Review: X-Men: Days of Future Past Should Change the Face of Comic Book Movies For the Better

Before our review, a detour.It’s been about 15 years since director Bryan Singer changed the nature and perception of comic book movies with X-Men, crafting a summer blockbuster franchise from a property that didn’t have the kind of built-in mainstream awareness of Batman or Spider-Man.The film embraced comic book conventions in a way that few films before it had done, and managed to do so without descending into camp, as the Joel Schumacher Batman films had done just a couple of years before. When X-Men hit theaters in 2000, many critics and audiences had written off superheroes as a fad whose time had passed. Superman’s movies went to pot after the second installment, and then Batman’s did the same. Marvel’s biggest success had been with Blade, a film that didn’t really even acknowledge its comic book roots and embraced the conventions or horror films more than the high adventure of superheroics (and which also went to pot after two installments, but that hadn’t happened yet).