Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch X-Men: Days of Future Past
2014 · Bryan Singer · X-Men: Days of Future Past on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice the color change every time the film switches era. (light)
Newton Thomas Sigel shoots the future in cold desaturated grays and blues, all ash and shadow. The 1973 material runs warm, with period browns and wood. You always know where you are.
Payoff: One glance at the palette places you in time, which lets the film cut between eras without explaining itself.
Watch the kitchen scene where the bullets hang still. (cutting)
The cameras reportedly ran at several thousand frames a second. Quicksilver strolls through suspended chaos, moving a fist here and a trajectory there, while a period pop record plays at normal speed.
Payoff: Every ordinary moment becomes a composed pose, and he gets to arrange them by hand before time restarts. In the reading: privileged-instants. The reading calls these privileged instants: decisive poses, the kind painting froze, here pulled out of continuous motion and rearranged.
Watch what the Sentinels do when a mutant attacks them. (setting)
Their armor reads the power used against them and becomes it. Whatever you throw comes back at you. The future X-Men spend their scenes holding a room rather than winning anything.
Payoff: You cannot fight a thing that turns into your own strength, so the future half is people with nothing to do. In the reading: crisis-of-the-action-image. The reading calls this the crisis of the action-image: characters who see their situation perfectly and have no adequate act available.
Notice how plain the camera gets in the talking scenes. (camera)
Sigel shoots the Xavier and Magneto confrontations with clean classical coverage: faces, eyelines, no restlessness. The action gets more movement, but legibility comes first everywhere in the film.
Payoff: The style steps back so the actors carry the scenes, which is why the quiet confrontations hold against the spectacle.
Watch McAvoy play a telepath who will not listen. (performance)
Xavier in 1973 is on a drug that gives him his legs and takes his powers. McAvoy plays him closed, angry and tired. Fassbender stays certain, which makes the contrast do the work.
Payoff: The film's problem is a man who cut down his own perception to survive it, and has to be made to look again.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Two eras, one decision. Watch which people are allowed to act and which can only hold a room.