X-Men: Days of Future Past proves Bryan Singer’s genius as a director. You wouldn’t think that racial genocide could be boring, but Singer manages to make it so. Partially he does it through the standard repertoire of tedium; lax dialogue; a convoluted plot that goes nowhere in particular before flopping over and giving up; a style that leaves even moderately talented actors like Hugh Jackman and Jennifer Lawrence adrift and disconnected from any recognizable plot arc or emotion. The narrative calls for Jackman’s Wolverine to be mellow lest he zap out of the past into the future; he responds by alternating between bland-face and stressed-face throughout the film; you can hear the audible click as Singer asks him to switch them.
The central failure of the movie, though, is that it systematically tries to erase the thing it should be about. The storyline is about a future in which the X-Men are hunted down and killed by an inimical human race. It’s a movie about genocide. And yet, the mechanics of genocide figure nowhere in the film. Not a single person expresses hatred or prejudice towards mutants; even the evil scientist Trask, who builds the killer Sentinels, seems to have no particular dislike of mutants; instead he seems to see them as a convenient bonding moment for humanity; a way to unite the human species against a common foe. Trask is Ozymandias and he has no more ill-feeling towards the X-Men than Ozymandias had towards his giant squid. The closest anyone in the movie comes to an expression of racialized disgust at mutants is a nurse who comments to a disguised Mystique that having blue skin might make you feel bad about your appearance. Hardly the stuff of Nazi propaganda, there.
Just in case you missed the point that the genocide is really nothing personal, the script goes out of its way, over and over, to let you know that there were lots of good humans who fought with the mutants against the killer Sentinels. Also, to let said regular humans were thought to to be likely to have mutant kids. This then is a mutant genocide in which humans neither hate mutants nor really single them out for harm. And yet, it’s not like the film is especially squeamish in other matters; Wolverine murders several people in casual cold blood. Video game body count death tolls are fine, apparently, just as long as no one really means anything by it.
Over the course of the film you get to see Sentinels murder various X-Men multiple times. Each murder is then erased by mucking about in the past, so you get the visceral rush of seeing folks dismembered without having to worry overly about the consequences. That seems to be the movie’s whole purpose; to enjoy genocide unmixed with any historical or ideological resonance — to turn the Holocaust into an inoffensive special effects extravaganza. In the future, the movie promises, the past won’t matter, and superpowers will reign down death divorced from animus, or even really from brain functioning. Drones will watch drones blow up without hate, or apology. Or interest.