One of the things that is always interesting when a film changes directors or writers or any key member of a creative team is seeing how much of the original plan for the film stays intact. Back when Matthew Vaughn was set to make the sequel to his own “X-Men: First Class,” he seemed more than happy to reveal certain details and ideas about how he’d approach the film.
In particular, he talked about opening the movie with the assassination of JFK, then revealing how Magneto would be revealed to be the killer, driven by a fury that Kennedy took credit for the Cuban Missile Crisis solution, pretending mutants had no part in it at all. Our interview about his plans was pretty widely quoted at the time, and when he left the film, I assumed they pretty much scuttled Vaughn’s plans completely.
After all, he wasn’t planning to do “X-Men: Days Of Future Past” at the time. That idea came after he departed the film, and we’ve heard now that the new film is set in 1973, which would seem to leave the JFK thing out completely.
There’s a new bit of video online today that suggests that even if the idea didn’t make it into the finished film, it was not discarded completely. The video leads to a new website, and it’s a really smart bit of world-building that explains how JFK’s death kicked off a decade of bloody mistrust between humans and mutants. It sounds like Azazel (Jason Flemyng) is long dead, killed in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis incident, and I’m curious to see how much of this is actually dealt with in the new film directly.
The website suggests that Magneto may not be guilty, though. If JFK was really pro-mutant, why would Magneto have killed him? And how would Magneto have been in cahoots with Lee Harvey Oswald? Or anyone else, for that matter? Well, if the rest of the website is to be believed, Mystique may have played a role in things as well, but not as herself. It actually seems like she and Erik may have had a parting of the ways, and she may be a more destructive force than he is at this point, a surprising development.
It’s a really well-built website, and I guess I’m impressed enough with how they put it together that it would never have occurred to me to be upset or offended. I’m more curious to see how they carry these narrative threads over to the new movie, and if they have built “Days Of Future Past” with the same clever attention to detail. If so, it’s exciting. There is nothing worse than when viral marketers are more inventive than the filmmakers, and here’s hoping it won’t be the case here.
What’s apparent is that the world described by “The Bent Bullet” website is not the world we’ve already seen play out in the “X-Men” films so far.
Things are going be very, very hard for mutants when “X-Men: Days Of Future Past” arrives in theaters on May 25, 2014.