X-Men: Days of Future Past 3D on Blu-ray – The DVDfever Review

X-Men: Days of Future Past seems to have taken a very long time to come to the cinema, rather like Mr Peabody and Sherman, although this time not quite as long. Normally, films only take around 3-4 months to reach the home market, but while this one was released in time for the late May bank holiday in the cinema, I can understand why they waited for the Christmas market to release it to buy.

It is the second in what will no doubt end up as a trilogy of ‘young X-Men’ films, where the younger roles of the two lead characters are played by James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender, and here they’re referred to as Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr, rather than Professor X and Magneto, who the cast list reminds us are played by Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, and you may indeed need reminding of that because it feels like they’re only in it for five minutes when the trailer made it feel like they’d have much bigger roles.

Erik is in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Despised by the government, like Erik, if you have a problem, if no-one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the X-Team.

Yes, the current existence for the X-Men is in turmoil because a group of what looks like flying USB hard drives are heading to X-Men Towers to dispense baddies and wipe out all the good guys one by one. It turns out that it all stems back to a time in 1973 when Dr. Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage) created a group of robot-like creatures called Sentinels who would tower over most buildings in any city and so come across like a “sledgehammer to crack a nut” response to improving upon policing the place, yet obviously their purpose is far bigger than that.

But how to stop them, then? Well, Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) is able to send anyone back in time, but only by a matter of days, rather than several decades. The man, or rather mutant, picked for the task is Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) who does go back in time – in spirit, yet he’s still there as a physical presence because he’s been transported back into his own body in 1973 and no-one notices because he doesn’t age (never mind the fact that his 1973 existence has to go somewhere in its place, but that’s the point where I stopped quite understanding how that was all meant to be working – to seek out Charles, get him to find a way to pull Erik out of chokey, and then instead of working against each other, he wants the two to work *with* each other to defeat evil and restore peace etc.

How does he convince them once he gets there? He tells them what we’ve already learned at the start – it was their idea!

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There’s a consistent storyline to this latest movie in the X-Men franchise, as well as a reason for Wolverine to go back into the past, but there’s a lot of pontificating from time to time, while other entries in the series would be getting on with some action, so it’s let the side down a bit there.

Also, while X-Men: Days of Future Past is the first in the series to be presented in 3D – and is also shot in 3D – I went with the 2D version at the cinema for two reasons. (A) – I can get cheap tickets for the Odeon, but they’re 2D-only, so I would be laying out a sizeable sum for a 3D screening, and (B) – I’ll go and see a 3D film if I think I’m going to get the benefit from it, and in this case, the trailer didn’t appear to demand it. On originally watching the film, I could only think of one scene which would benefit from it – Quicksilver’s kitchen scene in the Penatagon. The rest just looked like you’d only get a basic effect of 3D, which is the sort you’d get from natural perspective anyway.

Now, watching the 3D Blu-ray, while that scene certainly did benefit, as well as one with a bullet being tracked through the air, a lot of the 3D effect in the rest of the film ends up looking ‘cardboard cut-out’. I think this is because the background is often green-screen and it just hasn’t been blended in with the foreground as it should, and for this film it feels like 2D is the better option in the main.

Go to page 2 for more thoughts on the film, plus the package’s presentation and the extras.

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Some bad points about the film:

• Firstly, as I mentioned, there’s very little screen time for Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen and, even more annoyingly, the gorgeous Ellen Page, since they’re all stuck in the “present day” (which I put in quotes as they’re still about 10 years ahead of our time), as the majority of the film is set in the past.

• The battles aren’t brilliant. We know things are going to kick-off big-time between the mutants and Trask’s Sentinel crew, but they’re not unveiled until late into the third act and the level of overall destruction is limited to either bizarre other worlds in the future where we have no point of reference, or a 1973 American Football stadium which the trailer shows is lifted up by Erik and dumped somewhere else.

• The battles in the “present day” are just made confusing by the fact that one of the X-Men is equipped with something akin to a Portal gun, so you can effectively travel to another part of your current landscape, but where that works in the Portal game – as you set the first portal and then the second one, here they appear simultaneously so it comes off as a poorly-executed idea.

• There’s also precious little screen time for Halle Berry as Storm, but since I don’t think she could act her way out of a paper bag, this isn’t a problem to me.

• There’s also a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance by Anna Paquin as Rogue, even though she’s quite high up in the overall cast list, which is a bizarre situation. However, this post from ComicBook.com shows that her scenes ended up on the cutting room floor. Bad luck, Rogue. At the time of the cinema release, I said “Better luck when the Blu-ray comes out”… but she’s lucked out here, too.

• Finally, as I’ve said many a time, I’m one of those people who likes to stay for the end credits in the cinema. Generally, I’m the only person there at this time. This time, however, 8 people stayed, including me. And we got, as I suspected, a short clip at the very end. Exactly what it leads to, I don’t want to spoil at this point, but no doubt we will have to wait until 2016 to find out because X-Men: Apocalypse is scheduled for a UK release on May 19th 2016.

And we finally find out the truth reason the JFK “magic bullet” theory…

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The film is presented in the original 2.35:1 widescreen ratio and in 1080p high definition and it looks absolutely stunning, perfectly showing off the dark world of the ‘present’ as well as the bright scenes in the past, all doing full credit to the movie, especially on my Panasonic 50″ Plasma TV.

The sound is in DTS HD 7.1 and great use is made of the aural soundscape, with a lot of split-surround action as good and bad get zapped and impaled all over the place.

The extras are as follows and are all in HD:

• Deleted Scenes (5:36): Just five of them here, each with optional director’s commentary, but nothing that needs to be put back into the film.

• Kitchen Sequence (6:28): Bryan Singer talks about a scene featuring Raven, but not the circular 3D kitchen I was thinking of, which is rather a shame. This featurette contains an outtake and the final deleted scene.

• Gag Reel (5:40): Does exactly what it says on the tin, and includes a neat Star Wars line from Hugh Jackman.

• Double take: Xavier and Magneto (11:51): Two characters. Two actors apiece. Scenes aplenty with chat from key cast and crew characters, including the breakdown between James McAvoy and Patrick Stewart going almost nose to nose, and how that was McAvoy’s suggestion.

• X-Men: Reunited (9:47): Another brief featurete, this time looking at combining original and new X-Men characters, all in the same style as before.

• Classification: M (11:54): This time looking at working out which new characters to bring in, while producer Lauren Shuler Donner says it’s all due to “ethnic diversity”. WTF??!

  However, late on in this piece it does include a brief look at Quicksilver’s kitchen scene.

• Sentinels: For A Secure Future (9:19): A detailed look at the big robots.

• Galleries: Trask Industries: 30 stills covering mutant experiments (13), blueprints (10) and Sentinel construction (7).

• Theatrical trailers (7:09): Three of them, all in 2.35:1.

• Second screen app (5:34): Using your smartphone (Android, Apple or Kindle), this app ads extra concept art, storyboards, costume designs etc, as well as linking in all the X-Men social media platforms. I guess this was brought in as no-one uses the BD-Live function which was available on some players, so it does something similar on a phone, which everyone has.

• Sneak Peek of Exodus: Gods and Kings: A behind-the-scenes clip (1:26) of Ridley Scott’s Boxing Day cinema film if you hadn’t already been bombarded enough with the enforced trailer (1:31) which appears before the main menu on both discs, yet really shouldn’t… and is on here, too.

• Audio descriptive track: Does what it says on the tin.

There’s a lot of good stuff in these extras, but they do tend to get very repetitive and/or predictable after a while.

There are subtitles and languages in a fair few apiece, all listed at the bottom of the review. Oddly, the box erroneously states English-only. This will put some people off if they don’t know, 20th Century Fox.

Chapters are a fantastic number, here, with 40 across the 131-minute running time. More of this, please, Fox!

The 3D Blu-ray version of X-Men: Days of Future Past, which I’ve reviewed here, is presented in a gorgeous embossed sleeve. Click on the packshot for the full-size image.

X-Men: Days of Future Past is available now on 3D Blu-ray, 2D Blu-ray and DVD.

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FILM CONTENT PICTURE QUALITY SOUND QUALITY EXTRAS	7 10 10 5
OVERALL	8

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Detailed specs:

Cert:
Running time: 131 minutes
Studio: 20th Century Fox Home Video
Cat.no.: 5830115044
Year: 2014
Released: November 10th 2014
Chapters: 40
Picture: 1080p High Definition
Sound: DTS HD Master Audio 7.1, DTS 5.1, Dolby Digital 5.1 (all non-English languages)
Languages: English (7.1), Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Czech, Thai, Ukranian
Subtitles: English, Spanish, French, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Bulgarian, Chinese (two of these, for some reason), Croatian, Czech, Estonian, Indonesian, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malaysian, Serbian, Slovenian, Thai, Ukranian and English text (which is blank – huh?)
Widescreen: 2.35:1 (ARRIRAW (2.8K))
Disc Format: 2*BD50

Director: Bryan Singer
Producers: Simon Kinberg, Hutch Parker, Lauren Shuler Donner and Bryan Singer
Screenplay: Simon Kinberg (based on a story by Jane Goldman, Simon Kinberg and Matthew Vaughn)
Music: John Ottman

Cast :
Logan / Wolverine: Hugh Jackman
Charles Xavier: James McAvoy
Erik Lehnsherr: Michael Fassbender
Raven / Mystique: Jennifer Lawrence
Storm: Halle Berry
Hank / Beast: Nicholas Hoult
Rogue: Anna Paquin
Kitty Pryde: Ellen Page
Dr. Bolivar Trask: Peter Dinklage
Bobby / Iceman: Shawn Ashmore
Bishop: Omar Sy
Peter / Quicksilver: Evan Peters
Maj. Bill Stryker: Josh Helman
Colossus: Daniel Cudmore
Blink: Bingbing Fan
Sunspot: Adan Canto
Warpath: Booboo Stewart
Professor X: Patrick Stewart
Magneto: Ian McKellen
Havok: Lucas Till
Toad: Evan Jonigkeit
President Nixon: Mark Camacho
Beast (older): Kelsey Grammer (uncredited)
Jean Grey: Famke Janssen (uncredited)
Scott Summers: James Marsden (uncredited)