Yeah, no 5th dimensional stuff today, either. It’s Sunday, I feel lazy, and I am still missing an important piece of the puzzle re : the plot going where I want it to go, so, not yet.

Tomorrow for sure.

I watched X:Men : Days Of Future Past via good ol’ Netflix recently, and I will join the Internet chorus by saying this : it’s an okaymovie, but holy crap is it full of plot holes.

And most of them don’t even have to do with the ever-vexing subject of time travel!

Like, they make a point of having genocidal maniac Boliver Trask (played with extraordinary dinklage by Peter Dinklage) assure the White House people that there is not an ounce of metal in his Sentinels.

But then, later in the film, they have Magneto using the Sentinels like giant marionettes.

How hard would it have been to just snip that line about them being metal-free?

And true, the scene in question comes right after Magneto does a lot of dumb shit in front of the world’s TV networks, and I guess someone said “But how can he sell the idea of the Sentinels to the White House if that ‘mutant’ can just use them like puppets? We need a scene where he says they are metal free!”.

That person should have been told to sit down and shut the fuck up.

Speaking of “Magneto”, in the movie they have redefined his power as “being able to control metal”. And I approve of this change. You get the same kind of powers without relying on the vaguely defined term “magnetism” and all that can imply if you really think things through.

In theory, massive magnetism could give one god-like powers to do pretty much anything. Electromagnetism is one of the primary forces of the universe. Control that, and you control the world.

However, if you take magnetism out of the equation, you are then left with this question : why the hell is he called Magneto?

If anything, his name should be Metallo!

And there’s this sequence where Bad Future Xavier talks to 1973 Xavier and it makes absolutely no fucking sense. They do absolutely nothing to explain what is allowing this to happen. It really seems like the sort of scene that the writer and possibly the actors (and/or their agents) want to do, but should not be done because it makes no fucking sense.

And they went and gave Kitty Pryde the power to project people’s consciousness back in time. Waddy Fug? That’s not her power! She phases through solid matter! I understand the need for someone to be able to do this in order to get the plot in motion, but why change an existing character to do so? Why not invent a mutant called Flashback, and have THEM do it?

I guess Kitty Pryde’s agent should have been told “no” as well.

And then we come to the time travel bullshit. At the end of the movie (spoiler alert), Wolverine succeeds in preventing the terrible mutant genocide human slavery future, and wakes up in the nicer future where Xavier’s school is full of students and everyone is all happy and stuff.

Only Wolverine remembers everything that happened both in the movie and the backstory. The whole bad future that started in 1973 exists only in his head now. And he walks around the school marveling at how much nicer everything is now. Fine.

But then he talks with Xavier about how he will have to learn everything that happened since 1973 since it’s all different now.

Except he doesn’t. He’s been alive and living life that whole time. He even has some grey around his temples^[1]. It’s not like when Xavier saw him, he said “My god, Logan, where have you been for almost 50 years??”. No, even Chuck seems to think Wolverine has been around all this time. Even tells him he has a class to teach.

So what the fuck happened to the version of Wolverine that had been alive all that time? Did This Movie Only Wolverine’s arrival erase that guy’s mind? If so, isn’t that more than a little fucked up?

The only thing that makes sense and doesn’t involve identity murder and a terrible case of retrograde amnesia is having Wolvie remember both timelines, in which case, he would not need the update on what has happened since 1973.

He would, however, need way more psychotherapy from Prof X due to having two versions of reality in his head all the time.

This kind of shit is why I hate time travel. It just plain can’t be written to make sense!

Other mutants got their powers tweaked besides Metallo. They have this clumsy device where Hank “Beast” McCoy has invented a formula that suppresses mutant powers. This both gives them an excuse for him to be a regular human most of the time (rather than the rather ugly CGI Beast) and for Prof X to not have his massive mental powers when Wolvie shows up.

Otherwise, a lot of bullshit about convincing Prof X he’s really from the future could have been skipped. How terrible!

All in all, the movie suffers from a lot of lazy writing and bad decisions, and that’s a shame, because the story is interesting, the acting is a lot better than it needs to be, and of course, the effects are fucking spectacular.

And I love seeing a whole bunch of Marvel mutants on the big screen. They even had a cameo appearance by the Brotherhood Of Evil Mutants. And a mutant called Sunspot who I thought would be Sunspot from the New Mutants but who the movie apparently decided is actually just a knockoff Human Torch.

Look, Sunspot’s power (solar based super strength) kinda sucks, I agree, but you should have either used the real Sunspot or change the goddamned name.

One last nit to pick, and it’s totally the kind of thing that requires a very specific kind of nerdiness to notice and be bothered by : They always refer to Storm as “Storm”.

Bur her name is Ororo, god damn it! They called Wolverine “Logan”, they call Cyclops “Scott”, they call Phoenix “Jean”, they call Iceman “Bobby”, they should fucking well call Storm “Ororo”.

So yeah. Could have been a way better movie if they had just decided to take massive plot holes seriously.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. In fiction form!