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.
Once you have seen it
Watch Stewart and McAvoy share a scene as one man. (performance)
Singer puts the older and younger Xavier in the same room and shoots it plainly, with no effect at all. The old man is the young man's future. The young man is the old man's memory.
Payoff: Two actors hold one person between them, and the scene works because the camera declines to help them. In the reading: hyalosign / crystal-image. The reading calls this a crystal: actual and possible changing places until you can no longer sort which one is which.
Follow the two presents running side by side at the close. (cutting)
Ottman cuts the siege on the future refuge against the decision at the public event in 1973. Both cannot stand. You watch the siege happen while it is in the process of being unhappened.
Payoff: Parallel cutting usually brings two lines together. Here it holds two versions of what will have been.
Track what the film quietly undoes from earlier X-Men movies. (structure)
Nothing on screen announces that the continuity from The Last Stand and the spinoffs is being dissolved. The film puts your memory of six previous pictures into the load-bearing position.
Payoff: The franchise's own past becomes dramatic material, and erasing it is allowed to work as a climax.
Listen for cues carried over from the first two films. (sound)
John Ottman edited and scored this, so the music and the cut were shaped together. He reworks his own material from 2000 and 2003 across both timelines.
Payoff: The score bridges the eras before the plot does, and the reunion is audible before it is ever narrated.
Carry this in: Two eras, one decision. Watch which people are allowed to act and which can only hold a room.