X-Men: First Class rebooted the mega-superhero franchise three years ago by moulding its own intricate storylines around real-life, historic events. X-Men: Days of Future Past on the other hand decides it’s spent enough time playing slave to our timeline, and secures the future of Professor X’s team, and his franchise, by kicking out the action to a couple different time zones.

Whereas First Class tied its personal battle between Michael Fassbender’s Magneto and James McAvoy’s Charles Xavier into the Cuban Missle Crisis, Days of Future Past ties its key plotline around the overwhelming presence of mutant-murdering Sentinel robots in an apocalyptic future. A bit different then.

It also uses this future to bridge the gap between the two timelines in which X-Men is now set, taking the casts from past and present and mashing them into one big team.

It pans out well, and Bryan Singer looks back to his X-Men 2 best in the director’s seat of this action-packed effort. The post-apocalyptic world where mutants and humans alike are on the down sees Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart return alongside some impressive newbies, the most exciting of which is Fan Bingbing’s Blink – a character who sets about defending earth by playing Portal in real life. While McKellan doesn’t get as much screen time as he could have done with, Stewart does get the chance to provide some great speeches and face off against former self McAvoy in a scene handled with aplomb.

The Sentinels which lie at the core of the future’s problems are appropriately simple, badass, and hard to evade, and the horrible stormy weather conditions – why can the apocalypse never happen on a sunny day? – are still sculpted well enough to avoid total cliché.

Of course though, the bulk of the movie takes place in the 1970s, where Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine is sent back to right some past wrongs and subsequently stop the Sentinels in the future. Jackman’s return as the hard-knuckled Logan feels a little fresher this time around too, despite the audience overdose received from his spin-offs – his jokes work well, he doesn’t overdo the stage presence and despite his claws being bone rather than metal, he handles his fight scenes like an absolute badass.

Needless to say, McAvoy and Fassbender are both impeccable as the arch-rivals gunning for similar targets with vastly different tactics. McAvoy plays the Professor who has abandoned his ethical aims in search of a bowl of ice cream and a James Blunt album – he’ll be waiting a while if he’s in the 70s – but Fassbender steals the show as the villainous vigilante self-assigned to save the mutant race at any cost. Whereas in First Class he finds himself in the middle of history in Cuba, this time around Magneto decides to write history himself by closing in the White House with the shell of a baseball stadium. Just your average day at the office then.

The appearance of Evan Peters’ Quicksilver to break Fassbender out of his maximum security prison – where the prison is and what he’s in for add a nice extra quirk– is definitely another highlight. Peters’ super speedy character looks like your usual brat-come-good character when we first meet, but his comedic value is so much more. A slow-motion scene where he takes down four shooting officers and has extra time to mess around is undoubtedly one of the kickers in the film.

A special mention must also go to Jennifer Lawrence. The actress gets increased stage time as Raven-turned-Mystique, and the confusion, anger and sorrow of the character are portrayed well in her acting. Although I may be a bit bias, because I am kind of in love with her. (Please call me if you read this).

On the down side, Peter Dinklage, while increasingly sinister as Sentinel creator Tyrion Lannister, err, I mean Dr. Bolivar Trask, isn’t quite given the back story or justification the audience need for his hatred of mutants. Likewise, alongside the likes of McKellen, the future X-Men aren’t given enough screen time individually. The reason Blink stands out is because she’s an awesome fighter, and that’s pretty much all that cast get to do. Even Halle Berry’s Storm barely gets a line.

All in all though, the time travel is handled well, the deadlines imposed nicely, the acting is magnificent and the story grips you to your seat.

Verdict: On the back of a disappointing run out with The Amazing Spiderman 2, it’s nice to see Singer stepping up to the plate, hitting a home run here and showing how superhero films should be handled. New, exciting, action-packed and clever. A real winner.

Note: After the end-credits, mega mutant Apocalypse makes an appearance, so you’re going to want to stay around for that. But it’s a Marvel film, so you should already know this.

                                                                                                                                  Stuart Kenny

The latest take on Godzilla is a tough nut to crack. The concept of a giant monster tearing up Tokyo is one that lends itself rather manifestly to the B Movie action template, but director Gareth Edwards and writers Max Borenstein and Dave Callaham don’t seem quite content to be trapped within these walls.

Rather, they launch a film that starts with science – intelligent, gripping science – and form the basis of an intellectual viewing that can also boast a strong emotional narrative on the side. This plotline comes in the form of the on-the-mend relationship of Bryan Cranston’s Joe Brody and his son Ford, a father and son who are reunited to investigate strange occurrences in Japan some 15 years after the death of Joe’s wife and Ford’s mother in similarly suspicious circumstances. Cranston performs well as the father who has lost his way, while Aaron Taylor-Johnson shows promise and sincerity as the loving son insistent on building a happy family life for himself, his wife and his still-young son.

Early earthquakes and journeys into the depth of radiated territory give rise to suspense and allow the man pointing the camera to flex his big ass FX budget even before the monsters show. For a while, early on in the film, the efforts of the production team to take this blatant B Movie subject matter into the A leagues seems to have worked out surprisingly well. The only problem is that at some point in a film about giant fighting monsters, you’ve got to have giant monsters fighting – and when Godzilla and the M.U.T.Os (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms) begin to face off, all the serious tone of the film completely falls out the frame.

This can basically be seen as a movie of two very different halves. To start with, you’ve got your early plotline and tension building scenes set across America and Japan which are acted out wonderfully, crammed full of enough emotion to glue you to your seat and boast enough dramatic scenery and CGI to impress the best of us. Next, you’ve got your mucho monsters destroying landmarks around the planet while the previous plotlines effectively deteriorate as a bunch of irrelevant characters, including Ford Brody, now fighting with the US Army, fail to make any impact on the war taking place.

Seriously, as soon as those monsters get fighting, the characters may as well just set off. Ken Watanabe is the thoughtful Dr. Ishiro Serizawa, a scientist charged with helping David Strathairn’s template Admiral William Stenz with stopping the beasts destroying the planet. Only problem is, Serizawa very rarely actually offers any scientific input, instead sticking to a more philosophical approach, only ever providing long-winded answers to questions that nobody ever actually asked. Watanabe’s character does provide the signature moment of the film with his dramatic denunciation that the beast is named ‘Godzilla’ though, so we’ve got to give him credit for that. Some quotable shit right there.

Anyway, the visual FXs are impressive, but not to the point where it shocks. Godzilla is effectively a giant scabby dinosaur on steroids, and he appears as such, and the M.U.T.O.S he fights are overgrown bats that are indeed presented well but are hardly an innovation. The big set battles are fun and provide the set pieces that the audience look for in such a film, but after such a strong narrative build up, the remaining storyline descends into army-driven repetition and weakly presented plotlines as the film peters out.

Ultimately, after such good work from Cranston and indeed Gareth Edwards to create an intelligent foundation for the film, the inevitable and necessary scrapping of two overgrown play toys retracts the good work of the script and removes any decent plotline. Perhaps all the early stuff was just out of place intellect, and the film should’ve stuck to the B Movie script throughout – either that or stuck out the clever plotlines better. Either way, the resulting film is a fun watch, but not much more.

Verdict: The big money FX shots and the big set battles are there, but despite a build up which promises much more than just another battling B Movie, that’s exactly what this film inevitably ends up being.

                                                                                                                                  Stuart Kenny