X-Men: Days of Future Past - Discussion Thread - SPOILERS

[DarthTom]

So, a couple things did bug me about this film, though I did like it. I originally thought Magneto's plan for the sentinels was to have them shoot up everyone on the White House lawn, kill Nixon, etc. and make the public thing sentinels were a greater menace than mutants and thus kill the program. Instead, he hovers overhead with an entire fucking baseball stadium while controlling the giant robots, so everyone knows exactly who is doing this, and will only be more against mutants in the future. Good job breaking it, antihero.

But the plot required a reason to re-incarcerate Magneto - correct? Unless I wasn't paying close attention at the end of the film - Magneto heads back to his cell at the conclusion of the film?

The stadium fiasco gives the government sufficient cause to send him back.

 

[Captaindemotion]

^ I don't think he headed back. Did he not sort of guilt-trip Charles into letting him go free: 'if you send me back, I'll spend the rest of my days in a cage' or something like that?

 

[Robert Maxwell]

So, a couple things did bug me about this film, though I did like it. I originally thought Magneto's plan for the sentinels was to have them shoot up everyone on the White House lawn, kill Nixon, etc. and make the public thing sentinels were a greater menace than mutants and thus kill the program. Instead, he hovers overhead with an entire fucking baseball stadium while controlling the giant robots, so everyone knows exactly who is doing this, and will only be more against mutants in the future. Good job breaking it, antihero.

But the plot required a reason to re-incarcerate Magneto - correct? Unless I wasn't paying close attention at the end of the film - Magneto heads back to his cell at the conclusion of the film?

The stadium fiasco gives the government sufficient cause to send him back.

So you're saying Magneto had to do something totally senseless and dumb in order to serve the needs of the plot? That's hardly a point in favor.

 

[DarthTom]

So you're saying Magneto had to do something totally senseless and dumb in order to serve the needs of the plot? That's hardly a point in favor.

True. But it does permit the plot line to continue forward with Magneto still in jail and for the existing heretofore timeline to not be totally corrupted.

Magneto is still a mutant villain. If they make all of the mutants protagonists doesn't that make future stories more difficult to create in which tension not only exists between humans, but also amongst the mutants themselves.

It would be akin to rebooting Transformers and making all of them good guys - even Depecticon.

edited to add; but your point is well taken - which is IMO one of the inherent problems with time travel story arcs.

 

[tomalak301]

Summer Glau is an ok TV actress with a fairly limited range but a pretty big step-down from Lawrence.

Indeed. And I don't see h ow JLaw his "outgrown" X-Men considering right now comic-book movies are pretty much all the rage and actually many in Hollywood would love the chance to do them. So I'm sure JLaw is fine being attached to the X-Men franchise.

Yeah, she seems to be doing the right mix of big budget tentpole films and smaller dramas to secure a long and fruitful career. Sometimes after an Oscar win actors will either go entirely the arthouse route seeking more accolades or entirely the big budget route seeking more money and fame. She seems to have found a good balance between the two.

That's true. It's maybe just she's done so much since First Class (And like I said, I forgot she played Mystique) and her Hunger Games role has probably been her biggest to date. After seeing that, American Hustle, and Silver Linings Playbook, seeing her as Mystique just felt weird, but again, that is probably my personal reaction. She was good in the role though, as she was in all the roles she plays.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

So you're saying Magneto had to do something totally senseless and dumb in order to serve the needs of the plot? That's hardly a point in favor.

True. But it does permit the plot line to continue forward with Magneto still in jail and for the existing heretofore timeline to not be totally corrupted.

Magneto is still a mutant villain. If they make all of the mutants protagonists doesn't that make future stories more difficult to create in which tension not only exists between humans, but also amongst the mutants themselves.

It would be akin to rebooting Transformers and making all of them good guys - even Depecticon.

edited to add; but your point is well taken - which is IMO one of the inherent problems with time travel story arcs.

Being a villain doesn't mean you have to be stupid. At what point did I say Magneto should act like a good guy? For fuck's sake, I thought his original plan was to gun down the President and a bunch of other innocent people! It's not like I was trying to canonize him here.

I was just saying his plan showed absolutely no strategic aforethought. He's supposed to be smarter than that.

 

[Pauln6]

So, a couple things did bug me about this film, though I did like it. I originally thought Magneto's plan for the sentinels was to have them shoot up everyone on the White House lawn, kill Nixon, etc. and make the public thing sentinels were a greater menace than mutants and thus kill the program. Instead, he hovers overhead with an entire fucking baseball stadium while controlling the giant robots, so everyone knows exactly who is doing this, and will only be more against mutants in the future. Good job breaking it, antihero. Would've been a great plan if he'd just done it my way--no mutants to pin the blame on, just the story of technology run amok, something most people can get behind on a gut level. New tech is scary!

Trask trying to sell his tech to the Commies was indeed a bizarre turn. I got the impression he was a reasonably patriotic guy, but maybe he's just a total opportunist instead. Still, he should've known better than to think he could sell American-developed technology to the Commies at the height of the Cold War. At the Paris conference, no less! Sheesh.

Yeah. I thought hijacking Sentinels and swooping in as the saviour would have been more sensible a ploy, especially given what he knows about the future - it would be more sensible to discredit them as a viable mutant control option but then he would also need to obliterate the evidence of his tampering - no so easy when he's on his own.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

I originally thought Magneto's plan for the sentinels was to have them shoot up everyone on the White House lawn, kill Nixon, etc. and make the public thing sentinels were a greater menace than mutants and thus kill the program. Instead, he hovers overhead with an entire fucking baseball stadium while controlling the giant robots, so everyone knows exactly who is doing this, and will only be more against mutants in the future.

Magneto didn't want humans to be thankful to mutants and coexist with them. His whole philosophy (that he shared with Shaw and tried to achieve in X2 by reversing dark Cerebro) is that mutants are superior and humanity should be wiped out. He wanted a war with them, which is why he made the speech where he said "let me show you why you should fear us" and openly attacked with the Sentinels. That was foreshadowed with the bit of dialogue between him and Mystique at the airport where she said she had lost too many friends and she didn't want his war. Remember in X2 when he told Pyro "You are a god among insects"? Remember how he banished Mystique the moment she lost her powers, and how devastated he was at losing his in X3? That's how he views humanity. He doesn't want to live alongside us, he wants to crush us underfoot. It took the near extinction of mutant-kind (which they must have known was coming sometime after the new Sentinels went online during the events of The Wolverine) for him to finally realize the error of his ways and rejoin Charles.

 

[Pauln6]

I originally thought Magneto's plan for the sentinels was to have them shoot up everyone on the White House lawn, kill Nixon, etc. and make the public thing sentinels were a greater menace than mutants and thus kill the program. Instead, he hovers overhead with an entire fucking baseball stadium while controlling the giant robots, so everyone knows exactly who is doing this, and will only be more against mutants in the future.

Magneto didn't want humans to be thankful to mutants and coexist with them. His whole philosophy (that he shared with Shaw and tried to achieve in X2 by reversing dark Cerebro) is that mutants are superior and humanity should be wiped out. He wanted a war with them, which is why he made the speech where he said "let me show you why you should fear us" and openly attacked with the Sentinels. That was foreshadowed with the bit of dialogue between him and Mystique at the airport where she said she had lost too many friends and she didn't want his war. Remember in X2 when he told Pyro "You are a god among insects"? Remember how he banished Mystique the moment she lost her powers, and how devastated he was at losing his in X3? That's how he views humanity. He doesn't want to live alongside us, he wants to crush us underfoot. It took the near extinction of mutant-kind (and humans) for him to finally realize the error of his ways and rejoin Charles.

True but if he can achieve that AND discredit the Sentinels to preserve a safer mutant future then why not? It's the smarter play. In fact, it would have been smarter still to hijack the Sentinels to attack a foreign power and trigger a war a la First Class but I guess they didn't want to repeat a diabolical plan.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

Magneto did discredit the Sentinels. He showed that they can easily be hijacked by the very mutants they were meant to hunt down. Which is probably why the program was canceled until much later (around the time of X2/X3) when it was revived in limited numbers under Project:WIDEAWAKE by Stryker and the other Trask played by Bill Duke, who I'm going to assume is an adoptive brother of Bolivar or something and inherited the company. Which is why we got the giant Sentinel in the training session in the Danger Room in X3.

 

[Tom]

Starting World War 3 would also kill innocent mutants as well as humans, does not seem practical to me.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

Starting World War 3 would also kill innocent mutants as well as humans, does not seem practical to me.

The entire plot of X-Men First Class was about Shaw wanting to instigate a global nuclear war so that mutants can inherit the post-atomic wasteland where the radiation will increase their numbers. Magneto throws away dozens of mutants he considers "pawns" in the Alcatraz fight in X3. He tries to kill his BFF Mystique because she represents a threat to mutant-kind. He has no problem killing Xavier's mutants. Clearly he's not above killing or sacrificing many of his own kind for the "greater good" of exterminating humanity and making mutants the dominant life on Earth.

 

[Turtletrekker]

Good job breaking it, antihero.

Magneto is not an anti-hero, he is a straight up bad guy. I mean, he is kind of portrayed that way now in the comics, but that is an older and wiser Magneto who has learned the error of his ways. The Magneto of 1973 would have just wanted to wipe-out humanity before humanity wiped out mutants. To his mind, there was no third option.

 

[Tom]

Starting World War 3 would also kill innocent mutants as well as humans, does not seem practical to me.

The entire plot of X-Men First Class was about Shaw wanting to instigate a global nuclear war so that mutants can inherit the post-atomic wasteland where the radiation will increase their numbers. Magneto throws away dozens of mutants he considers "pawns" in the Alcatraz fight in X3. He tries to kill his BFF Mystique because she represents a threat to mutant-kind. He has no problem killing Xavier's mutants. Clearly he's not above killing or sacrificing many of his own kind for the "greater good" of exterminating humanity and making mutants the dominant life on Earth.

Shaw was going to far with that plan. Eric wanted the same thing but was not going to let Shaw start World War 3 and wipe out thousands of mutants in the process. Yes, he did sacrifice some mutants but not on a scale that World War 3 would do. Radiation is going to kill most mutants too (do we know for sure they are all 'immune' or increase there birth rate going forward?).

 

[Professor Zoom]

So, a couple things did bug me about this film, though I did like it. I originally thought Magneto's plan for the sentinels was to have them shoot up everyone on the White House lawn, kill Nixon, etc. and make the public thing sentinels were a greater menace than mutants and thus kill the program. Instead, he hovers overhead with an entire fucking baseball stadium while controlling the giant robots, so everyone knows exactly who is doing this, and will only be more against mutants in the future. Good job breaking it, antihero.

But the plot required a reason to re-incarcerate Magneto - correct? Unless I wasn't paying close attention at the end of the film - Magneto heads back to his cell at the conclusion of the film?

You're suggesting Magneto just... took himself back to jail? Seriously?

 

[Locutus of Bored]

@ Tom:

Wiping out Homo sapiens will prevent the births of a metric fuckton of potential mutants too, because they're also born of humanity. If he really wanted their numbers to be at their greatest, he would try and peacefully coexist with humans and not antagonize them. Obviously he's determined that securing mutant domination in the near term is more important than having humanity and mutants coexist and gradually have their numbers grow among humans naturally.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

I originally thought Magneto's plan for the sentinels was to have them shoot up everyone on the White House lawn, kill Nixon, etc. and make the public thing sentinels were a greater menace than mutants and thus kill the program. Instead, he hovers overhead with an entire fucking baseball stadium while controlling the giant robots, so everyone knows exactly who is doing this, and will only be more against mutants in the future.

Magneto didn't want humans to be thankful to mutants and coexist with them. His whole philosophy (that he shared with Shaw and tried to achieve in X2 by reversing dark Cerebro) is that mutants are superior and humanity should be wiped out. He wanted a war with them, which is why he made the speech where he said "let me show you why you should fear us" and openly attacked with the Sentinels. That was foreshadowed with the bit of dialogue between him and Mystique at the airport where she said she had lost too many friends and she didn't want his war. Remember in X2 when he told Pyro "You are a god among insects"? Remember how he banished Mystique the moment she lost her powers, and how devastated he was at losing his in X3? That's how he views humanity. He doesn't want to live alongside us, he wants to crush us underfoot. It took the near extinction of mutant-kind (which they must have known was coming sometime after the new Sentinels went online during the events of The Wolverine) for him to finally realize the error of his ways and rejoin Charles.

I understand that, but he had no allies and used that move as his opening salvo in a war he had to know he was doomed to lose, given his situation.

Magneto isn't supposed to be stupid. Rather, he's supposed to be quite clever and strategic. There is no real strategy in that kind of public spectacle. Even after being told by Wolverine how the human/mutant war turns out, Magneto evidently misses the point and believes it to be "we have to stop the sentinels and start the race war early." I hardly expected him to turn over a new leaf on the spot, but discrediting sentinels without going any further at that moment would have been the best strategic play. It would have been a very public example of just how far humans were willing to go in order to defeat mutants, so it's a great rallying cry for him to gain allies with. What he actually did was also a rallying cry, but a far more dangerous and risky one to himself for basically no gain.

In addition to that, he had to have known that the sentinels becoming such a public catastrophe would paralyze humans (or at least the US government) from responding to the threat they posed for a good while, while he would be free to recruit and build up his own forces. You don't start a war from a weak position, you start it from a strong one. A key first step is weakening your enemies, which he had already accomplished before revealing himself as the one controlling the sentinels.

I get that one can rationalize Magneto's actions six ways to Sunday, but it wasn't a strategically prudent move and I think it undermines his character's supposed intelligence. Magneto is not the X-Men's "oldest, deadliest foe" just because he's powerful. He's got the mind to go with it, and he totally wasn't using it here.

 

[DarthTom]

^^^ I view Magneto more like a Bond Vilian than some sort of super smart strategist. Yea, Bond villians are smart - often powerful -- and usually are very strategic but often their biggest Achilles heel is sometimes their arrogance gets the best of them

 

[Locutus of Bored]

Magneto isn't supposed to be stupid. Rather, he's supposed to be quite clever and strategic. There is no real strategy in that kind of public spectacle.

How is his rash behavior in DoFP any different from his attempt to wipe out two massive US and Soviet fleets off the coast of Cuba in the previous film? That would have provoked a war against mutants when he had even fewer resources and allies than he had eleven years later after being in prison.

I don't think he is all that strategic. He's blinded by bigotry and his God Complex into acting irrationally and lashing out against humanity for the threat they pose that he does nothing to discourage and in fact most often provokes. He was about to use an unproven machine to mutate (and kill, but he didn't know that because his sole test subject, Sen. Kelly, escaped) all the world's leaders, without knowing the potential consequences. He unleashed The Phoenix without knowing the potential consequences (which he immediately regretted).

He's kind of a dumbass (hyperbole, but he's no great strategist, IMO). I bet Charles kicked his ass in every chess match. Plus, he keeps getting caught, so he can't be all that.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Magneto isn't supposed to be stupid. Rather, he's supposed to be quite clever and strategic. There is no real strategy in that kind of public spectacle.

How is his rash behavior in DoFP any different from his attempt to wipe out two massive US and Soviet fleets off the coast of Cuba in the previous film? That would have provoked a war against mutants when he had even fewer resources and allies than he had eleven years later after being in prison.

You'd think some time in prison might have made him more contemplative.

I don't think he is all that strategic. He's blinded by bigotry and his God Complex into acting irrationally and lashing out against humanity for the threat they pose that he does nothing to discourage and in fact most often provokes. He was about to use an unproven machine to mutate (and kill, but he didn't know that because his sole test subject, Sen. Kelly, escaped) all the world's leaders, without knowing the potential consequences. He unleashed The Phoenix without knowing the potential consequences (which he immediately regretted).

Yes, I suppose he's made a lot of dumb moves in the past, too. His plan to mutate world leaders wasn't a terrible one, he just executed it without doing enough research into its effects.

I've tried to forget everything in X3. Thanks to this film, so can everyone else!

He's kind of a dumbass (hyperbole, but he's no great strategist, IMO). I bet Charles kicked his ass in every chess match. Plus, he keeps getting caught, so he can't be all that.

True. This is easily one of the best X-Men films, and I just found his behavior bizarre because the plan I thought he was carrying out turned out to be much more boneheaded and shortsighted than I would have expected from him. I know he's not a master manipulator but you'd think the guy could at least plan beyond next week.

I tend to cast a skeptical eye on character behavior being written off as them being "irrational," as it gives writers a pass to have characters behave any arbitrary way they want. The real reason Magneto had to put on his big show was so all the stuff after it could happen--the part with Mystique, Magneto getting shot, Charles talking the situation down, etc. I'm cool with where things ended up, but there were smarter ways to get there.