"X-Men: Days of Future Past" (2014) (An actual review this time) (Honest)

My friends, I have had the unparalleled delight of seeing this on the big screen for the third time.  My local theater brought it back for the long weekend, and thanks to my generous and understanding Cowboy, I just got home from spending two more hours in the company of Wolverine and the rest of the X-Men.  It's one of my happiest places.

(This moment isn't actually in the movie, but yummy!)

After my second viewing, back in June, I tried to write up a coherent review, but real life intervened, as it so often does.  This time, I'm going to write this while I take a few minutes to unwind so I'll actually fall asleep when I crawl into bed.  Absolutely everyone else is asleep, so for a few minutes, it's just me perched on the edge of the bathtub with the laptop, trying to put into coherent words what I love about this movie.  Because love it I do -- it might not be quite as jewel-perfect as X2, but for deeply personal reasons, I think I love it a little more.

This is a movie about friendship and love, loyalty and betrayal, hope and despair.  All the explosions and mutations and special effects are just window dressing.  At its heart, it's about two friends who are constantly pulled apart by their different ideologies, yet convinced they could work together if only things were different.  It's also the story of a handful of people desperate to save not just themselves, but also strangers they'll never meet, people they'll never know.  The trouble, of course, is that they don't all want to save the same group of people.

(Here be spoilage.)

(How priceless and adorable is this picture???)

Those two friends, of course, are Charles Xavier and Eric Lehnsherr.  Over the past 14 years and four movies, we've watched them battle, unite, divide, unite again, hurt each other, help each other.  In some ways, they're like a star-crossed couple, always searching for a way to thwart their own selves in order to be together.  And I mean that in the non-slashiest way possible.

Of course, generally Eric wants to promote mutant welfare above human welfare, and Charles wants mutants to protect humans, and so they tend to butt heads and part ways a lot.  And in this movie, you've also got Mystique trying to take down the guy who's going to create the machines that will wipe mutants off the earth.  And that guy's just trying to protect humans from the mutants.

(Why are there so many pictures of Fassbender in this post?  But look at his beautiful hat!)

And poor Wolverine is trying to sort out this mess, get everyone to shut up and work together for a few minutes so he can save his "found family."  Because he's the best he is at what he does (even if what he does isn't always very nice), he succeeds.  As a reward, he gets to live in a new future where people he loves are safe, sometimes even no longer dead.  The final scene, as he walks through the halls of the School for Gifted Youngsters, never fails to bring me to tears.  The wonderment on his face, the dawning hope, and finally the joy when he sees Jean Grey -- they make me achingly happy.

(It's hard to find a picture of Wolvie smiling.  Best I could do.)

The rest of the movie's lots of fun too :-)  Quicksilver's "Time in a Bottle" scene is hilarious and brilliant, and every single scene that takes place on Professor X's plane could be six times as long and I would still be entranced.

(Also hard to find pics of the inside of that plane.  The internet is so silly sometimes.)

Okay, that's as coherent as I'm going to get at 1:34am.  A bit more lucid than last time, I hope!

I'm not sure why, but all summer long, this Beatles song has been reminding me of this movie.  So I'll end with it: