X-MEN: Days of Future Past and the Fight for a Dying World

by Christopher Barr

“Mutation, it is the key to our evolution.  It has enabled us to evolve into the dominant species on the planet.  This process normally takes thousands and thousands of years.  But every few hundred millennia, evolution leaps forward.”

– Professor X (X-Men 1), Jean Grey (X-Men 2)

X-Men: Days of Future Past was a fantastic, fun extravaganza to be hold.  Its story was complex with time jumping and memory swapping and its action scenes have something fresh about them.  Director Bryan Singer had a lot to make up for after bowing out of X-Men 3 to do the not-so-bad Superman Returns.  The problem is the third installment of a comic book franchise, that was just coming off the mass success of the masterful X2: X-Men United, was put in the hands of mediocre filmmaker wannabe Brett Ratner.  As a result the momentum that the first two garnered was all but a corpse after the first screening of X-Men: The Last Stand.  The CGI was sloppy; the action scenes were contrived and the story was horrible.  Not to mention all the main characters that were killed off in unmemorable and unnecessary ways.

This last installment, a sequel to X-Men: First Class, a prequel to The Last Stand and a reverse crossover, hybrid of The Wolverine, was Singer’s way of dealing with damage control for The Last Stand and to undo some of the comic book blasphemy that was in it, restoring the balance back to the X-Men universe’s future and past.  Singer brought the narrative back to its fundamental human problem, discrimination resulting in extermination.  This marvelous movie has its fun moments with one in particular involving Quicksilver, in the best action scene in the film, and a number of security guards firing upon himself, Xavier, Magneto and Wolverine, the moment was priceless, it was also reminiscent of the Nightcrawler scene at the beginning of X2 .  But the real achievement was Singer brought the seriousness that Ratner shamelessly did away with back. 

We see this seriousness right from the start when a cargo box is tipped up and dead humans and mutants roll out into a pile, while a number of other mutants and mutant-sympathizing humans are escorted to a likely death chamber, in a very dark despotic future circa 2023.   This is a bleak world that is overrun by Sentinels, huge powerful robots that have been originally designed to track and eliminate all mutants.  This scene was also throwback to the first film and a reminder of the fact that something simply don’t change, even if we want them to.  This post-apocalyptic wasteland is all that remains as humans and mutants are well on their way to extinction.    

The first X-Men movie started off with rain pounding down on a large number of Jewish people being herded off to the gas chamber during the atrocities of World War 2.  The screen was bled of most of its color leaving a pale, grim suitable atmosphere as a young Erik Lehnsherr is separated from his parents who are among the number of sad souls off to their deaths.  Understandably angered by this, he draws upon a seemingly foreign ability held deep within him, and generates a magnetic field between him and the closed metal gate that divides him and his parents.  The angrier he becomes the more powerful the magnetic field becomes and manipulates the metal gate, violently bending it toward him until a guard hits Erik in the face with the butt of his rifle, knocking him near unconscious to the muddy ground.

“You’ll have to kill me, Charles – and what would that accomplish?  Let them pass that law and they’ll have you in chains with a number burned into your forehead!” 
- Magneto

This opening scene did a number of things; it let its audience know that we are entering new territory here when it comes to the superhero movie.  It said that this movie is going to be the polar opposite of the horrible 1997 movie Batman & Robin, but it also made the statement that we are going to take this material seriously.  Clearly the unfortunate events that occurred in concentration camps during World War 2 were appalling to say the least.  So for a comic book movie to start out reminding its audience of these events is saying a lot. 

This scene, our first look into the world of the X-Men on the big screen, was to set the tone for the entire series.  It was making a bold statement about the madness of division, about fearing what we don’t understand and hating what we fear.  It’s saying we can’t just kill what scares us; first we must understand why we are scared in the first place.  The result has been proven over and over again; if you begin to understand you become less afraid and if you do that, you become less likely to resort to violence as a result.

Difference has always scared the hell out of humanity, and at an earlier point in our history, that fear of difference was understandable.  It’s natural for a person to be afraid if they don’t know what is going to happen next.  Our defense mechanisms assure us of this on a daily basis.  But whether it’s the religious differences that led to the genocide in Rwanda or the extermination of 6 million Jews during World War 2, it is clear that as we grow as a civilization, we grow fearful of all the change that is out there.

Change has always scared the hell out of humanity because we seek comfort and avoid predators, just as our early ancestors did.  We are hardwired to survive long enough to have off-spring and raise them through cautious means of survival.  So when a foreign ship lands at our shores, we rightfully become fearful, not only for ourselves but for our young, for others that may be part of our group or tribe.  As a direct response to that fear, we naturally become defensive and it just depends on the group whether they kill and then ask questions or they take the more civil other way around.  

“…and there are even rumors, Miss Grey, of mutants so powerful that they can enter our minds and control our thoughts, taking away our God-given free will. Now I think the American people deserve the right to decide if they want their children to be in school with mutants. To be taught by mutants! Ladies and gentlemen, the truth is that mutants are very real, and that they are among us. We must know who they are, and above all, what they can do!”

– Senator Kelly (X-Men 1)

Mutants have a variety of powers and Senator Kelly at the beginning of the first film does make some valid points about the potential dangers of that fact.  What’s to stop one that can walk through walls, from entering a bank vault or the White House, which Nightcrawler does during the magnificent, spectacular opening scene to X2: X-Men United?  He is under the chemical control of William Stryker but never the less; Senator Kelly’s point is that it is possible.

Persecution is the resulting effect of not understanding another group of people and more horribly, not attempting to understand another group of people.  Magneto was that young boy who watched his parents carted off to certain death while lying helpless on ground.  Later we find out that his mother lived only long enough for Sebastian Shaw to shot her because Erik was unable to use his powers at will, during the opening scenes of X-Men: First Class.  Magneto has struggled over the years to realize his goal of mutant supremacy.  In the first film he tried assimilation, the second annihilation and the third mobilization, all in an attempt to not be that scared little boy, lying in the mud, helpless.

Scottish philosopher David Hume saw societies being run by passion and emotion and not reason and logic.  The X-Men live in such a society, one where people’s feelings about change and difference outweigh their critically reasonable side.  Because most societies are governed with an emotional purview; problems with equal rights, same sex marriages, racial differences, cultural differences, stem-cell research, terrorism, genocide, climate change and media, governmental and corporate propaganda will always exist.  These are not logical problems; these are not problems that when you apply a little reason cannot be solved.

I would never want humanity to dampen the flame of its passionate, emotional side and become Vulcans, where logic is their only means of understanding, but I ideally would like it see a society, and certainly live in one, that applied actual logic to its foreign policy, one that would see that same sex marriage is not a problem and that it’s a waste of everyone’s time even debating about it.  Clearly most of the above so-called problems listed are religiously traditional tenets that a healthy, growing society should be ashamed to admit that they advocate, but yet here we are, in a world that is a troubled place, because it is feeding off its immature emotional side and not growing up to the necessity of reason and logic.

The X-Men are a Marvel comic book creation by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby.  These men created these characters to have purpose, to mean something, to reflect a problem they saw in society that was and still is, tearing it apart.  We are unable to get over our differences and instead of dealing with that unavoidable fact and grow with it; we stick our precious little heads in the sand and say, ‘kill anything that isn’t like me’.  Apathy, ignorance, racism, nationalism and intolerance all stem from our fear of the unknown. 

X-Men: Days of Future Past was dealing with a lot of those same problems as the previous films, where the ignorant only desired death to the mutants.  So it was humans vs. mutants but it was also mutants vs. mutants.  Magneto is a tragic figure that is unable to get over his bitterness of his childhood.  Some would rightfully say why should he but his lifelong friend Charles Xavier only wishes for him to take the compassionate path of righteousness.

Charles is truly a noble figure, a guru of a man that wants peace above all but isn’t afraid to fight for it.  Essentially he’s a very smart man trying to convince all the ignorant people that what they are doing is wrong, that there is a better way to do it and that is through knowledge.  Tolerance on a massive scale requires a sleeping population to wake up out of their mind-controlled slumber and live their lives in a more productive, open-minded, fulfilling way.

This is what was so great about X-Men: First Class; is we got to see Charles and Erik’s relationship develop and we got to eventually see their ideologies separate.  We got to see how one man’s strength was not enough to save his friend from the fall of dispair.  Charles never had the opportunity to tell Erik that his way of thinking, mutants above all, was quite similar to the way of thinking Hitler employed during his extermination campaign in World War 2.

Stan Lee said that he based Charles Xavier on Martin Luther King Jr. and Erik Lehnsherr on Malcolm X, both men who had their hearts in the right place, but one that couldn’t escape his anger over how his fellow African Americans were being treated.  I do think that noble men like Xavier and King are rare indeed and I would argue that most would likely not have the strength to look their enemy in the face and grant mercy.  True strength is not to see your enemy as an enemy at all but as misguided.  A true teacher would only want to guide such a person or group onto a path that grants equality for all.

The real fantasy of Days of Future Past is the chance to make it right, the chance to go back and correct a mistake that created a ripple effect to the destruction of us all.  It’s something that would have passed through the minds of most people because most people harbor regret for some of the things they have done, but didn’t have the wisdom at the time to see that.  If only wisdom came before we all got so afraid of most of the things around us.  What a world that would be, a world that would finally realize that fear is an illusion that the mind creates to sound the alarm bells, and that alarm doesn’t always mean something is wrong.

There is a new timeline in the X-Men universe, much in the same way as the new Star Trek franchise.  I certainly would've liked to have seen more moments from the future, but I also see that its purpose was to let us know of the devastation that was being fought there and not to explore its detail.  Essentially we just needed to know enough to feel the weight on Wolverine’s shoulders once he went into the past, what was at stake and what would have been lost, salvation for all was the goal.  The next film is called X-Men: Apocalypse, so maybe this timeline change will cause more problems than they bargained for.  

The X-Men will continue to fight the treachery of evil men in order to maintain their place as an evolutionary leap for the future of mankind.  They will fight those that only wish to hold us all back from growing and expanding our view of the world, and all those that inhabit it.  The X-Men will fight for what most free-thinking people should fight for; the future of our species, because if we let the warmongers and politicians have their way, we might well be heading toward a post-apocalyptic wasteland of our very own.

“I’m looking for hope.”

– Professor Xavier