X-Men: Days of Future Past (5 Stars)

This is the film that I've most anxiously awaited this year. It was intended as a sequel to "X-Men: First Class", but also a cross-over with the X-Men trilogy.

In the future (2023) mutants have been hunted and slaughtered by killer robots known as sentinels. These sentinels have also enslaved the world, similar to the machines in the Terminator films. In addition to killing mutants, they also kill all humans who have the genetic possibility to have mutant children. The human race is to be kept pure. Pure and docile.

A small number of mutants have survived, but are on the run. They include Professor X, Magneto, Wolverine and Kitty Pryde. The other mutants around them are based on Marvel characters, but they're not all easy to identify, since their portrayal in the film is so different to the way they were in the comics. I guessed some of them, but I had to resort to sites like IMDB to find out who they were. Kitty, whose powers in the comics were limited to making herself intangible, is shown with powers to project people's consciousness into the past. Weird. On the instructions of Professor X and Magneto she sends Wolverine's consciousness back into the body he had in 1973, so that he can prevent Mystique killing Bolivar Trask, which was the key event leading to the creation of the Sentinels.

Phew. Is all that confusing? Yes. I won't describe the main part of the film, but at the risk of giving spoilers I want to point out some things at the end of the film.

When Wolverine returns to the future, everything has been changed. Jean Grey is still alive, so it seems that by changing time the events of "X-Men: The Last Stand" never happened. Judging by the ages of the mutants around him after his return it seems like he hasn't returned to 2023, but to an earlier time, probably round about 2005. Also, back in 1973, we see that William Stryker captures Wolverine, but Stryker is really Mystique in disguise. This seems to imply that the events in "X-Men Origins: Wolverine", in which Stryker was himself, have also been cancelled and never happened. This gives the X-Men franchise a clean slate. Anything can happen in the next film, and it doesn't matter if it contradicts what happened before.

Now to a comparison with the comics. The film is based on a story printed in Uncanny X-Men 141 and 142, dated Jan-Feb 1981, but actually released at the end of 1980, since comics had the strange habit of releasing comics approximately 10 weeks ahead of their cover date. That means the January issue of X-Men was in the shops in mid October. The story begins in the far distant future, the year 2013! There are only seven mutants left alive: Magneto, Kitty Pryde, Wolverine, Storm, Colossus, Franklin Richards (son of Reed Richards and Sue Storm) and Rachel Summers (daughter of Scott Summers and Jean Grey). Professor X is already dead. In the comic Rachel Summers sends Kitty's conscience back into her body in 1980, when she was the X-Men's youngest member at only 13, in order to prevent Mystique killing an American senator.

I would have preferred the film to stick to these characters. Someone like Chloe Moretz would have been perfect to play Kitty Pryde as the film's main character, but unfortunately the X-Men films are all so Wolverine-centric that the story had to be rewritten for him to take centre stage. Never mind. But what's more interesting is the difference in the nature of existence between the comic and the film. In the film things are simple: Wolverine's consciousness goes into the past, changes events, and everything is new; the mutant slaughter never happened. In the comics, the theory is that once something has happened it can never be undone; going back in time and changing events doesn't cancel the future, it just creates a branch in the timeline. This means that after the events of Uncanny  X-Men 142 there were two futures, one in which the mutants live and one in which they die.

Quite ridiculously, Marvel has decided to number all the alternate universes. The normal Marvel Universe is called Earth-616, whereas the future with the slaughtered mutants is Earth-811. Marvel now adds universes for each film, so they can say that if stories contradict each other it's just because they happened in different universes. For instance, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy takes place in Earth-96283, whereas the new Spider-Man films take place in Earth-120703. That's a cheap trick to explain contradictions. In the good old days attention was paid to continuity. In the silver age of comics (1961-1969) the events in Marvel comics were happening in our universe, and were threaded around real events, such as the Moon landing. In the bronze age (1970-1984) Marvel's stories were said to be taking place outside of our reality in a place called the Marvel Universe. That's okay, though it certainly isn't what Stan Lee intended when he invented his super-heroes. Marvel's main rival, DC Comics, had always set its stories in fictional cities, such as Gotham and Metropolis. Stan Lee decided to place his heroes in our world, in particular New York, so that his readers could relate to the stories. The invention of the Marvel Universe brought Marvel down to the level of DC, effectively saying, "That place in our comics is called New York, but it isn't really New York, it's just a city that looks like New York in a different universe". Unpleasant, but acceptable. But now we're asked to accept that there are a potentially infinite number of New Yorks that we have to distinguish.