Wow. RFK got a stadium named after him really quickly!
Reading this Thread, I kept thinking the references to the 70s era stadium as RFK Stadium had to be anachronistic. So, I went ahead and looked it up. Damn! It was renamed in January of 1969!!! Just seven months after he died! It really surprises me to learn that it was named in his honor so very soon after his death.
Saw it today and really liked it. My random thoughts/questions were:
Why does Wolverine have Adamantium claws at the start of this movie? Didn’t he lose them in the second Wolverine movie?
I’m shocked that teaser person was a male. I thought it was a female making the pyramids.
I wish we’d found out how Charles was alive in the original timeline present.
I don’t mind that Magneto and(I assume) everyone else has their powers back. X-men 3 already showed us it was temporary at the end when Magneto wiggled the chess piece. Yes, that movie is wiped out completely.
Quicksilver was hilarious and awesome.
I did not get how Magneto could not only control the Sentinels like puppets, but could also make them fire their guns and stuff.
It was almost cute watching Patrick Stewart have to recite lines about how he and Mystique were close when they were young. Bigtime ret-con for his movies, but I don’t mind seeing them try.
Great movie. X-men 2 is the best X-men movie, but this is probably runner up.
But the mission to Paris was a total failure. Nothing was resolved there. Because of the attempted murder of Trask, the US government fully funded the Sentinel program - which was precisely the outcome they were trying to avoid by stopping Mystique. Worse, the program is going ahead with Trask still alive and in charge of it, and he’s still got a sample of Mystique’s DNA, which means that the development of the uber-Sentinels is going to be conducted under his immense scientific genius, likely leading to the war happening even sooner.
Which, incidentally, is my fanwank for why Trask could have invented the Sentinels in the '70s, but they didn’t start destroying the world until some time after 2010 or so. Trask’s genius is so far advanced that, with him dead, it takes decades for people to replicate his research. In the original timeline, there was no press conference with the President flanked by Sentinels. Stuff like the Mutant Registration Act from the first film would, therefore, be stop gap measures the government tried to institute while it was still funneling billions to Trask Industries to try and get a working Sentinel robot.
I’d just like to say that I read the original comicbook back in 1980, when the X-Men comic was glorying in a blaze of creativity. This was one of the best stories I’d read in that genre up to that time. The dystopian future in the comicbook was the unimaginably distant year of 2013.
My fiancee liked this story too, which was fairly unusual for her - she wasn’t a great comicbook fan. Now in the unimaginably mundane year of 2014 we find ourselves watching a major motion picture based (however loosely) on this tale from that far off era. Strange world.
We watched this film in the company of our daughter Rachel; a mild pity that the character of Rachel Summers didn’t make it into the modern version; but that would have been a bit tricky to achieve, since neither of her parents exist in this continuity any more.
Oh wait…
You named your daughter Rachel. That’s funny.
I just picked up a comic today that you might find a little amusing. There’s a character that looks like Wolverine with Mystique’s coloring in All-New Doop #2.
(OTOH, it’s part of a giant multi-series plotine apparently, so you might just find it tedious.)
I saw this as an error as well. I think the general guess/theory is that he somehow reacquired it later (possibly with the help of Magneto).
There’s a teaser at the end of X-3 where the guy in the coma wakes up and says “Hello, Moira” in Xavier’s voice. It’s pretty clear that he transferred his consciousness into the coma guy’s body. (As for why he looks exactly like Xavier and can’t walk, the director made a comment in an interview that the coma guy is Xavier’s twin brother.)
Although I haven’t read that one, it’s probably Raze, a character introduced (I think) in All-New X-Men as an alternate future son of Mystique and Wolverine. He shapechanges and has claws, ooh. Same storyline introduce a son of Xavier and Mystique, who looks exactly like Charles and has the same telepathic powers.
Mystique’s family tree is growing to be almost as complicated as the Summers family tree, and that basically needs six-dimensional charts and tenser math to explain.
I assume that he lost and reacquired them at least a dozen times in the interim.
So she has a default rest state, and any variation from that takes energy to sustain? I guess that would help explain it, coupled with her decision to not give a shit what the masses think any more. If she’s stopped caring about being blue, maybe she threw out nudity taboo with it. I can buy that.
In the teaser at the end of The Wolverine when Magneto and Professor X round him up together, that sets the stage. We don’t actually see what happens between then and the Sentinels taking over the world, so there’s a gap. Assume Magneto took care of it since they became allies again and his claws are more useful in adamantium and razor sharp.
I liked First Class better. It didn’t have as many anacronisms in the past parts and fit together more smoothly IMO.
Well, the trouble with Mystique wearing clothes is that they won’t change with her.
I betcha that only has to happen once or twice before she’s all, “Screw this, I’ll make my OWN clothes.”
I’m betting Wolverine gets his metal skeleton from Apocalypse in the next movie.
Of course you know how he controlled their movement, the railroad scene. Shooting the guns and controlling propulsion is just Hollywood gloss-over. Perhaps he threaded the rails to the triggers that initiated weapons.
Having little interest in the franchise, both printed and movie forms, I watched the original movie in 2000 and was underwhelmed. I ignored the franchise until this year and DOFP. Not having read the comics to any great degree and having seen none of the movies since the original (which I mostly forgot), I was ignorant of the narrative. However, I was excited to see DOFP, because I enjoy watching movies and I know that Hollywood’s perspective has changed, especially regarding comic book franchises, and they no longer just dress actors in a costume and give them hammed-up one-liners expecting that to carry the movie. IMHO (of course) DOFP is not only an excellent X-Men movie, it an excellent movie, no qualifications. Most of the cast is very charismatic. Thus, I was interested in the rest of the franchise (movie-wise) and decided to watch X-Men again and all of the silver-screen iterations prior to DOFP. 1 and 2 were typical; 3 and OWolverine were atrocious; First Class was first class; and The Wolverine was second class, but tolerable. I also did a lot of on-line research, mostly regarding characters and time-line.
Here is what I’m struggling with, realizing that, like mutants, especially Mystique, the franchise is constantly changing (but Jesus, could they at least offer a cursory explanation [in movie form] to the following concerns?):
What the hell happened between 1962 and 1973?
At the end of First Class, Lehnsherr and Xavier parted, but they were still tentative friends. In DOFP, they hated each other and (apparently) several mutants died because of X and several humans died because of Erik. There seems to be a whole other movie missing here. Instead, the producers write it off with a “just trust us” scene or two in DOFP.
And what happened after 1962 (original time-line)? In DOFP, Hank asked Wolverine if he made it and Wolverine said “No.” Huh, what the hell happened to Beast and when?
When, and how, did Erik and X become buddies (after the events of the original 3 movies, when they were bitter enemies)?
How did Magneto get his powers back?
How was X resurrected?
I know there are extraneous answers to the last two (and possibly other) questions, but they are too important not to treat with a movie.
These aren’t just needling, pedantic, continuity errors (like Wolverine’s claws–as above), these are huge fucking gaping fucking holes. What the hell are the writers and producers thinking? I know they basically reset the franchise (cleverly, IMHO) with the last movie, but I think it’s wrong to wand away everything and expect people to just deal with it. At least give us some much desired narrative.
There are more discrepancies, of course, but these are the principle ones. Maybe I’ll get into the minutia in other posts/threads.
Regardless, DOFP is one excellent fucking movie and has invigorated my interest in the franchise. I’ve seen it 5 times and I will probably see it a few more times when it gets transferred to a second-run theater, and I’m now thinking of reading the comics, at least from 1986 and up, and am anxiously awaiting the next film release.
I understand if this is TLDR.
*emphasis added
That was my initial though also, but breaking into the Pentagon was pretty dangerous. X, Wolverine, and Hank never revealed to QS the overall mission or its importance, at least not on-screen. In QS’s last scene, he asked why they were going to Paris. Why they chose not to reveal their mission to QS and enlist his help is an unanswered question.
It cheapens the narrative. Anytime anything adverse happens, she can just port someone to the past to gain a favorable result.
I assume that it meant in the future from which Wolverine comes from. We don’t see Beast (or hardly any of the older mutants), other than Storm, Magneto, Xavier, and Wolverine. So it is likely that Beast died sometime between X-3 and DOFP, including the Wolverine movie.
I think it is mentioned in the second Wolverine movie, or at least Magneto and Xavier appear as colleagues. Perhaps this is something that will be explored in another Wolverine movie or in the next X-Men movie.
As mentioned before, Xavier transferred his mind to a comatose patient, and you can see that the mutant cure appears to be temporary because Magneto is able to move a chess piece. Both of these are shown at the end of X-3.
Yeah, the choreography of her ability was brilliant, but also led to her death.
Right. But my point is, you can’t just allude to these events in a scene of a different movie, or a credits-trailer, it needs to be a major narrative. They hinted at X and Magneto at the end of 3, but then just forgot about it altogether.
They appear to have thrown out continuity altogether. If Xavier transferred his mind to the other body, why was he in a wheelchair in the future timeline? How did Logan get his adamantium claws back? The dark future hinted at in the post-credits scene of The Wolverine was clearly near-future, whereas this movie was much farther future.
They apparently just decided to take some of the cool characters and situations, and ignore the past movies. The original X1-3 + wolverine movies are entirely erased in the new timeline. In fact, do we know if Logan even has metal claws at the end? Stryker never got him according to the new timeline.
But interestingly, Wolverine said in DOFP, in the scene when they stop Mystique from shooting Trask in the hotel room, that he just saw someone (in a memory) who is going to cause him a lot of pain some day. That is bizarre, considering he underwent the adamantium treatment voluntarily.
We know from the narrative that Mystique dropping the gun in the end eliminated the Sentinels; but what else did it change? Scott Summers and Jean Grey were not killed by Sentinels (they were killed by other X-Men–Scott by Jean, and Jean by Wolverine), but they were alive again, so Mystique’s choice obviously had more of an effect than just stopping the Sentinel program. At the end of DOFP, Rogue still did not have her powers which she voluntarily gave up in The Last Stand. We know she didn’t have her powers because she was holding Bobby Drake’s hand with a glove-less hand. This may seem like a nitpick, but it also seems the producers of DOFP thought it important enough to focus on at the end of DOFP.
The effects of the actions in DOFP seem to be almost random, unknown (even to the producers), fiat, convoluted, and willy-nilly.
There is still one more Wolverine movie, which could deal with the near future mentioned at the end of the second Wolverine, and tie in with the beginning of DOFP.
Young Xavier, when he entered Wolverine’s mind, saw all that had happened in the other movies, so he would be in a position to know perhaps what not to do and avoid Phoenix.
Also, just by showing the mutants to the world earlier than in the previous timeline, it changes a lot of things that are the main issues in the first three movies.
It is possible that Rogue found a way to control her powers. After all, if the ending is truly in 2040 or close to it, she would have had plenty of time to learn how to manipulate those powers.
Wolverine was not taken by Striker, but by Mystique, but considering it is Mystique, it is possible in the new timeline it is she who gives the adamantium claws to Wolverine.