Since the beginning of this year, it’s has become clear that it is the year of the comic book movie. Captain America: Winter Soldier is planned to be released in a little more than a week, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 will premiere in a few short months, and the new Fantastic Four crew has been cast. We already covered Guardians of the Galaxy a few weeks ago, so to follow the trend we are going examine the freshly released trailer of X-Men: Days of Future Past

X-Men: Days of Future Past Trailer

Time Travel?

Time travel is always a sticky situation, but when executed correctly it can be incredible. The gist is this: In 2013, the Sentinel robots control the United States and mutants are not welcome. They are treated like second class citizens and are gathered up in internment camps with other superhumans. The only hope for mutantkind is to send Kitty Pryde’s mind back into her past self’s body in 1980 to prevent mutants and humans from fighting in the first place.

From the trailer, it is clear they took a few creative liberties to bridge all the X-Men movies together. To unite the original X-Men cast with the more recent First Class cast, it appears that it takes place in the 1970’s rather than the 80’s and further into the future than 2013. Additionally, Wolverine is being sent back in time instead of Kitty. I’m positive that this was a strategic marketing move because Wolverine is a more recognizable character than Shadowcat. Plus, they can easily justify shooting Wolverine into the past because he never ages.

New Characters

Because it is a dystopian future with murder crazed Sentinels on every mutants tail, some more adaptive mutants are bound to rise, giving screenwriters the perfect chance to introduce new characters. From the trailer and IMDB, it seems that there will be 7 new characters to the X-Men cast.

First off is Quicksilver, the goofy looking, silver haired boy played by Evan Peters. In comics, he is known as the estranged son of Magneto, but it appears writers didn’t see that detail as being important. What is important is that he has super speed and should be on the good guys’ side.

Next is Bolivar Trask, the ever-so-groovy Peter Dinklage with a mustache and chunky glasses. Why is he important? Trask proudly championed the anti-mutant campaign and developed the Sentinels to “protect” mankind from them. Whoops.

The girl with the pink highlights and green eyes is named Blink, played by the beautiful Bingbing Fan, a mutant with unstable teleportation abilities. Afterwards, you see two guys running through shelves and walls. The guy on the left I believe is Warpath, played by Booboo Stewart with the huge dreadlocked hottie Bishop on the right, played by Omar Sy. Warpath is your typical superhero, with strength, speed, and enhanced senses, while Bishop can absorb then redirect energy.

The other characters I didn’t see in the trailer. Sunspot, played by Adan Canto, can absorb sunlight then shoot it towards his opponents. Lastly, there is Ink, played by Gregg Lowe, who can manifest abilities from the tattoos all over his body.

Other Lingering Questions

Obviously the trailer isn’t going to answer all the questions about the movie, but there are some giant details that I noticed off the bat. First, can Hank switch back and forth from man to Beast? At the end of X-Men: First Class, experimentation with antidote to mask his mutant feet, Hank ended up manifesting his mutation throughout his body. Was he able to reverse it? Does he only express his furry self when he’s enraged like the Hulk? And where the heck is Alex Summers? From the small glimpse in the trailer it looked like he was locked up in some kind of holding facility. Did he leave the Xavier Mansion after the Cuban Missile Crisis? But the absolute biggest question I have is how the heck Charles Xavier is at eye level with Magneto? The last scene of First Class, Charles was left in a wheelchair after the infamous beach scene. In addition, it’s undeniably canon that Professor X is wheelchair bound throughout the series. In another sequence, Charles is in a wheelchair, but I am still utterly confused why he was standing face to face with Magneto earlier.

It looks like we are all going to have to wait until May 23^rd to find out all the answers.

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