HUMAN TARGET producer crowdfunds for his INDIANA JONES fanfilm

I have a pretty strict policy about Kickstarter endorsement - I don't promote it unless I contribute to it.  Because of this, I'm pretty skeptical when I get an email drawing my attention to a particular campaign, but every now and then there are elements attached to the project that draw my interest.

TV writer/producer Stephen Scaia is running a campaign to raise money for his Indiana Jones fan-film.  Stephen's credits include the shows JERICHO, WAREHOUSE 13, the unproduced live-action STAR WARS series and - most notably - HUMAN TARGET.  I really enjoyed HUMAN TARGET, particularly the first season, and one of the big things I loved was that it seemed to do an action movie for TV every week.  So an Indiana Jones-style action sequence as conceived by that guy definitely has my interest piqued.

The cast includes Simone Bailey (BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, THE L WORD) and Timothy Omundson (PSYCH, JERICO, DEADWOOD.)

Check out the pitch video for the project. 



You can find the entire page for the campaign here, along with all the rewards.  They're very close to their goal, so close that perhaps they've crosssed it by the time you see this.

EDGE OF TOMORROW is the kind of sharp action film we need more of

I've been seeing promos for EDGE OF TOMORROW for about six months now, and it's rather embarrassing that it took a couple comments during Tom Cruise's interview with The Daily Show last week before I woke up to a major aspect of its premise.  The film stars Cruise as a solider named Cage who is part of a battalion of ground troops taking on an alien force in Europe.  When he dies in battle, he suddenly wakes up a day earlier, quickly realizing he's now part of a time loop that resets the day each time he dies.  This gives him the chance to learn from his mistakes and try to last longer on the battlefield, hopefully eventually scoring a victory.

It's a perfect metaphor for the nature of a video game character/player.  It is perhaps the most literal translation of what it's like to play something like SUPER MARIO BROS, where Mario gets sent to a new land, and - thanks to extra lives - gets a restart from the beginning every time he dies.  If EDGE OF TOMORROW didn't exist, it's whole hook would be a clever enough conceit to actually take another run at re-adapting MARIO BROS for the big screen.

I haven't read any reviews yet, but early chatter seems to use GROUNDHOG DAY as shorthand when describing the concept.  EOT uses the time loop in an entirely different way than that earlier film, though.  In GROUNDHOG DAY, Phil Conners is trying to find a way out of the loop. He needs the repeating day to stop.  In EOT, the loop is a tool that the protagonists use to gain information and experience that will let them achieve a deciding victory in this war with the alien occupiers.

When we first meet Cage, he's a Major in the military's PR department.  He had a hand in creating a propaganda star out of Emily Blunt's Rita Vratski, who won a major battle on her first day in the field and became the poster girl for their new recruitment drive.  Cage is a pretty boy, a glad-hander with zero combat experience and no desire to get anywhere near a battlefield.  Most amusingly, Cruise seems to be playing him as an amplification of his own public persona rather than his action movie persona.

I don't want to get too much into the mechanics of how Cruise is able to reset, or too heavily into the specifics of what his mission becomes.  What is important is that after a few runs through the loop, he tracks down Rita, who's familiar with what's happening to him because she too used to be a repeater.  She trains him and through her we not only learn the rules, but figure out the road map to defeating the aliens.

One thing a lot of writers could learn from the script is economy of action. Cruise's first time through the repeating day is shown in fairly heavy detail.  During the second time, we see less.  There's a nice cut from Cruise telling his commanding officer, "Just give me 30 seconds and I can explain all of this" to him being dragged off kicking and screaming.  We don't need to see Cruise recap the previous fifteen minutes in a failed attempt to convince the commander he knows the future.  We just need to see the result - that he's disbelieved.

The timing of the cut also provokes a laugh and gets some comic relief in.  There are a few more moments of these that happen throughout.  Once or twice we see a scene end abruptly and then start over just seconds earlier, indicating that Cruise met an untimely (and sometimes darkly comic) death and we're catching up to him after he's already relived through the necessary preamble.  (I dare not spoil the best one of these but it involves Cruise trying to slip away from his platoon unnoticed.)

The film is peppered with moments like that.  We come into the second or third version of a scene much later than we did on the first go-round.  At times, we're only shown a series of events on the final time Cruise completes the event.  There's a moment late in the film where he's trying to convince a general that the ground mission will fail and that the only chance is for the general to release some contraband he has in a safe.

It's easy to overlook how challenging this performance must have been for Cruise.  Obviously a film a shot out of sequence, so actors are used to having to track their performances without the benefit of playing the film in any sort of emotional continuity. There's an extra degree of difficulty when an actor has to perform multiple versions of the same scene - often with near-identical dialogue - but bring a different emotional nuance to each version.  The cocky version of Cage whom we meet in the start slowly disappears over the course of the film.  "Press Junket" Cruise matures into "Ethan Hunt" Cruise.

The first scene in the loop is usually Cruise's confrontation with a commanding officer played by Bill Paxton.  We see that a variety of ways and each instance leads into a number of other scenes that follow that particular stage of Cage's development.  Cruise has to make sure all these jigsaw pieces fit perfectly, even though he might spend a week shooting 12 iterations of that scene, he has to make sure the version that fits with his 4th version of the loop is distinct from the others AND matches the later scenes from that version of the loop.

Of course, when he shoots the next scene in that sequence, it will be on a completely different day and also likely as one of many multiple incarnations of that scene.  And it's not as if he's playing one extreme to the other.  This is a gradual arc, a little like stepping up the musical scale one key at a time.  An actor gets little credit when they pull this off because the perfect continuity is invisible, but it's the sort of performance that you can only get from a dedicated professional.  That's just one reason why only a fool would dismiss this as a big dumb shoot 'em up.

It's soon apparent from the way that Cruise is anticipating every minor event unfolding during this meeting (sort of like Bill Murray masterminding his heist in GROUNDHOG DAY, or telling Rita about everything that will happen seconds from now in the diner) that he's lived through this many times before.  We don't need to see five failed attempts to win the general over - all that maters is this last desperate time where Cruise DOES say the right thing to get what he needs.  This is also the sort of scene that works better late in the film when the audience is so used to the rules the movie is playing by that it's easy to process what's going on.  There's a certain point where the movie stops explaining every last little thing and trusts that you're smart enough to keep up.

The break into the third act is another moment that underlines how perfect the structure of this film is.  Without betraying too much, all I'll say is that there's a clear "oh shit" moment where we realize that all bets are off.  One of the problems of telling a time travel story is that if the characters can always go back in time, the stakes are diminished.  This safety net is obliterated by a development that establishes a tight ticking clock on the end.  Just when we've finally gotten used to the idea of "Oh, he can just die and start over. No big," the film pulls the rug out from under us.

The only aspect of the script that doesn't totally track for me is the final ending.  And since I've been careful about not blowing other plot points, this is your final warning that what follows after this is nothing but SPOILERS

SPOILERS

SPOILERS

We cool?  Okay, so the team succeeds in destroying the Omega, and just before Cruise dies in the processes, he absorbs the Omega's blood, which is what sent him back in time in the first place.  He wakes up in the past, but somehow several hours sooner than he usually did.  What's more, despite time rewinding, the Omega is apparently somehow still dead even though those events haven't happened yet.

That seems a little weird to me. Cruise leaping back a little further I guess I could just chalk up to him absorbing a lot more blood before he died.  (I considered that it's just that he died a few hours sooner than scheduled, but the fact is even when he lasted well past his original time of death, he always bounced back to the exact same point in time.)  The Omega remaining dead I guess is just supposed to be one of those weird time-travel things, where I suppose if it's killed at one point in the loop it reverberates backwards.

It seems to be a deliberate paradox, but I'm a little thrown by the fact the film doesn't try to explain it.  There's not even a scene of Cruise or his science buddy making a theoretical guess as to what it all means.  It doesn't ruin the film or anything, but I do wish the ending were more airtight.

Still, I highly recommend EDGE OF TOMORROW as the sort of action film we need more of.  The characters take center stage and the movie is intelligent about every one of its developments.

THE FAULT IN OUR STARS - not a film about cancer, a film about character

When I was working as a reader, there was a particular breed of script that I came to dread almost as much as my much-loathed torture porn: the "terminal illness grief porn script."  In terms of specs I hated, torture porn was more offensive, but this sort of overwrought melodrama was far more common.  I saw so many scripts about people dealing with cancer, people dealing with their kid's cancer, people dealing with their cancer and their kid's cancer while their own father wastes away with Alzheimer's... you get the picture.

Writers sometimes want to deal with weighty matters.  They think that's the ticket to an Oscar script - a story about terminal disease with the main objective in bumming the audience out in the misguided belief that making an audience sob is both easy and a benchmark of quality.  I'm pretty sure that at some point in this blog, I've given the advice "Do NOT writer your terminal illness/AIDS/Cancer spec!"

Writing a script about cancer is a hack writer mistake. It usually just leads to awful stories that swim in false sentimentality.  THE FAULT IN OUR STARS, however, is not a film about cancer. It's a film about people, people who happen to have cancer.  Adapted for the screen by Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber from the novel by John Green, THE FAULT IN OUR STARS is a movie that everyone looking to write well-rounded characters should study.  There's not a moment of the script that doesn't feel genuinely character-driven.  It's a virtue shared by Neustadter & Weber's last effort THE SPECTACULAR NOW, which I previously raved about and put on my Top Ten List of last year's films.

I've not read the novel by John Green, so I have no idea what elements of the screenplay are totally unique and which ones are literal translations of the novel.  The fact remains that adapting a great book is more than just retyping the dialogue.  The two mediums accomplish character development in very different ways.  So even if this translation is extremely faithful to the spirit of Green's novel, that doesn't diminish what Neustadter & Weber have accomplished here.

Our protagonist is a teenage girl named Hazel, played wonderfully by Shailene Woodley.  She's been dealing with cancer for several years now and as it has spread to her lungs, she requires a portable oxygen tank in order to breathe.  It also means that her condition is terminal.  When we are introduced to her, she's dealing with this the way I imagine most of us would, being bluntly and slightly annoyed with how everyone around her deals with her cancer in touchy-feeley ways.  She's forced to attend a self-help group, but seems to find the whole exercise a waste of time.  There's even an undercurrent that suggests she feels this pageantry only feeds false hope and platitudes.

It is at one of these meetings she encounters an 18 year-old cancer survivor named Augustus Waters.  Cancer took his right leg below the knee, but he's in remission right now and is mostly there to support his friend, who is about to lose his second eye to some sort of disease.  Augustus is the sort of sweet, non-threatening and impossibly charming teenage boy who only exists in Young Adult novels.

If there's a male equivalent to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, Augustus would probably qualify. He knows how to flirt with Hazel just enough to make her laugh and blush, but not make her uncomfortable in a bad way.  Much like THE SPECTACULAR NOW, the movie really captures that pure feeling of first teenage-love.  There's cute banter, followed by hanging out, the trading of beloved books, late night texting and developing inside jokes.  The film revels in the sort of innocence that we seem to have lost in teen romance for some time now.

There was a point that it dawned on me that these two had been hanging out for over a half-hour of screentime and the movie hadn't gone anywhere near the issue of sex.  There were no raging hormones, no overt sexual insecurities or angst about losing one's virginity.  It feels like a lot of teen movies today can't help but kick off their relationships on one of those notes. (And there's nothing wrong with that when it's done well, mind you.)  It was a real breath of fresh air that their meet-cute didn't involve some sort of awkward hook-up at the start.  The movie really knows how to set them up as "friends" while moving them towards that ambiguous "are we friends or are we more?" stage.

And yes, their mutual virginity eventually does become an issue the film raises, but even then it feels understated.  Their individual sexual insecurities feel real and the movie presents them well while laying the groundwork for later progression.  When the two finally consummate their relationship, it feels earned.  Too often, sex scenes in films are there just to titillate, but Woodley and her co-star Ansel Elgort turn it into a moving moment of connection between the two.

(It's also interesting to contrast the film's mature handling of teen sexuality with the utter ineptitude of an earlier project Woodley appeared in, the ABC Family series THE SECRET LIFE OF THE AMERICAN TEENAGER.  Though that show barely went 30 seconds without mentioning the word "sex" and every single plotline on the show was tied to the sex lives of the teens, it played as though it was written by aliens whose only exposure to human behavior were magazine articles about the teen hook-up culture.  It's remarkable that was the first thing I saw Shailene Woodley act in, giving performances that carried no hint of her true talent. It's kind of like if "Octopus's Garden" was your first exposure to the Beatles.)

So much of the film builds to that moment without a plot overtly ferrying us there. Aside from an impending trip to Amsterdam, there's no overt goal that the characters are working toward. The story momentum is entirely built on the growing connection between these two characters.  That's an incredibly hard needle to thread without the script seeming directionless.  Yet, when you want the film, that deceptively appears to be accomplished with no effort at all.

And then the movie breaks our heart.

Augustus reveals that his cancer has returned in an aggressive way. We've spent so much of the film steeling ourselves for Hazel's condition to get worse that this is a gut punch we don't see coming. One of the harder things to see is how this robs Augustus of his breezy spirit.  Hazel clearly has kept a lot of her insecurities about death inside for a while, but in a weird way, she seemed to have accepted it.  She might not be at peace with the idea, but she's not kidding herself that this is going to end any way but her death.

Augustus, on the other hand, had faced that moment and thought he beat it.  It took his leg, but he clearly expected that the be the price he had to pay.  You get the sense that death had become an abstraction for him in a way that it no longer was for Hazel.  When he crashes, he crashes hard.  A voiceover from Hazel says that she wishes she could say that his condition didn't rob him of his smile or his sense of humor, but that that would be a lie.  Her delivery of that line says more than three scenes of Augustus lashing out in self-pity could.

Seeing him broken like this hurts us too. He's the guy who made us smile in the first act, the guy we wanted to see get Hazel out of her shell.  There's a profound unfairness to the fact that all of that means nothing - the cancer's going to get him too.

I like that the movie doesn't give us a death scene.  We're not there at his final moments.   In fact, once the film establishes his decline, we seem to spend more time on his "good days" than his bad ones.  I think that's what makes it such a gut punch when Hazel's voiceover reveals he's gone. There's no catharsis granted by seeing him slip away while totally at peace. We don't get to say goodbye. He's there, and then he's gone.  All that's left is to watch Hazel devastated by her own grief.

This isn't cheap grief-porn.  Audiences don't leave THE FAULT IN OUR STARS with red, swollen eyes because of some hack manipulation.  We cry because for two hours, Augustus Waters and Hazel were our friends. They were real. And then something bad happened to them.  First we had to deal with how it changed them, and then we had to deal with how it took them.

This is a story about love and about appreciating life. It's a story about growing up and dealing with all that entails.  But most of all, it's a story about Hazel and Augustus.

And it's most definitely not "a story about cancer." It's so much more than that.

See Joshua Caldwell's $6,000 feature film LAYOVER!

Those of you in Los Angeles tonight should try to catch the LA premiere of friend-of-the-blog Joshua Caldwell's film LAYOVER.  The film is screening in competition as part of Dances With Films, following a successful premiere last week at the Seattle International Film Festival.

Caldwell shot the entire feature for a budget of $6,000, making use of a borrowed camera and stolen shots.  He also wrote a fantastic post about the whole experience on the site No Film School. It's something everyone dreaming of making an indie film should read. An excerpt:


Write Set Pieces that Can Be Accomplished on a Budget

If you know how to pull it off for no money, you can allow for a few scenes that look expensive but were actually the cheapest scenes we shot. There’s a trick, however, to making some of those set pieces scenes work: don’t write any dialogue or require any performance from your actors.

The reason for this is while you might have a really expensive looking scene, you may not be allowed more than one take. These are scenes you shoot guerilla style. Here’s an example:

There’s a scene in the film where our main character Simone meets up with a friend and they go to a club in Hollywood. The club is packed, it’s busy, it’s fun, colorful and dark and our editor, Will Torbett edited the hell out of it. Feels like we owned that club.

But we didn’t. We got permission to be there with our camera and film but nothing else. We couldn’t control the lights; we couldn’t control the crowds or anything else. But I knew that would be the case (because we didn’t have the money to shut the place down) so I wrote a scene that didn’t require any dialogue (dialogue requires multiple takes) and only had specific piece of action to be filmed (Simone seeing her friend). The rest was just girls dancing and having fun.

BUT that was also the point of the scene. For Simone, this is the point in the movie where she starts to let go and have fun. So it became the perfect character-based set piece and it really increases the production value of the film.

SlashFilm also conducted a video interview with Josh that you can find below:



The film screens tonight at 9:30pm at the TCL Chinese Theatres.  Tickets are available here. 

Over on his own site, Josh talks about his Indiegogo campaign to raise money to film the remaining two films in what he sees as "The LAX Trilogy."

"How are submissions to agents for their clients handled?"

 Blaine asks:

I have a question on script length when it’s NOT for a spec submission.

I totally understand why 120 pages is the barometer for submission of spec scripts.

Totally understand time is money.

I can write most of my screenplays to 120 comfortably.

However, in this particular case…. I have written and am now producing  a feature which I am directing.  (Based on a best-selling novel)

The script is 165 pages.

It’s a drama in the vein of THE ENGLISH PATIENT, OUT OF AFRICA….

I am confident of bringing the film at 160 minutes.

OUT OF AFRICA and THE ENGLISH PATIENT both run at  161 and 162 respectively.

Its fiction based on true events and the first time that this story has ever been told on screen.

A love story set against the backdrop of a civil war. This war was and is very close to the hearts of many. Many lives lost, many have been effected and continue to be so.

The script has a good pace (I feel);  the pace is quicker than the two I referred to.

The current situ is we are well on the way to putting the funding plan together , sales estimates etc… so WE are comfortable with the length and funding BUT

In the next few weeks the Script will be going out to Agents in LA as part of the packing campaign.

THE QUESTION:  I wondered if you had any insight or thoughts into how the Agents (of their readers) handle the script length issue? Given they are reading it from the perspective of its appeal to the Talent they represent?

My experience is that when you submit to an agency, your script will be read by the same readers who receive all the general submissions.  Really, when you submit anywhere, unless you have an extremely strong personal connection with the executive you're submitting to, expect that the script will be read by the usual "first filters."

Though the coverage will likely address the viability of the script as a project for that actor specifically, it's also likely to give a broad overview of the entire script's virtues and sins.  The reasons for this are probably obvious - even if there's a great role for an actor in the project, if the rest of the script is a dog, that agent is probably not going to want their client committed to it.

Another reason for the coverage to focus on the entire script in general is that this particular coverage will go into the company-wide database.  At some point, should the script be submitted for any other reason in the future, that old coverage will be called up.  Agency coverage lives FOREVER.  If you resubmit the exact same draft, the script will probably not be re-covered.  If you submit a revised draft, it's possible the script will be sent back to the original reader (if available) so that they can do comparison coverage and note if anything has changed from the previous draft.

You might try to get around this by changing the title of the script, but I can assure you that the people working in most story departments are sharp enough to pull up previous submissions by the same writer and give them a quick check to see if the characters and setting are similar to any of those earlier drafts.  More than once I got a script that the story department correctly flagged as a resubmission when the writer was attempting to make it look like a new script. 

There was also one time where the writer successfully fooled duped the people screening the scripts only to have the bad luck for the original reader (me) to grab the new version by sheer luck of the draw.  Within about three pages I recognized the script, which not only had been retitled, but also had several of the character names changed.  Also, the writer used a different permutation of their own name.  The best part? The rest of the script was about 95% the same.  (And pretty bad, so I didn't feel too sorry for him that his little stunt didn't work.)

So with all that in mind, the script length issue becomes somewhat irrelevant. They either like it or they don't.  The length itself won't be a problem as long as every page is compelling.  That said, always make sure that when you're submitting a long script (or any script, really) that there's not an ounce of fat in it.  If it's really good, the worst that'll probably happen is that the reader will note that perhaps future drafts could find a way to bring the length down.

"Black List Live" to hold live reading of 2013 Black List Screenplay

I've spoken before of the virtues of holding a live reading of your screenplay.  There's a lot you can learn from hearing actors speak your dialogue outloud and frankly, it's just plain fun.  Casting table reads of my own specs is one of my favorite things to do, actually.

That's why I'm so excited about the latest Black List announcement regarding a live reading of the 2013 Black List script "1969: A Space Odyssey, Or How Kubrick Learned to Stop Worrying and Land on the Moon"  by Stepheny Folsom.  I've reproduced the press release below along with links to purchase tickets.

Jason Reitman has held some rather famous table reads of script from acclaimed films, but to my knowledge, this is the first time something so public has been tried for an unproduced script.  It'll be interesting to see if this sparks renewed interest in Folsom's screenplay.  Hopefully, this even will be enough of a success that it can encourage future readings of other well-regarded but unproduced screenplays.

PRESS RELEASE
 
Los Angeles (May 30, 2014) - This morning via Twitter, The Black List announced the partial cast for their first Black List Live! event on June 14, 2014 at the Los Angeles Theatre. Black List Live! will present a live table read of Stephany Folsom’s 2013 Black List script “1969: A Space Odyssey, Or How Kubrick Learned to Stop Worrying and Land on the Moon.” Folsom will also be directing the read. Truly a one-time only event, the event will not be filmed or livestreamed.

“1969: A Space Odyssey” is the story of a White House Public Affairs assistant (Kathryn Hahn - Bad Words, Parks and Recreation) who hires Stanley Kubrick (Jared Harris - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Sherlock Holmes 2, Mad Men), to fake the moon landing just in case of technical issues during the now world famous one small step. Thomas Sadoski (The Newsroom) plays the role of legendary NASA Public Affairs administrator Julian Scheer and Shannon Woodward (Raising Hope, The Riches) has joined the cast as Stanley Kubrick’s assistant, Kara Downs.

Black List co-founder Franklin Leonard says, “our mission with the Black List has always been celebrating great screenwriting and the writers who do it, and presenting this script to an audience with actors like Kathryn, Jared, Thomas, and Shannon gives us an extraordinary opportunity to continue that mission in a very exciting way. Get your tickets now. It’s going to be a hell of a night.”

The event takes place downtown at the historic Los Angeles Theatre on Broadway, a hidden gem rarely open to the public. Modeled after Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors, the French Baroque theatre first opened its doors in January 1931 for the premiere of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights.

A limited of tickets are available for $20 via the Los Angeles Film Festival - get them now!

Once sold out, full price tickets are available online for $40.

Black List Live! presents "1969: A Space Odyssey"
Saturday, June 14, 2014
7:00pm doors (cash bar), 8:00pm

The Los Angeles Theatre
615 S Broadway,
Los Angeles, CA 90014

A limited edition movie poster designed by Fernando Reza and signed by the cast will be available for sale in the lobby of the theater before the show.

X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST - Making continuity accessible to new viewers through character

Here is possibly the most important thing you can know about X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST - my wife's only exposure to the X-MEN at all is a viewing of about half of FIRST CLASS and she really loved the film.  For a story that spans two incarnations of the franchise and touches on storylines that encompass not only the original three films but the WOLVERINE spinoff and the FIRST CLASS prequel, it's nothing short of a miracle that the film works almost as well for the uninitiated as it does for the faithful.

(HOW uninitiated was my wife? Afterwards, she said that when the film started, she was surprised to discover that "Captain Picard" was in this and then remarked how cool it was that Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen were cast "as the older versions" considering how notable and adorable their real-life friendship is.  So anyone telling you that someone can't walk into this movie cold and understand it really isn't giving the average viewer much credit.)

Before we saw the film, I expressed concern to my wife that she might be a little lost.  She brushed that off, saying, "They always make these movies so you can follow along even if you've never seen the others."  In an ideal world, she'd be right but many a franchise has come undone when its focus becomes too insular. Actually, I can even envision another version of this film that ends up being total "continuity porn" with the references to Trask from X2 and WOLVERINE, Jean Gray's death in X3, and many other grace notes in the epilogue.

By the way, massive spoilers follow, so steer clear until you've seen the film...

Everything one needs to appreciate DAYS OF FUTURE PAST is contained within the text of the film itself.  That means that the film carries the burden of not just the history I've alluded to, but even further connections, all of which must somehow be incorporated into the film as exposition without feeling like exposition.

We begin a few years in the future, where mutants wage a war against futuristic Sentinels who are capable of adapting and overpowering any mutant attack.  It's a devastating post-apocalyptic time, with only a few surviving mutants that include Professor Charles Xavier, Storm, Wolverine, Kitty Pryde and (surprisingly allied with our heroes) Magneto.  The war is all but lost, but Xavier and Magneto have hatched a plan to use Kitty Pryde's powers to send Wolverine's mind back in time 50 years into his old body.  There he'll have a chance at stopping this war before it starts.

One of my few issues with the film is how Kitty suddenly has the power to project minds back in time.  This ability is new to this version on film and the movie doesn't really dwell on how she's able to do this.  In any event, she's able to project Logan/Wolverine back, but the catch is that they have to stay alive long enough in their present for him to complete his mission.  If the Sentinels find them and kill them all, future Logan's mind will die and 70s Logan will wake up with no idea what he's been up to.  This neatly establishes some urgency and a ticking clock

In 1973, Logan needs to convinces a broken and reluctant Charles to rejoin the fray so he can stop Mystique from assassinating Bolivar Trask, the head of Trask Industries and the man who designed the Sentinels in the hopes of convincing the U.S. Government to purchase them as weapons against the mutant population.  In the original history, Mystique's mission has unexpected results.  She kills Trask, but is taken prisoner herself and experimented on. With access to her shapeshifter DNA, scientists are eventually able to develop that ability as a feature in later versions of the Sentinels, allowing them to counter any mutant attack with ease.

Of course it's not that easy.  Not only is the younger Charles a broken recluse, but he's also sacrificed his mental powers as a side effect of the drug that lets him defeat his paralysis.  And even once Wolverine gets him in the game, they have to collect the younger Magneto... who's currently held in a prison 100 feet below the center of the Pentagon.

The solution to breaking a man out of the most heavily fortified prison known to exist turns out to be a speedster named Quicksilver.  The prison break might be one of the most inventive set pieces in any of the X-MEN films and I say that as someone who was blown away by several of the action scenes in X2.  There are some clever moments where we experience things along with Quicksilver, who's moving so fast that everything around him appears to be standing still.  (This is also doubly amusing to anyone who remembers that the internet reaction to the first Quicksilver still and the Carl's Jr. commercial was certainty that the character would ruin the film.)

If that set-piece is a fun moment of levity, several others are squeezed for maximum tension, particularly the third act set-piece that involves Magneto lifting up a baseball stadium and dropping it around the White House while manipulating Sentinels to do his bidding.  The eyes of the world are watching as President Nixon is about to announce the Sentinel program and by this point Charles, Logan and Beast know that Mystique is going to make another attempt on Trask's life (following the failure of the attempt that succeeded in the original history)  If Mystique kills Trask - and possibly the President for authorizing the program, all it will do is inflame mutant/human tensions and give humans even more reason to fear the mutants.

This is brilliantly cross-cut with what's happening concurrently in the future timeframe, as the Sentinels have found the citadel where our last few heroes are hiding out.  The mutants need to make one last stand in order to buy Wolverine enough time to secure a better future.

In a particularly elegant bit of writing, the climax comes down not so much to whose powers are stronger or who can hit harder. No, the axis of the future revolves around Mystique's choice.  Can she choose the path Charles advocates?  Or will she surrender to the desire for revenge and justice that fueled her initial attempt and now has only become stronger?  Magneto's involvement raises the stakes even higher, but even if he's dealt with, the most critical moment in the film hinges on the action she'll take with the eyes of the world on her.  Charles can try to appeal to her soul, but in the end, she defines mutant/human relations forever with her decision.

Charles gets a fair amount of character development as this younger version is a far cry from the serene wise man of the first three films and the mentor/older brother figure of FIRST CLASS.  Seeing the professor in this new circumstance also forces Logan into a bit of a role reversal.  Suddenly he's the seasoned veteran who has to help his former mentor find himself.  Magento is largely the same man he always is, but the script and Michael Fassbender give the character a lot of dimension.  He might not undergo much change, but this isn't a film that treats it's human characters like chess pieces to be moved through action beats.

And then there's the ending.  I've made no secret of my feeling that X3: THE LAST STAND is possibly one of the worst comic book movies ever made.  Recently I've seen some rumblings on the internet from people who claim that it only takes a lot of heat because people think it's fashionable to hate its director Brett Ratner.  I still contend that it's an awful film that makes horrible choices with its characters and then doesn't even have the balls to stand by those choices, immediately introducing the trapdoors that can undo them. (Except for the really terrible deaths of Scott Summers and Jean Grey.)  The reset button is so primed by the end of that film that it renders most of the events of the movie utterly pointless and a waste of time.

The ending of this film seems like an apology of sorts for X3, as all the timeline shenanigans lead Logan to wake up in a reconfigured present where the Sentinel war never happened.  As he wanders the halls of Xavier's School for the Gifted, he sees several of his old friends, alive and happy: Rogue, Iceman, Kitty.  And then, in a doorway, he sees her... Jean Grey, the woman he loved and killed.

Of course, this is no longer THAT Jean Grey.  The implication is that X3 never happened (and probably not her death in X2 either.)  Then, as Logan is still reeling from this return, an old rival steps into the reunion - Scott Summers.  And why wouldn't he be? If Jean never went bad, then she certainly never would have killed him.  If this really is the last time we see the cast that launched this franchise 14 years ago, it's hard to think of a better way to tie things up than with the promise that all of these X-MEN are still alive, still out there, and are living on just as they have in the comics.

The amazing thing is how much impact this sequence has for someone who didn't see the earlier X-MEN films.  There's an earlier exchange between Wolverine and the younger Beast where Logan mentions that Beast isn't still alive in his future (having died off-screen between X3 and this film.) Thus, the brief cameo of the older Beast in the rebooted timeline allowed my wife to get that "aw, Logan saved his friend."

The Jean Grey resurrection was easily appreciated via a flashback to Logan having to kill her, which is slid into the film within a scene where Logan urges the younger Charles to look into his mind.  In that scene, the flashback's apparent purpose is to show us all the horror Logan has lived through as a way of leading up to how Logan has gained much from his friendship with the older Xavier.  It's not bald exposition - it's organic to the scene in the moment, even as it sets up a more impactful payoff later.

Am I saying that that wonderful final sequence played as emotionally for my wife as it did for someone like me?  No, I doubt it hit quite THAT hard.  But it certainly works as a denouement to aspects of this film itself.  For that reason, it transcends just being a convenient way to ignore unpopular sequels and their elements.  

X3's teased resets were infuriating because they were unearned emotionally.  DAYS OF FUTURE PAST makes the reset a feature, not a bug, and the justified payoff of everything the film builds to. This isn't just a great comic book movie, it might just be the best X-MEN movie yet.