Last weekend was the Super Bowl and to celebrate it I did the same I do every year: I didn’t watch. What can I say, football just isn’t my thing. Even so, the annual event does bring about a few great things. Good food and — if we’re lucky — good commercials.

During the Super Bowl, Marvel dropped a brand new trailer for the upcoming Doctor Strange movie. As a fan of superhero films I was excited to watch it when I found it on YouTube. I was even more excited after watching, because it revealed something that many fans have been anticipating for years. It introduced the X-Men into the Marvel Cinematic Universe through a split second of dialogue between an offscreen Professor X and Doctor Strange. I was giddy. Ever since I was a little kid, the X-Men were my favorite superheroes. 

One important thing about the X-Men franchise is that the films are incredibly hit or miss. There hasn’t been a good one in almost a decade. In 2014, X-Men: Days of Future Past was released. It follows a similar plot line to the comic arc of the same name. The movie opens in a grim future (the year 2023!) where mutants are hunted down and killed by highly advanced robots called ‘sentinels.’ A gruesome war is nearing the end between homo-sapiens (normal people) and homo-superior (mutants), with many casualties on both sides. One mutant, named Kitty Pryde, has the ability to send somebody’s consciousness back into their past body. Eventually, the remainder of the X-Men hatches a plan to use this ability and send Wolverine back in time to correct the past and prevent the war from happening in the first place.

A young Professor X played by James McAvoy

In 1973, Wolverine needs to find and persuade a young Professor X and Magneto to help him stop Mystique from killing the weapons manufacturer who designed the sentinels. This might be confusing if you’re not familiar with the X-Men franchise, but bear with me because I am pretty much done explaining the movie’s plot points. When he meets Charles Xavier (Professor X) in the past he learns that he has developed an addiction to a drug which gives him control of his legs at the cost of his mutant abilities. His power is the ability to read and interact with other people’s minds telepathically. This is treated in the movie in a very interesting way. It is almost observed as a mental illness where he can’t control the voices that he hears in his head, something akin to schizophrenia. His drug addiction (which is visually clear due to him tying his arm to reveal veins in which he can inject the serum) allows him to heal himself physically and mentally in some regards. The movie does this to present that something like addiction is not entirely a black or white issue. Often, drug addictions are used to cope with and help control the users mood which makes them difficult to treat.

Kitty Pryde, played by Elliot Page

Another interesting thing about this film is its casting. Kitty Pryde, the mutant who facilitated the time traveling, is played by the actor Elliot Page. This film came out prior to Page’s transition. At birth, Elliot Page was assigned female. This brings up the topic of deadnaming (the act of referring to a transgender person by their birth name rather than one they chose upon transitioning their gender) somebody. Especially in films. In the credits of X-Men: Days of Future Past, they are credited as ‘Ellen Page.’ This movie was released years before Page’s transition, but the show Umbrella Academy (2019), which Page stars in, also came out several years prior and the credits were amended. Is there a statute of limitations for how long after the release of a film or show the credits should be corrected? Should there be any responsibility to correct them in the first place? I’m not sure. Personally, I think it is obviously a positive move to do so and usually would require a minute amount of effort. I tried to find a relevant article, but the closest I could find regarded the debate over IMDB’s rules about deadnaming, which is still an interesting read and is somewhat related. 

Regardless, the number one responsibility of a film is to be entertaining. As an X-Men fan, I think that Days of Future Past does a great job. The storyline is strong and it shows a lot of what many superhero films do not do very well: It brings up the events of what made many characters turn out the way they are and gives glimpses of how their stories unfold. This movie also has an incredibly iconic scene which I will link below along with the trailer. X-Men: Days of Future Past is worth a watch if you are interested in superhero movies or sci-fi. If you do give this movie a shot, you might want to check out X-Men: First Class beforehand though, to get some background on the characters.

http://https://youtu.be/pK2zYHWDZKo