Using Kitty
Pryde’s powers, Wolverine’s consciousness will be sent back into his younger
self in the 1970s, where he’ll have to track down and help the First Class
versions of the characters in order to stop Trask. But that will be even harder
than it sounds, as in this era, the X-Men team is just as disparate, with
Professor Xavier (James McAvoy) and the rest either at odds or in a low ebb.
Can the younger versions of the mutants save their future?
Going back in
time to prevent the mutants’ annihilation in the future, Logan aka Wolverine,
Hank McCoy aka Beast and Charles Xavier/Prof. X employs the help of a young
hiding mutant named as Peter Maximoff who later will be known as Quicksilver to
bring Erik Lensherr aka Magneto out of the most secured prison built after
being accused in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Faster than the speed of
sound and light, this fast moving mercury marvel successfully led the young
Magneto out of prison to help mutants stop the Sentinel program and save both
human and mutantkind.
Quicksilver is
another key mutant character in the 1970s scenes. Quicksilver’s power, as his name suggests, is
his superhuman speed, which up until meeting the X-Men, he has employed for
petty theft and teenage mischief.
“Wolverine knows Quicksilver in the future,” says Singer. “But in the past, he’s a kleptomaniacal kid
with an attitude. The only way they can enlist Quicksilver’s help is to appeal
to his penchant for troublemaking, asking him if he’d like to break somebody
out of the Pentagon.”
Singer and
director of photography Newton Thomas Sigel used high-speed phantom cameras and
photo-sonic technology to film the Pentagon break-in and escape sequence, one
of the film’s most technically intricate and visually arresting scenes. The scene was shot at 3000 frames per second
with Quicksilver running along the walls in the Pentagon kitchen, parallel to
the ground. “We’ve never experienced this on film before,” says Singer.
The technology
required the use of enormous lights rigged above the set, each powered by about
40,000 watts. “The set was so brightly
lit, we had to wear sunglasses just to work on it,” Singer adds. “The actors had to close their eyes until the
moment they started shooting.”
It was also
important, according to screenwriter and producer Simon Kinberg, to continue
the First Class story without needing a direct connection. “We didn’t want it
to start or a month, or even a year after the last movie. We wanted to give it
a big breadth of time so that you would meet these characters in some ways for
the first time again, so we set the movie 10 years later than First Class ended
and in doing that, part of my responsibility as the writer was creating a
timeline so we can just give the actors a sense of who they've become and how
they got there over the span of the 10 years we haven't seen.”
Don’t blink –
Quicksilver will speed up in Philippine cinemas when “X-Men: Days of Future
Past” (3d) opensMay 21
nationwide from 20th Century Fox be distributed by Warner Bros.
