THERE BE SPOILERS AHEAD!  THOU HAST BEEN WARNED!

The announcement of this film left the devoted fandom of the X-Men comics and franchise filled with both anticipation and dread.  Anticipation that there would be a crossover between the cast members of the original trilogy and that of X-Men: First Class, and dread that the adaptation would be a disaster on the level of X-Men: The Last Stand’s version of the Dark Phoenix saga.  Which direction would the franchise take this time?

 

Oddly enough, it will come down to a matter of perspective.  Just as many noted that Amazing Spider-Man 2 suffered a bit from the studio’s late-in-the-game decision to push for a franchise on the level of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (though not as much as some would contend), X-Men: Days of Future Past can’t simply tell its own story.  It continues the process that First Class began and doubles down on the notion of rebooting the franchise continuity into something a bit more manageable.  Yet, at the same time, it has to tell its own story.

 

Similarly, if there is an ongoing downside to Singer’s treatment of the X-Men franchise, it’s how often the sheer number of mutants in each film translates into shallow characterization.  In a way, it’s a bizarre homage to the source material; beyond a handful of core characters, most of the vast mutant population and supporting cast is defined by their power set.  So even as characters are announced in the months leading up to the film’s release, it’s always a question which of the cast members will actually get substantial screen time.

 

All this might sound like a litany of errors leveled at Singer and the film, but that’s not at all the case.  It’s more a statement of context and expectation.  For all the dozens of mutants in the story, the plot is grounded within the core dynamics of the most important to the events at hand.  Also, while the script plays coy with the issues of continuity, some lines are firmly drawn in the sand.  It’s now clear what is “official continuity” and what is merely potential or alternative timeline in nature.

But before getting into the implications: the story itself.  It’s a loose adaptation of the classic story arc, which I won’t get into here.  In this version, the future is just as bleak as one would expect.  In 1973, Mystique assassinated Bolivar Trask, who was doing his level best to start an anti-mutant Sentinel program.  Trask’s death eventually led to Mystique’s capture and vivisection, which led to the creation of Omega Sentinels with her adaptive traits.  Meanwhile, the Sentinels of various progressive generations have been waging a war against mutants, latent mutants, and eventually even the humans that disagree with the Kill All Muties policy.

 

This forces all mutants that have survived the onslaught to band together, including Charles Xavier and Magneto, who have long since recognized that they work better together than at odds.  Somehow, Shadowcat (aka Kitty Pryde) has developed the ability to send the consciousness of others back into their younger selves.  The further back in time, the more damaging it is to the subject.  The last hope of mutantkind is to send Wolverine (whose healing abilities make him sufficiently resistant to the damage) back to 1973 to prevent the assassination of Trask.

This means getting Xavier and Magneto to work together, and bringing the audience up to speed on the challenges that both men have faced in the decade since First Class.  It’s not pretty.  Magneto’s proto-Brotherhood of Mutants from the end of First Class made a mess of things.  Apparently JFK was a mutant, because Magneto tried to save him from assassination; it didn’t work out.  This led not only to the swift end to Xavier’s school, but also the incarceration of Magneto and the extremism of Trask and Mystique.

Despite sounding very convoluted, it plays out in a straightforward manner.  Wolverine, in his younger self, has to convince Mystique’s two most influential “friends” to help stop her from killing Trask or otherwise giving the government reason to pursue the Sentinel program.  With only so many characters to work with, tons of supporting characters from First Class are unceremoniously killed off-screen as victims of Trask’s secret experimentation on mutant biology.  Hank McCoy is still there, and has continued working on a treatment to control his ability.  This treatment has also been modified to restore Xavier’s ability to walk, but at the cost of his telepathic abilities.

For a film that hinges so much on Wolverine and his mission, the main thrust of the story is really the ongoing battle between Charles and Erik, and which one will have the stronger effect on Mystique.  Both men reason to galvanize their philosophies, and both take big steps towards their apparent futures.  Xavier is clearly going to restart his school, and with the First Class slate clean, it’s now clear to introduce how the “original” cast came together.  Similarly, the setup for the Brotherhood of Mutants is right there in the story, so the threads are fairly clear from that end.  In essence, the events from First Class and the 1973 sequences from this film are the foundation going forward.

 

Therein lies the trickiest aspect of the film, and the one a lot of folks will be puzzling over until X-Men: Apocalypse arrives.  The only other piece of solid continuity by the end of this film is a scene set sometime shortly after The Wolverine, in terms of year/date purposes, in which the older Wolverine (who retains memories of that alternate future) awakens in Xavier’s school to find not only many familiar faces still alive and kicking, but none other than Scott Summers and Jean Grey alive and well!  Let me restate the conundrum: preventing the alternate future means that only the continuity in First Class, the 1973 elements and “positive” future scenes from this film are still “canon”.

 

On the plus side, this takes the X-Men continuity and cleans it up tremendously.  The events between 1973 and 2020-ish are wide open; how they get from A to B is to be determined.  X-Men: Apocalypse could easily take the next step in the direction of that future without contradicting anything.  Rogue’s white streak implies that the events of X-Men were still roughly the same, but the finer details need not be set in stone.  And while many smaller plot elements aligned well with X-2: X-Men United, that last little twist at the end suggests that the trajectory of the Weapon X program could be very different, or at least guided by Mystique in ways that William Stryker wouldn’t have realized.  Still, it’s fairly straightforward in terms of what future writers technically need to keep in mind, continuity-wise.

 

The implications are vast for X-Men: The Last Stand, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and The Wolverine.  While X-Men Origins could technically still be in play to some extent, the other films are clearly not part of the current continuity.  They are rendered an “alternate timeline”, for which the “pre-DoFP” versions of X-Men and X-2 are the precursors.  The “new” future implies that all those previous films were in the timeline that led to the dark future ruled by the Omega Sentinels.

But it’s implied that Mystique was captured long before the events of those films, and as seen in The Last Stand, Mystique is “cured”.  Then again, so was Magneto, and Xavier was atomized by Dark Phoenix, yet they are both alive, well, and powered by the end tag of The Wolverine.  There are enough hand-waving clues in The Last Stand to allow for it, I suppose, with the “cure” not necessarily permanent and Mystique’s capture and experimentation therefore happening between The Last Stand and The Wolverine.  That said, it’s still very messy, and perhaps one of the best reasons for this film to wipe the slate relatively clean and dispense with all that nonsense.

 

My suspicion is that X-Men: Apocalypse will deal primarily with picking up the threads from Days of Future Past, while the follow-up to The Wolverine will explore what Logan has learned about the changes to the timeline, since that would involve a time period with the older Wolverine.  That would be the cleanest way forward, and since this film was all about that sort of thing, why wouldn’t they take that path?  Of course, much depends on developing the kind of cohesion that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has, now that the studio has started down the path.