Fish and Cherries Productions

X-Men: Days of Future Past went the extra mile of the path to redeeming the franchise that First Class started. While the apocalyptic future scenes kept the serious tone that the original trilogy had, the scenes in a past were refreshingly doused in the humor found in First Class. Seeing everyone return to their roles is a huge treat, but the new additions to the cast are also well in their element, such as Peter Dinklage as the creator of the Sentinels, Fan Bingbing as the mutant Blink who uses portal powers very creatively, and Evan Peters as Quicksilver who steals every scene he’s in. The scope is truly impressive too, as the mutants in this movie truly feel like the next step in evolution, even being something like gods to the normal humans and the future Sentinels are something out of nightmares. I wasn’t a huge fan of some of the costumes, but I can write that off as the future being light on materials. Days of Future Past is the hero the franchise deserved and needed and I would highly recommend it. And to those who are still a little burned from X-Men 3 and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, let’s just say that problem is… fixed.

The first time I saw The Wolverine, I was so exhausted that I kept dozing off. After seeing it again, I can definitively say that it is a conflicting movie. On the downside, it drags very heavily in the second act and some of the action scenes feel incredibly long. On the upside, the action scene on the bullet train is absolutely amazing and it cleanses the pallet of the previous, rather awful Wolverine movie. It also avoids one of the major problems of the first movie where they made an action movie around an indestructible protagonist and instead made it a drama with action scenes. After all, there are few characters who have as much easily mineable angst as Wolverine. The movie is far from perfect, as there are a few characters that feel underutilized or underdeveloped, but on the whole, it’s worth a watch. There’s also a post-credits scene that will make fans of the franchise wet their pants, so there’s that too.