3 Things That Still Don’t Make Sense About X-Men: Days of Future Past

In 2014, when the Marvel Cinematic Universe was being nothing but ambitious, Fox was struggling to get its X-Men franchise on the right path. A reboot, X-Men: First Class, had just come out a few years earlier, but a tease at the end of The Wolverine revealed that the powers that be weren’t done with the original cast just yet. The grand plan was to bring both sets of characters together in X-Men: Days of Future Past and deliver one of the biggest X-Men stories in the history of Marvel Comics to the big screen as a sort of swan song for the original trilogy.

Days of Future Past works, for the most part, with it being an emotional affair about the bond that mutants share and the lengths that people will go to save the ones they love. However, since it’s a time travel movie, there are a few things that just don’t add up at the end of the day.

What Does Mystique Want With Wolverine?

Mystique plays a fairly significant role in the comic version of “Days of Future Past,” putting together a new Brotherhood of Evil Mutants in the present to assassinate important figures and pushing the world to embrace the need for Sentinels. Things don’t play out all that differently in the movie, as Mystique kills Bolivar Trask in the ’80s and makes mutants seem like more of a threat. The big difference is that Mystique gets captured after taking out Trask, and her abilities are used to make the Sentinels more powerful. The mutants in the future have no answer for their enemy, and slowly but surely, most of them are taken off the board.

The future mutants have no choice but to send Wolverine to the past to recruit Professor X and Magneto and stop Mystique from ever killing Trask. While it takes a lot of work, they get the job done and prevent a terrible future. Unfortunately, Wolverine ends up worse for wear after tangling with Magneto and ends up at the bottom of a river. William Stryker locates him and appears to be adding a new weapon to his program, but it turns out to be Mystique in disguise. It seemingly sets up a new future for Wolverine where he doesn’t end up with adamantium claws. However, the next time Wolverine shows up in X-Men: Apocalypse, he’s in Stryker’s facility with no explanation about Mystique’s interference.

How Did Kitty Pryde Get Her New Powers?

Kitty Pryde is one of the core X-Men in Fox’s original trilogy. While she goes through a couple of recasts, Elliot Page eventually lands the role in X-Men: The Last Stand. She sparks up a relationship with Iceman and uses her phasing ability to help defeat Magneto’s army of bad guys, who are looking to kill a young boy who is the key to a mutant cure, even getting the better of Juggernaut for a brief moment. It sets up a bright future for the X-Men, but Days of Future Past proves things don’t stay good for long. The Sentinels start attacking, sending mutants all over the world on the run. Kitty forms a small group of allies that includes Iceman and Sunspot and works with Professor X to gain better control of her newfound time travel ability.

In addition to phasing through walls, Kitty can now send people’s minds back in time, allowing them to take control of their younger selves. While the movie tries to justify the leap with a few lines of dialogue, it ends up being more confusing than anything. Sure, Days of Future Past has a lot of mouths to feed, but it should’ve taken the time to better explain how Kitty’s mutation evolved so drastically.

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How Does Trask Have Two Major Roles in the Franchise?

Fox’s X-Men franchise is no stranger to recasts. In addition to Kitty Pryde being played by three actors, characters like Moira MacTaggert find themselves wearing many different hats in the series. Trask fits into that category because, while the version played by Bill Duke that appears as the Secretary of Homeland Security in The Last Stand doesn’t get referred to as “Bolivar,” it’s pretty clear that’s what the movie is going for. A tie-in video game for X-Men Origins: Wolverine even has Trask working with Stryker on a Sentinel-related project, pouring more fuel on the fire. However, Days of Future Past just ignores all that and turns Peter Dinklage’s Trask into a tech genius responsible for creating the Sentinels.

The Trask recasting doesn’t take away from the film much at all. It does speak to a larger issue with the Fox movies, though: lack of consistency. The events of one movie rarely seem to matter in the next, and things get so confusing that Days of Future Past has to act as a reset for the whole franchise. If the creatives had just been more careful when using characters like Trask, they would’ve never found themselves in such a dire situation.

X-Men: Days of Future Past is streaming on Disney+.

Do these issues take away from your enjoyment of X-Men: Days of Future Past? Where does the movie rank for you among all of Fox’s X-Men movies? Let us know in the comments below!