After I waited over thirty years -- and watched it get
ripped off by James Cameron for the Terminator movies -- the two-issue comic
book story X-Men: Days of Future Past finally comes to life on the big
screen this week, bringing me just as much joy as the best-ever version of Godzilla, the monster I loved at age
four, even before reading X-Men comics.
Imagine my joy if I not only saw both movies in the same day but bumped into my lovely friend
Malinda Boothe while walking to the theatre across Central Park and bumped into
Kennedy and her fellow TV-making libertarians on the way back home -- plus, in
between the two films, finished reading that ridiculous Supergirl comic book
anthology I blogged about last time. And watched a little dog near my apartment
sniff pizza scraps at evening’s end.
That would be a
perfect day -- and I can only assume it was some very strategic time travel
by my (heroic) future self that brought it about, presumably by preventing some
other dark timeline in which bad things happen to me.
But to see me enthuse on video -- along with my co-host
Gerard Perry -- check out our
latest YouTube chat directed by Matt Brandenburgh.
And lest you think this X-Men film featuring peace
conferences and robot armies is a bunch of childish stuff unrelated to real
life, note that a U.N.
conference later this year will address the problem of killer robots and the
attempt to give them morals. But the important question about the future,
obviously, is: what’s next for the X-Men film franchise?
•••
You know, one radical way to bridge the odd time gap between
the past-set and the near-future-set X-Men movies might be to have a balding James
McAvoy as the youngish Prof. X gather a teenage
Jean, Scott, and Ororo in 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse
(set in the 1980s), as sounds likely to be the case, but then -- since there is
talk of doing one more solo Wolverine movie and then an X-Force movie -- have
the post-credits teaser on X-Men: Apocalypse
show Wolverine “thirty years later” remembering the horror of the time he spent
as Apocalypse’s mind-controlled henchman...and then (get this!) have the
X-Force movie involve their leader Cable discovering clones of his parents -- namely
Scott and Jean, recreated in the 2020s by Apocalypse’s acolyte Mister Sinister
(roughly in keeping with the comics), and have the Scott and Jean clones played
by the same teen actors who play them in the 1980s-set 2016 film.
Voila, consistency/fusion! (Plus the retention of the cheaper,
new actors if desired by the studio, as is often the case.)
I mean, we’ll all miss McAvoy if they ever decide to keep
moving forward into the future that way, instead of lingering longer in the
twentieth century, but it’s enough to make the whole thing sort of hang
together. Then, in subsequent films, there are still all sorts of ways they can
play with X-Force, Scott, Jean, and even the unaging Wolverine if Jackman
decides to return yet again. Beats having the franchise fragmented across a
sixty-year time period, I think.
But I have no serious complaints about the ensemble films in
this franchise. I look forward to whatever happens next, whatever era it
happens in.
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