X-Men: Days of Future Past

Maybe a third of the way into X-Men: Days of Future Past, there’s a joke stolen from Shanghai Noon: Quicksilver asks Magneto if he knows karate, and the Master of Magnetism replies, “no, but I know ca-razy.” It’s not especially very funny, but it is particularly emblematic of a movie that, despite its best intentions, still finds itself unable to escape the early 2000s.

Before The Marvel Cinematic Universe changed everything, before the landmark The Dark Knight, and even before Spider-Man was pretty sweet, there were the X-Men. This franchise kicked off the super hero age of cinema (sorry Blade) in 2000 and has somehow been going this whole time, through several sequels and spinoffs and sequels to spinoffs. X-Men: Days of Future Past is an attempt to reign in all those years of continuity and leave the franchise in a place that would allow Fox to compete with Disney on the super hero universe front, all the while pretending the Brett Ratner movie and Sexman Origins never happened. And it does a fun, albeit sloppy job of getting there.

Basically everybody is back, including the cast from First Class, the prequel movie from a couple years ago. How does that work? Time travel! Screenwriter Simon Kinberg and cowriters Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn took the rough idea of the classic comic story, “Days of Future Past” and reappropriated it for the film franchise by making it about the cinematic series’ main character: Wolverine (the increasingly ripped Hugh Jackman). Basically, killer robots called sentinels have Terminator-ed the near future, and it’s up to Logan to travel back to the Seventies to undo the events that led to the creation of sentinels.

It’s pretty clear that Fox would like us to fall in love with the new cast, as most of the movie is spent in the past, where we how find how Professor X (James McAvoy), Beast (Nicholas Hoult), Magneto (Michael Fassbender), and Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) are coping with the fallout of First Class. There’s no sign of Moira McTaggert, and the other mutants from that movie either get cursory cameos or are mentioned in a list a dead people. But whatever, I like that core four and I didn’t mind getting to spend more time with them.

The problem is, I like the old cast more. Seeing Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan together again is great, and there’s something fun about Ellen Page and Shawn Ashmore again too. And Halle Berry’s there. There are even some fun new mutants that are only in the future, I thought Blink (Fan Bingbing) seemed really cool, and as a Bishop fan, it was cool to see Omar Sy doing his thing. But much of the future stuff is left unexplained, big stuff like how Professor X and Magneto are both alive and have powers, in favor of focusing on that past. And given the way the movie ends, I still kinda just want to see a movie with those original guys.

Maybe that’s over-thinking things, let’s focus on what this movie is. It’s a collection of some of the best fight scenes in this franchises history (I still don’t think anything tops the train scene in The Wolverine). And hey, speaking of new mutants, it’s Quicksilver (Evan Peters) who steals the show. His action scene is the best in the movie, and it’s just refreshing to see someone in this universe who’s not sad or pissed all the time. This is yet another X-Men movie that is focusing on suffering, sacrifice, and civil rights with action surrounding it. So I liked seeing one person, for a change, who seemed pretty stoked to have super powers.

In the end of this admittedly fun adventure, I was left wondering where do they go from here? This was not the simultaneous resetting of the canon and passing of the torch I thought Days of Future Past was supposed to be. It says something when the end of the movie is focused on the old cast, not the new. After all the time we spend with the young cast, the movie didn’t feel confident enough to fully commit to them… Which is a shame because I felt like the movie was almost there. Now that I’m hearing the sequel will have the team facing another apocalyptic scenario that may include both casts, I’m kinda bummed out. But, you know, at least The Last Stand never happened.

Godzilla

What expectations do you have for the latest attempt to make an American Godzilla movie? Are they still low after the 1998 disaster? Did recent successes like Cloverfield and Pacific Rim raise them back up? Did you really like Godzilla ’98 and are simply pissed you had to wait 16 years for a sequel? Do you just not care about things like this anymore, now that you find yourself staring into the yawning chasm that the rest this summer’s slate of movies appears to be? It matters, because what you get out of this new movie depends partly on what you bring to it.

As you well know, I was completely satisfied by Pacific Rim, which took all the best giant monster, mech, and anime tropes and made it into one glorious sensory overload. What was compelling about Godzilla to me, going in, was that it wasn’t supposed to be like that Guillermo del Toro movie at all. The early buzz was that director Gareth Edwards had designed this to be a horror movie more than anything else. I think I even heard the idea was to show what it would be like if the King of Monsters really did show up in the real world. It’s really not that.

The marketing has been pretty good at keeping the story under wraps (and just good in general, that 2001 parachuting trailer is terrific) so I won’t go into many details here. Godzilla shows up to fight creatures called MUTOs, and a soldier called Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is caught up in the destruction. So are the rest of his family, including his dad (Bryan Cranston) and his wife (Elizabeth Olsen). The only people who seem to have any idea of what’s going on are a pair of scientists, Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins, and the admiral they report to David Strathairn.

The biggest weakness of this movie is its choice in characters. Bryan Cranston is horribly underused, but at least he is used, which I can’t really say is the case for most of the supporting cast. Elizabeth Olsen only gets to worry about things and get scared at things, she has no agency at all. The same is true for Sally Hawkins, supposedly one of the few Godzilla experts in the world who does absolutely nothing in the entire movie. Ken Watanabe and David Strathairn have a bunch of scenes where they basically agree to just let things happen as they happen, man.

That leaves Ford as the only character to actually get out there and do something, but he’s probably the least interesting character in the movie. A straitlaced soldier everyman, Ford is designed not to be a someone the audience roots for, but rather a tour guide who can believably lead the audience through the film. He’s that guy that is always right next something really bad, who somehow keeps getting brought exactly to where the danger is despite all the odds. And all he wants to do is get to his family… Who gives a shit? I’ll take the story about the crazy scientist who holds himself responsible, or the lady who wants to kill the MUTOs because they wrecked her home town, or the guy who wants to try to have sex with Godzilla any day over this. This is the most it’s felt like a movie is a ride since, well, since I actually rode Pacific Rim in D-Box. It doesn’t work as well here.

Of course there are plenty of things that don’t make sense, which is just going to have to the case in any story about beings that are too large to every actually physically exist. It hurts the most in scenes where characters somehow can’t find the giant monster and the ridiculous path of destruction they’ve left behind or when they walk right by one of the monsters because it’s standing still in the fog. What, was it holding its breath? We have multiple senses, you know. Not just sight. You’re telling me that thing doesn’t stink? You can’t feel heat radiating off the monster that literally eats radiation? It’s not making any sounds at all?

Despite those complaints, there are more than a few thrilling scenes in Godzilla, and some of them are damn pretty too. That drop scene from the first trailer is pretty epic. As is the final showdown, featuring something I’m sure franchise fans all over the world will be excited to see. And they wreck the Bay Bridge, and I guess that’s something too.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Marvel knew it couldn’t rest on its laurels after The Avengers. It would be too easy for super hero fatigue to take hold if they kept hitting the same note. So each movie of Phase 2 has been a take on a different genre; Iron Man 3 was an action comedy, Thor: The Dark World was a fantasy epic, and now Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a political thriller. All of them are also super hero movies, but it has been an effective way to keep familiar heroes from turning stale. And if there’s anybody who needed to be protected from becoming old hat, it’s our blast from the past, Captain America.

Chris Evans is back as Steve Rogers, whose life has changed rather profoundly since The First Avenger. He’s now technically in his nineties and trying to figure out how exactly he fits in this new world and his new role as SHIELD’s top agent. Or at least one of the top two, as he spends this movie fighting alongside Black Widow, (Scarlett Johansson) who continues to be surprisingly awesome for a character I didn’t really know anything about before Iron Man 2.

Right when Cap decides to voice his concerns to Director Nick Fury (Samuel Jackson, who is used in this movie better than any of the others so far) shit starts going down. The Winter Soldier, a legendary Russian assassin appears in Washington DC and goes after Cap and Fury. All the while, Fury and Alexander Pierce’s (Robert Redford) latest program is just days away from launching but the question is: should it?

This is a movie with a political agenda, although not an incredibly deep one. Basically drone warfare is morally wrong and big brother spying on everything is creepy. But still, some people will probably cheer when Captain America says “this isn’t freedom, this is fear.” And hey, they should. Mostly, I liked the way this story leaned into Cap’s outdated personality, making his hokey old-timey beliefs into something heroic. Also the addition of Anthony Mackie’s character, a councillor at the VA, is a nice touch too. Plus Mackie brings so much fun and energy to the movie that I hope we get to see more of him.

Captain America’s powers aren’t very exciting compared to Thor or Iron Man, he’s pretty much a dude who’s just better than everyone at everything. He’s strong, but not Hulk strong. He’s fast, but he can’t fly. If he wants to shoot somebody, he’ll do it with a gun, not lasers or lightning bolts. Those limitations are this movie’s greatest strength, as it lets the fight scenes mostly be just Cap versus regular soldier guys. And man, regular grunts don’t stand a chance. None of the fights in this movie felt extremely CG-heavy, and they all felt totally brutal. Watching Cap knock fools 20 feet away with a single blow is awesome. Judged purely for its action, this is maybe the best Marvel movie yet.

Then there are the people who are interested in the bigger picture, people like me. While you could make the case that the ending of Iron Man 3 was a game-changer, Captain America: The Winter Soldier is the first Phase 2 movie to actually alter the landscape of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. What happens in this film immediately affected what was going on in Agents of SHIELD (for the better) and the aftereffects will surely will still be felt when Avengers: Age of Ultron comes around next year. So, even if you don’t think you care about the captain, if you’re at all interested in cinema’s grandest experiment, don’t let this one get away.