The X-Men franchise was one of the first Superhero franchises to begin back in 2000 and it was surely the first Superhero team-up movie. All those years, it laid grounds for the Avengers to eventually come in, and it also gave us the best version of the clawed mutant that we have grown to love over the years, Wolverine. Even though the entire plot of the X-Men movies is now getting fatigued, it still managed to bring out some great movies in the name of X-Men: First Class and X-Men: Days of Future Past.
First Class may or may not be the best movie in the entire franchise, but we have to admit that Days of Future Past was the biggest event which was desperately needed by the franchise. The original X-Men trilogy was great even though the third movie completely shit the bed and ended what the first two movies had managed to build. That was followed by a Wolverine Origins movie which also went down the same rode that The Last Stand did.
Things needed to be brought back on track with the prequels and X-Men: First Class did exactly that. It gave us the very perfect origin story of the X-Men focussing on how the war between mutants and the humans really started. Then came in X-Men: Days of Future Past. The movie was a sequel to the original trilogy, and along with that, it was a prequel as well. Not only did it fix the franchise by completely erasing the bad movies, preventing them from ever happening, it set the path for a new beginning.
It set the ways for new stories to take place in the franchise even though X-Men Apocalypse took the franchise to similar standards that The Last Stand set. Still Brian Singer is a respected Director who is responsible for the greatness of this franchise even though he may also be the culprit responsible for Apocalypse. He brought us the first two X-Men movies and then came in and fixed everything with Days of Future Past. So, if we just ignore the last movie, he surely is the great Director we have known him as.
Days of Future Past is literal to its title and the movie brought the biggest Superhero ensemble on the big screen even before the Avengers did that. Wolverine was at the centre of it all but he was accompanied by 3 big guns established in X-Men: First Class. Charles was always the righteous Mutant in this story while Eric always turned out to be the villain we have known him to be.
But the big twist came at the very end of the movie where Mystique suddenly had a change of heart that people would not have expected to see. In the original trilogy, we saw her to be the villain who always supported Eric, but in the prequel, we saw her turn into an anti-hero (because Jennifer Lawrence was involved) and that change was for the good of everyone.
Even though she did the right thing at the end, we still got to see her in the face of William Stryker when Wolverine was taken out of the waters. She stood in as William Stryker and that is what confused most of the audiences. Well, that actually turned out to be a last minute addition made by Bryan Singer, who chose to turn the eyes of William Stryker yellow to suggest it was Mystique who was there to save Wolverine.
He explained this last minute addition on his Instagram post saying:
“I caught your question on #reddit I have to be honest, the idea to have #stryker ‘s eyes turn yellow was added to the film very close to its completion. However I ended up liking it because it showed #mystique ‘s path of secretly helping mutants. In that case #wolverine It is a path that continues into #xmenapocalypse”
Singer did set up a great subplot for X-Men: Apocalypse to follow, but it did not necessarily go on that path. By what Singer is saying here, it suggests that Mystique was trying to save Wolverine, but we still got to see Stryker back in Apocalypse having accomplished the Weapon X program once again in the X-Men Timeline. Still, an explanation from the director himself does help the cause of Days of Future Past.
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