X-Men: Days of Future Past - First Look at the Sentinels of the Future

Fans unsatisfied with the earlier "oscillating fan" version of director Bryan Singer's Sentinel robots will undoubtedly have some strong opinions on this--the "future" Sentinels that will be seen in the dystopia of X-Men: Days of Future Past in May. Feeling more like a Transformer from one of the Michael Bay films mated with Thor's Destroyer than anything seen in 1980s comic books, this Sentinel appears to have some kind of adaptions that allow it to combat mutants, that have altered its appearance significantly from the comic book source material. Seemingly made up of thousands of tiny pieces of metal layered over one another like Captain America's traditional scale armor, the Sentinels of the future will retain the featureless faces and gangly limbs of the Sentinels we've already seen numerous times throughout the film's viral campaign and early promotional run-up. Additionally, the body features what look like two lighted gills on either side of the torso. What purpose this serves--other than to look cool onscreen--is anybody's guess.

This also means that the Sentinels seen in X2: X-Men United's Danger Room sequence are apparently as close to the "real" Sentinel look as we're going to get onscreen anytime soon. It's an interesting directorial choice by Singer, who has gone out of his way to retain the look of his first two films in so many other ways, all the way down to casting fairly low-profile actors in roles because they happened to be the ones who played the characters as glorified extras a decade ago. Of course, it's a time-travel film, and the Sentinels seen in X2 were in a fantasy sequence. Replacing them with these oddities doesn't inherently create a continuity error--just a lot of unhappy fanboys who have been very vocal on the Internet ever since the first Sentinels were seen at San Diego Comic Con International last year that they wanted to see the "real thing" by the time we reached the present day in Days of Future Past.