehensible.  For some reason, Jackman's assignment is to save the vicious dwarf from assassination.  Why the dwarf must be saved is wholly unclear to me.  After all, it was the dwarf, a bargain-basement Alberich, who invented the malevolent Sentinels who keep killing Mutants (although the Mutants keep getting resurrected as well.)  Also, it seems that the hero must kill a shape-changing woman, the blue-scale skin lady, whose name is either Mystique or Storm or, maybe, something else entirely.  The blue-scale-skin lady traipses about naked except for blue body paint and one of the pleasures of the picture is attempting to detect her vulva between her blue and scaly thighs -- I think you can see her genitals in a couple of shots.  Since blue-scale-skin lady has donated a swab of DNA that is used by the Sentinel giants in their shape-shifting, it seems that the time-traveling mutants should be devoting their energy to disposing of her as well -- and, in fact, the mutants spend part of the movie, I think, trying to kill her until they decide that she is really on their side and that she shouldn't be killed.  Whether blue-scale-skin is evil or good is debatable on the evidence presented by the film.   The audience isn't helped by the fact that when the mutants aren't working miracles they all look like strong-jawed variants on Jon Hamm, one actor who thankfully isn't in the show, although every single man seems to be either a skinny or muscular version of him.  The best thing in the movie is a guy who can run at lightning speed, so fast that he plays ping pong with himself and outpaces bullets so that he can gently deflect them away from their targets.  This X-man is a lot of fun -- so what does the movie do with him?  After a couple of adventures, he's exiled from the picture and watches the rest of the mayhem on TV from home with his alcoholic mom -- this sort of bizarre narrative decision is inexplicable.  The X-Men grunt and bear-down grimacing as they transform into super-heroes -- it's as if they are straining over a particular unpleasant and difficult bowel movement.  Each of them is killed two or three times, but they just keep coming back to life.  Even the ice-hero who had his head ripped off and shattered in the opening sequence shows up again in the noisy climax to be killed once more, inconsequentially, however, since I assume he is resurrected in the final scenes of the movie.  I keep going to these big blockbuster films because critics praise them highly and seem to suggest that they are worth seeing.  But they aren't.  I should have known I was in for a bad time in an early sequence in which someone says:  "their species will drive itself extinct just like innumerable species before..." Exactly what species made itself extinct?  So far as I know, human beings are the only species attempting that feat and, even, we haven't succeeded yet.  The movie has five-hundred pointless shots -- dialogue is divided into talking heads and big close-ups of actors woodenly reacting, except they really aren't reacting at all and, in some of the group scenes, the high-paid movie stars lounging around mug and ham it up as if trying to steal the shot for the character declaiming his or lines -- you can generally tell a film's ineptitude by looking at the actors who are not central to the shot to see what they are doing.  If they are mugging outrageously or just looking bored (and both types of reaction occur in this film) you know the movie is in trouble.  I am writing this note within an hour of having seen the movie.  I'm afraid that if I wait for another hour or so, the whole 140 million dollar spectacle will simply vanish from my memory.