This movie gets off to a weird but interesting start, with cool but confusing action scenes played out by low quality young actors.
As the movie continues, the confusing weirdness continues along with lots of hot-headed drama and a bit of cool action, right through till the end. It’s too drama heavy for my taste, but still it’s not a bad movie – I’d rate it Bang Average along with all the other X-Men and Wolverine movies to date since they all have a similar mix of pros & cons. Just enough good stuff to pique our interest, but not enough to thoroughly entertain and make it frequently rewatchable. It’s worth watching as part of a marathon of viewing all the X-Men movies in order of release date, but I’d avoid watching it as a standalone movie on its own merit outside of the wider saga since it provides valuable context for understanding what remains a weird & unclear movie even with that context.
Unlike previous X-Men and Wolverine movies, this one features a good amount of screentime from both the younger generation and the older generation of Professor X and Magneto, although the younger generation gets a slightly priority here.
Hugh Jackman plays Logan / Wolverine as usual. James McAvoy plays the younger Professor X, and Patrick Stewart plays the older Professor X. Michael Fassbender plays the younger Magneto, and Ian McKellen plays the older Magneto. Jennifer Lawrence plays Mystique who has a very vital role in this movie.
Peter Dinklage plays arguably the main antagonist, Dr Trask, although the real enemies to the X-Men are the Sentinels he creates to hunt down and kill all mutants, and movie revolves more around the team stopping Mystique from killing him since it’s his death that gets his Sentinel program funded so Wolverine went back in time to stop her from killing him in order to prevent the extinction of all X-Men and mutants in the future.
Halle Berry gets a little screentime as Storm, and Famke Janssen gets even less screentime as Jean Grey. Nicholas Hoult gets a fair amount of screentime as Beast, although his character was not particularly vital to the plot. There were a few other characters from the usual squad too, but the important core characters have already been mentioned.
The movie ends on a happy note, with disaster averted and everyone alive – even Jean Grey and Scott Summers who were both killed off in previous movies. Then at the end of the closing credits there was what seemed to be a little teaser scene – indeed it was a sneak preview of X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) and it looks quite captivating.