Trailer Tuesday: X-Men - Days of Future Past

If you thought Christopher Nolan's sprawling Batman trilogy and Joss Whedon's assembling of The Avengers were daunting cinematic challenges, wait until you see X-Men: Days of Future Past. If you can describe this sci-fi actioner with just one word, it has to be "Ambitious!"

Because seriously, if director Bryan Singer pulls this off, X-Men: Days of Future Past will be the most complex superhero film ever made, given its massive cast and time travelling plot... Because you know as soon as time travel is involved, logic migraines kick in.

Anyway, X-Men: Days of Future Past is loosely based on one of the most iconic of story arcs in X-Men comics history. In essence, the future is a dark war-torn place, with mutants hunted to extinction by deadly robots called Sentinels. The US government granted permission for the Sentinels to be made as a result of a high profile assassination of a political leader (let's assume in the movie's case it's President Richard Nixon). The last remaining X-Men - including Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart), Storm (Halle Berry), Rogue (Anna Paquin), Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), Colossus (Daniel Cudmore) and Kitty Pride (Ellen Page) - along with former enemy Magneto (Ian McKellen) - decide that the only way to stop this devastation from happening is to change history. To do this, Wolverine's (Hugh Jackman) consciousness must be transplanted into the body of his 1970s self so that he can convince a disgruntled, recently crippled Xavier (James McAvoy) and vengeful Magneto (Michael Fassbender) to stop the assassination.

Personally I suspect most of the film will be set in the past, with the majority of screen time going the way of the young mutants introduced in X-Men: First Class - while the cast of X-Men 1-3 will have little more than glorified cameos. Nicholas Hoult's Beast, Jennifer Lawrence's Mystique and Lucas Till's Havok are all returning, while fan favourite mutants joining the franchise for the first time include Bishop (Omar Sy) and Quicksilver (Evan Peters). Peter Dinklage, for the record, is the film's "kind-of" villain Trask, the inventor of the Sentinels.

I firmly believe that if anyone can pull it off the massive demands of X-Men: Days of Future Past, it's Singer. After all, he helmed 2000's original X-Men, which basically jump-started the 21st Century Cinematic Era of the Superhero, and his follow-up X2 is one of my top 5 superhero films of all time. Oh, and you all saw how shite X-Men 3: The Last Stand was without his involvement in any capacity (he was back producing and writing for 2011's First Class).

Here's holding thumbs that Singer is up for the challenge of wrangling Days of Future Past's vast scope. After all, there is the very real risk of the film ending up on our screens as an overstuffed, superficial mess that can best be described as "play spot the mutant standing pointlessly in the shot" - much like The Last Stand.

Out of interest, the new movie has been specifically shot for 3D.

X-Men: Days of Future Past opens in North America on 23 May 2014. The film is apparently set to open in South Africa almost 2 months later *sigh* on 18 July.