X-Men: Days of Future Past

I’ve been trying to control you ever since the day we met... and look where that’s got us. Everything that happens now is in your hands. I have faith in you, Raven.

—Charles Xavier to his adoptive sister Raven, aka Mystique

X-Men: Days of Future Past is a 2014 superhero film directed by Bryan Singer, adapting one of the most iconic and beloved storylines of the original X-Men comics.

In a dystopian future where Sentinel robots have been created to identify and hunt down mutants, the surviving X-Men hide in a remote Chinese temple. Their only hope is Time Travel to the past, to avert Mystique's assassination of Bolivar Trask (played by Peter Dinklage) in 1973, which resulted in the creation of the Sentinels who have been exterminating all mutants. Wolverine volunteers for the dangerous mission and wakes up in his younger body decades earlier.

Xavier initially refuses to help Wolverine, remembering his rude refusal in the previous movie, but eventually accepts at the prospect of meeting his adoptive sister Raven again.

With the help of newly recruited mutant Peter Maximoff, Wolverine and Professor X free an imprisoned Magneto from his plastic prison under the Pentagon, only for Magneto to go his own way as Erik thinks her powers makes her an everlasting risk for the existence of mutant kind, leaving Xavier, Logan and Hank McCoy to try to thwart Mystique while also not trying to kill her.

Considered one of the best X-Men films of all time, behind Logan, X-Men: Days of Future Past is also the only X-Men film to get an Academy Award nomination (for Best Visual Effects). It was followed by X-Men: Apocalypse in 2016 and Dark Phoenix in 2019.

Produced by 20th Century Fox, Marvel Entertainment, Bad Hat Harry, The Donners' Company, Genre Films, TSG Entertainment. Distributed by 20th Century Fox.

Tropes used in X-Men: Days of Future Past include:

Adaptational Badass:
- Quicksilver is nowhere as fast in the comics, and people with average vision can see he is just running instead of wondering if he is teleporting.
- The Sentinels didn't have adaptive super-powers in the comics, though they had plenty of weaponry that compensated for it.
Adaptational Villainy: Trask never realizes his prejudice towards mutants and helps them against the Sentinels like in the comics, though that may be explained by the fact he dies much earlier in the timeline. It's unclear at what happens in the new future, as the movie only shows the future of the X-Men.
Alternate Timeline: The finale of the film resulted in this.
Bad Future: The present-day scenes are set in this future, where most of mankind has been extinct and chances of victory are literally zero, so the best the remaining mutants can do is try to change the past, so it never comes to pass.
Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: John F. Kennedy was apparently a mutant according with Erik. Xavier doesn't believe on it, however.
Big Bad: Bolivar Trask, the man who created the Sentinels. He is long dead in the future, but without him the robots would never be created.
Blatant Lies: Xavier's lies to distract guards on the Pentagon are so bad that Logan decides to use violence instead of waiting to see if they work.
Blood Knight: Peter is convinced by the heroes to join them just because he gets an opportunity to invade the Pentagon, that is a pretty big challenge to a thief.
Broken Masquerade: Mutants' existence is revealed to a large world as Mystique jumps out of a window to escape Erik's assassination attempt.
Bullet Time: The Quicksilver scene at the kitchen uses this to depict his speed.
Cyborg: Aside of creating killer robots, Trask also has projects on creating mechanical limbs, allowing for paraplegics to walk.
Darker and Edgier: The Bad Future scenes have helped give this film a drearier tone.
Drama-Preserving Handicap:
- Xavier can't use his powers because of his treatment against his wounds on the vertebral column. As a result, he can't use his powers to resolve most problems.
- Wolverine gets PTSD of seeing a young Stryker being tasered seconds before Magneto decides it's better to kill Mystique than risk Raven ever being captured by humans who will use her power to make Sentinels more powerful, preventing Logan of stopping him.
Enemy Mine: Trask's argument for the Sentinels is that there is no bigger geopolitical threat to communists and capitalists than the mutants, and that they should team up, and uses his robots as weapons on this war.
Heel Realization: Of all people, Nixon has one at the climax after Mystique saves him, as he realizes he needs mutants as allies, not enemies, and orders Trask to be arrested.
Heroic Bastard: Peter was born out of wedlock. He comments that his mother knew a dude with the exact same powers as Magneto. Erik weakly dodges the question.
Hijacked by Ganon: Magneto takes control of the prototype Sentinels to kill Richard Nixon on the third act.
Historical In-Joke: Apparently the eighteen minutes missing of Nixon's secret videotapes are conversations he had with Trask about mutants.
Honey Trap: As is typical of Mystique, she uses her human form to seduce a Vietnamese official so she can infiltrate a peace conference to kill Trask.
In Spite of a Nail: As Logan comments, the temporal changes he caused still didn't stop him, Jean and Cyclops of forming a Love Triangle.
It's All About Me: One of Nixon's few lines is saying he doesn't care who Trask hurts, as long it's not him.
Killer Robot: The Sentinels, machines built to hunt mutants.
Logo Joke: At the very end of the 20th Century Fox logo, the X-Men leitmotif was heard.
Meanwhile in the Future: The past and future segments are presented as though they are happening in parallel.
Motor Mouth: Quicksilver talks very fast, sometimes having to slow down himself so he can be understood.
Noodle Incident: Logan met Quicksilver before time-traveling. He mentions he wasn't so young, implying he was born earlier in the original timeline.
Precision F-Strike:
- Charles Xavier remembers when Logan swore at him, but instead of saying "Go fuck yourself" like in the previous film, Charles says "Fuck off".
- The Rogue Cut has a second one from Richard Nixon.
Re Cut: The film has a 2015 extended edition called the Rogue Cut where Anna Paquin's Rogue is more prominent in the film.
Refuge in Audacity: Xavier infiltrates a government event by pretending to be a war veteran.
Refusal of the Call: Xavier is so mentally broken by the death and/or imprisonment of his first-class students that he angrily shuns Logan away. It is eventually subverted after some more bit of convincing.
Right for the Wrong Reasons: Trask is right about mankind going towards an era of everlasting peace by hunting down mutants. But that is because his Sentinels will terminate most of mankind, so the few human survivors will have no reasons to wage war.
Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The main storyline of the film.
The Stinger: There is a teaser for X-Men: Apocalypse where a young En Sabah Nur is making the pyramids with his Four Horsemen watching.
Take a Third Option: Seeing Magneto and Xavier stuck on a deadlock about using Magneto's powers against human guards, Quicksilver instead uses his powers to get rid of them non-fatally, as Xavier wanted.
Thou Shalt Not Kill: Xavier is still very attached to this rule, and considering the event that triggered the Bad Future was Mystique killing Trask, he feels even more justified than before.
Time Travel: Well, yeah.
Turned Against Their Masters: The Sentinels began by terminating mutants but eventually changed their own orders to terminate any carrier of the X-factor, that turned out to be a majority of mankind.
Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
- As Charles points out, Magneto's violent ideology leads to the Sentinels wiping out mutants in the future because Mystique followed his principles to a deadly end.
- Trask didn't think his X-factor detector would also detect passive carriers, that results in not only mutants but normal humans also being terminated in the future.
Utopia Justifies the Means: Trask believes hunting down mutants will lead mankind to everlasting peace in face of Stryker's arguments that he just a hater.
Wham! Shot: Jean, alive and well in 2023. It turned out Logan not only saved the mutant race and Xavier's students, but the whiplash effect of Mystique not killing Trask saves her of turning into Dark Phoenix.
X Meets Y: In probably one of the weirdest cases of this trope, it's Days of Future Past (the comic) meets Terminator 2. The over-arching plot of killer robots that turn on mankind after they create them as military weapons to terminate their enemies is from the comic, and it precedes Terminator. The specific plot thread involving someone with exoskeleton made of metal being sent in the past to try to stop a shapeshifter of shaping the future in a horrible way is from the James Cameron movie.