X-Men Days of Futuristic Plot-Holes

I want to start out my review by saying that X-Men: Days of Future Past was very underwhelming.  Don’t get me wrong; it wasn’t a terrible movie.  It was still entertaining and fun to watch, but the characters, the props (I’m really only going off what I saw in Argo, which was set in the same time and my said had poor costume design for the seventies), and especially the plot seemed underdeveloped and unimaginative.  It certainly wasn’t like Green Lantern or Iron Man 3, which were absolutely terrible, but it was definitely not of the same caliber as the Dark Knight Trilogy or Thor, which were excellent.  I would probably compare it to the first Iron Man film, which as a whole was a good movie, but was rather disappointing on the big screen – although that might have been because we had front row seats.  And I mean really close to the screen.  My neck was sore for a good long while after that from craning my head back to look at the screen.

I really don’t feel like writing a synopsis at the moment, so I’ll just keep it brief and to the point.  The future is a post-apocalyptic world in which the humans use giant robots called sentinels to take down the mutants.  Professor X and Magneto agree to send Wolverine back in time, using Shadowcat’s random ability to send peoples’ conscious back in time.  Wolverine proceeds to recruit young Xavier and young Eric to help stop Mystique from killing the man in charge of the sentinel program, since that’s what kick starts the enactment of the sentinels in the future in the first place.  There, now that the synopsis is out of the way, I can talk about a few of the colossal plot-holes, including:
- Professor X being alive in the future even though Jean Grey killed him in the third movie and the future in this film is obviously a sequel to the original trilogy.
- Magneto has regained his powers, even though he lost them in the third movie when he was injected with an anti-mutant serum.  I don’t care if they hinted at it in the third movie; you need to explain that kind of giant plot-hole.
- Shadowcat suddenly having the ability to send peoples’ consciences back in time, even though this power has not been seen or even hinted at throughout the rest of the films.
- Supposedly it took fifty years for the Sentinel program up and running after 1972, but yet be get no hint of it during the original three films.
- The man in charge of the Sentinel program’s last name is Trask, which, as we all know, is an anagram for Stark, and will undoubtedly come into play in Avengers 2, although there is no hint of him in the Iron Man movies.
- Quicksilver can move much, much faster than a speeding bullet.  Why, when total chaos is erupting, does he do nothing but sit on his couch and play Pong with himself?
- Why doesn’t Blink, who can create portals, teleport the sentinels to the moon?  Or space?  Or Mars?  
- Why doesn’t Shadowcat, who can dematerialize through things, grab something, dematerialize, stick it in the sentinels, and rematerialize it?  
- On a similar note, how does Shadowcat get hurt by Wolverine’s claws when he panics under the time-travel thing, when she can just dematerialize so the claws would just pass through her?
- In fact, why doesn't Shadowcat just completely abandon the X-men and strike out on her own.  It's not like the sentinels can kill her.  So long as she's dematerialized, everything would just pass through her.
- Why the heck did they even make the first three movies if they were going to just completely alter the whole history of those films?
- Is the after-credits scene of the guy building the pyramid supposed to impress us?  Because Jean Grey is already a telekinetic, so it’s not all that impressive to see some random copycat.  
- What the heck does “Days of Future Past” mean?  I’m pretty sure that the future will never pass.  That’s why it’s called future.  You know, cos’ it hasn’t past yet?  Whatever, I’ll go complain to someone who cares.

Hugh Jackman, Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, Tyrion Lannister Peter Dinklage, and essentially everyone else in the cast deserve a huge shoutout for their performances in the film.  Unfortunately, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan get little time in the movie, so you can’t really compare the two versions of the characters effectively, and Mystique is almost always disguised as someone else, so Jennifer Lawrence gets hardly any time on-screen, which I’m sure disappointed everyone in the theater, as well as making it difficult to connect with her character.  James McAvoy’s performance especially was outstanding, portraying the depressed, broken-down younger version of Charles Xavier.  Lawrence, when on screen, does an excellent job of playing the conflicted, vindictive Mystique.  Michael Fassbender brilliantly depicts the quiet but determined killer Magneto.  The skilled cast all in all improves the film a great deal.

The film isn’t anything visually special, providing all the impressive, obligatory special effects and CGI mayhem.  The movie cuts a lot to grainy TV-esque footage, fitting in with the 1972 setting.  Bolivar Trask has an appropriately 70s haircut, but he’s just about the only one, as everyone else is wearing 2010s suits and nondescript hairstyles.  The film has several high special-effects money shots, including the football stadium lift, the sentinel bomb, and the portal attack.  

I would recommend you see X-men: Days of Future Past, especially if you’re an X-men fan, but I wouldn’t necessarily advise seeing it in theaters.  It’s not the kind of movie that absolutely needs to be seen on the big screen like Pacific Rim or Godzilla.  You’ll also probably be absolutely, completely, utterly, wholly, totally, all-encompassingly lost when the next film comes around.  Little details like the whole first three movies getting dumped in the trash after Wolverine changes the past/present/future.  So if you have any plans at all to see X-Men: Apocalypse, or if you’re looking for a fun movie to watch over the weekend, you should give Days of Future Past a view.