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"Is the future truly set?"

"I don't want your suffering. I DON'T WANT YOUR FUTURE!"
Charles Xavier

X-Men: Days of Future Past is a 2014 sci-fi superhero movie in the X-Men Film Series, adapting the Marvel Comics story of the same name. The seventh installment in the series, it is a sequel to X-Men: First Class, The Wolverine AND X-Men: The Last Stand as well as both sequel and prequel to the original X-Men Trilogy, re-combining the semi-tangled film universe into a single narrative. The film is directed by Bryan Singer, of X-Men and X2: X-Men United fame, with First Class director Matthew Vaughn serving as a producer. It is the first movie in the franchise to receive an Academy Award nomination (Best Visual Effects). An alternate version of the film with 17 minutes of additional footage was released on Blu-Ray/DVD in 2015 and subtitled The Rogue Cut.

In the year 2023, mutants have become an endangered species, hunted by the mechanical "Sentinels" of Trask Industries. With nowhere else to turn, Professor X and Magneto band together for a final desperate plan: using a particular mutant's Time Travel powers to send one of their own into the past, and stop the war between man and mutant before it ever begins.

    The cast includes: 

Followed by a 2016 sequel, X-Men: Apocalypse.


X-Men: Days of Future Past provides examples of:

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    Tropes # to C 
  • 20 Minutes into the Past: Half of this 2014 film takes place in 1973 thanks to Mental Time Travel.
  • The '70s: Part of the film takes place in 1973, complete with the Porn Stache, Richard Nixon, bell-bottoms and polyester. Gets an Establishing Shot in Wolverine's wake-up scene, with a lava lamp and a waterbed.
  • '70s Hair:
    • The younger Professor X still has a full head of hair, and sports a longer, hippie-style mane.
    • Mystique rocks some hairstyles of the time in her human form and in one scene, masquerades as a black woman with an enormous afro.
    • Quicksilver's glam mop upset many fans in promotional materials, but it fits in with the era perfectly.
    • Trask's hair helmet is very appropriate for the time period.
    • Wolverine still wears his muttonchops even in the future scenes.
  • Abled in the Adaptation: Hank invents a serum that Charles can take which allows him to regain his ability to walk at the cost of his powers.
  • Achilles in His Tent: 1973 Xavier gives up on his powers and his role as the leader of mutants, and refuses to cooperate with Wolverine; without his aid, the entire venture is impossible. He's got more justified reasons than in most examples of the trope.
  • Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene: There are plenty of emotional, character-driven moments (especially with the younger Xavier) in between the spectacular action sequences.
  • Action Girl:
    • Storm is the first strike against the Sentinels because of her weather powers.
    • Blink's powers make her extremely effective in fighting the Sentinels, both in taking them out herself and assisting the others in fighting them.
    • On a more meta level, Mystique is the only mutant back in the past who has been doing anything for the last few years. (Magneto was stuck in the Pentagon for a decade, and Xavier has been moping around the house since the start of The Vietnam War.) Even once the plot takes off, she's arguably the most active character.
  • Actor Allusion:
    • In the scene where Erik tries to kill Mystique with a bullet, his attempts to hit her with it are presented in slow motion, at one point curving the bullet around Charles' head.
    • When Mystique shapeshifts into an Army Colonel in Vietnam, the name on her uniform is "Sanders", whose best-known creation is KFC. The "K" stands for Kentucky - Jennifer Lawrence's birthstate.
    • Lampshaded by James McAvoy when talking about his character's '70s clothing in this interview.
      "Listen, I feel like I'm in The Last King of Scotland! I'm Nicholas Garrigan grown up! Ten years older. A 34-year-old Nicholas! Yeah, I like it."
      • In the aforementioned movie, it should be noted that McAvoy had portrayed a cocky, naïve, carefree, womanizing medical doctor who enjoys a good drink, and experiences a series of traumatic events that leaves the character with severe psychological and physical wounds.
    • In the Paris subway, a sign can be seen for "Victor Hugo Ave." Jackman appeared in Les Misérables (2012), based on Hugo's novel of the same name.
  • Adaptational Badass:
    • In the comics, the Sentinels are just Humongous Mecha, and mutants with strong powers note  usually take them down by the dozen. They are portrayed roughly as such in the 1973 portion of this movie as well. The future Sentinels, however, are a Composite Character with Nimrod, an advanced Sentinel that racked up a significant body count over the years in the comics. The difference is that there's dozens of them in the movie and Conservation of Ninjutsu is not in effect: with their ability to duplicate mutant powers to counter their opponents, they are so overwhelmingly powerful that any fight with them is considered outright hopeless.
    • Quicksilver is one of the fastest characters in the Marvel comics universe, but he has limitations on just how fast, and is generally well under the speed of sound. Hank mistakes him for a teleporter, and fans have noted that Peter's Super-Speed and power set (he's capable of redirecting bullets with ease and shattering glass by vibrating his hands) are closer to The Flash, who explicitly has a speed advantage over Quicksilver in inter-company crossover stories.
  • Adaptational Heroism: Mystique is given a very realistic and sympathetic motivation for her Start of Darkness moment, in contrast to her depiction in the comics. In fact, the film goes so far as to establish that prior to killing Bolivar Trask, she'd never taken a single life during one of her crimes. Additionally, she pulls a Heel–Face Turn and not only spares Trask, but rescues the president from Magneto during the climax.
  • Adaptational Protagonist: The protagonist of the original Days of Future Past comic is Kitty Pryde, however, it's changed to Wolverine for the movie. This is because Kitty was largely Out of Focus for the X-Men film series, so the plotline wouldn't make as much sense to wider audiences if it was starring her. She is still the catalyst for Time Travel in the movie.
  • Adaptational Villainy: While in the original comic book Bolivar Trask wasn't a good guy by any means, he did eventually come to realise that Mutants are not a threat to humanity and even performs a Heroic Sacrifice to stop the Sentinels. Neither of those happen in the movie.
  • Adaptational Wimp: A minor example; Magneto in the comics naturally possesses some natural resistance to telepathy, but this movie shows that he's completely vulnerable to Xavier's power if he doesn't wear the helmet.
  • Adaptation Expansion: The original comic book is a story of just 2 short issues. There is a Bad Future, Kitty Pryde is sent back in time to warn the X-Men to prevent a political assassination, which is stopped, Kitty returns to the future, the end. In its original form, it would be short even for an episode of an animated series. Everything in this movie which was not mentioned in that short premise is something new.
  • Adaptation Name Change:
    • Quicksilver's real name is changed from "Pietro Maximoff" to the more Americanized "Peter Maximoff." This is due to the fact that the film version of Quicksilver was raised in the U.S., while his comic counterpart grew up in Eastern Europe. A supplementary website, 25 Moments, still refers to him as Pietro and so does the Italian dub.
    • Colossus is more complicated. Originally he was Piotr Rasputin and the film changed this to Peter Rasputin. Then again, he's called Peter in the comics by most people anyway. "Peter" is the Anglicized version of their names in any case.
  • Adaptation Personality Change: Peter Maximoff is portrayed more positively and more negatively in comparison to the original source. In the comics, he is often an outright jerk (often intentionally), but in this film, he's more of a merry mischief-maker. He can easily flee on his own once the breakout goes bust, but instead, he goes out of his way to save Logan, Charles and Erik, even though he had already freed the latter from prison by technicality. Quicksilver is also clearly unimpressed (if amused) by the idea that he helped free the person suspected of killing JFK once he finds out, and is shown to be stunned and horrified by Magneto's "demonstration" in the climax. Comic book Quicksilver may be a world-class asshole and suffer from Heel–Face Revolving Door, but he is well-meaning at the core and can be counted on to do the right thing. Here, he's just a bored teenager with a kleptomaniac streak who doesn't really care about being a productive member of society, and who has to have the breakout sold to him as an opportunity to raise hell, as it's clear that he wouldn't have done it of his own volition otherwise.
  • Adapted Out: While they added a lot of characters (in the original story, only Magneto, Storm, Colossus, Kitty, and Wolverine survived while Beast and Magneto's younger self were uninvolved in the story), at the same time a lot of characters were removed from the original story. Rachel and Franklin Richards are not present in the bad future (likely because Rachel's parents were dead and Franklin is tied to the Fantastic Four and thus would require too much explanation to include them), while the film has Wolverine work with Beast and Xavier rather than the group of X-Men who did so in the past (the above mentioned from the future minus Magneto and along with Angel and Nightcrawler), and Mystique had her own Brotherhood of mutants helping her carry out the assassination, none of whom who appear in the film. At least one of these, Pyro, is justified by being tied into the original films' timeline and so isn't born at this point, as was the X-Men team involved.
  • Adaptive Ability: The Sentinels in the Bad Future have the ability to adapt their structure, powers and strategy to counter the mutants, allowing them to win in almost any scenario. They got the ability from 50 years of research on Mystique's DNA. The only way to survive their attacks is by using time travel to ensure they never happened.
  • Addled Addict: Past Charles is so far gone with his alcoholism and self-medication that he can't function without Hank's help.
  • Adrenaline Time: The changing speed in the scene where Quicksilver rushes with Erik across the Pentagon hallway, sending the security guards flying through the air in slow mo and then back to normal speed.
  • Advertised Extra:
    • Anna Paquin takes the cake as Rogue, as she got a magazine spread and her own poster. She only has about three seconds of screen time. Her scenes were later restored in an extended cut.
    • Fan Bingbing only appears in a minor role (with one line). But it's a common practice to heavily advertise a foreign star to attract viewers from their country.
  • A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
    • In Wolverine's own words, the Sentinels were created to kill mutants, but then moved on to anyone with the potential to breed more mutants, then anyone who tried to aid the mutants (insert WWII analogy here). The "very worst of humanity" are all that remain, ruling over the Sentinels.
    • Zigzagged with the 1973 Sentinels. Magneto laces the prototypes with iron so he can control their movements and use them as weapons, but he can't really affect their programming. One Sentinel tries to kill Erik when it gets the chance.
  • The Alcatraz: Magneto is kept at a high-security, all-concrete prison right in the center of the Pentagon. Considering he was arrested shortly after the JFK assassination (1963), this jail has successfully restrained one of the most powerful mutants in the world for ten whole years.
  • The Alcoholic: The younger Charles has been a drunk for the past decade by the time Logan meets him.
  • Allegorical Character: "Hope" is the title of Xavier's theme on the soundtrack. His 1973 self must regain hope, otherwise by 2023, mutantkind is doomed to extinction (a hopeless past Charles = a hopeless future for mutants).
  • Allergic to Routine: Because Quicksilver experiences time much more slowly than everyone else, he gets bored very easily, so he treats life like it's one big game. He gets his thrills by stealing whatever catches his fancy, and Xavier observes that Peter is a kleptomaniac.
  • All Part of the Show: During the Sentinels show, the Sentinel prototypes suddenly start floating under Erik's control. The audience takes it as part of the show and cheers until the Sentinels start shooting.
  • All There in the Manual: The significance of the mutant seen in The Stinger (as well as the four riders appearing on the background) can only be understood if you know him from the comics.
  • All There in the Stinger: If you haven't seen the end-credits scenes of X-Men: The Last Stand or The Wolverine, good luck understanding how (or why) Professor X is still alive.
  • All Your Base Are Belong to Us: In The Rogue Cut, Trask Industries have commandeered the X-Mansion, using it to experiment on mutants.
  • Alternate History:
    • Taken even further than First Class. For starters, 1973 technology has advanced somewhat faster than the real world: the Sentinels were built, plastic weapons to counter Magneto have been developed, and mutant-gene scanners exist (when the mid-'70s marked the period when genomics started to take off).
    • The bit where Magneto drops a baseball stadium around Richard Nixon's head in front of international television, or the little number where the mutants get into a full on brawl during the Paris Peace Conference, which drastically changes world events by bringing mutants to public attention.
  • Anachronism Stew:
    • Mystique ends up getting hit with a Taser in both the original and altered events of 1973, a year before Jack Cover invented the device.
    • Hank has created a serum capable of both restoring Charles' mobility and specifically silencing a gene; both feats are still being researched today, and this film takes place in 1973, when genomics was just starting to grow as a field. It's implied that Hank has a boost from Raven's DNA.
    • There are some technologies that are far more developed than they had been in our world (see Alternate History) or could have been by technical standards of that time. So this could be just other cases of an Alternate History.
  • And Starring: Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen shared the "And" billing.
  • Anti-Villain: Bolivar Trask. Unlike other characters obsessed in exterminating the mutants, he does so not out of hatred, but a desire to see humanity united against a common threat, and casually admits to admiration towards mutants for helping him accomplish that goal. Pity he has no empathy...
  • Apocalypse How: The severity in the Bad Future appears to be Class 3a. New York City is an apocalyptic desolate ruin, and both mutants and humans who dare support them are being exterminated in concentration camps the size of Central Park, whilst the fact the very worst humans are now in charge of what's left leaves hopes for a successful repopulation that much less likely.
  • Armor-Piercing Question: When Erik confronts Charles about his withdrawal from the world and abandonment of his former friends.
    Erik: We were supposed to protect them! Where were you, Charles?! Where were you when your own people needed you?! You and Hank, hiding, pretending to be something you're not! You abandoned us all!
  • Artistic License – Geography: The Pentagon is not in Washington, DC. It's across the Potomac in Arlington, VA. It's understandable because it has a Washington, DC mailing address, and that Arlington was once part of DC.
  • Artistic License – History:
    • RFK Stadium is shown with a baseball diamond, when in real life the Washington Senators baseball team had moved to Texas in 1971, two years before this film is set.
    • Magneto was involved in the JFK assassination, because why else would the bullet curve? While a popular conspiracy theory for some time, modern analysis has shown that due to the positions JFK and Governor Connaly were sitting in, the bullet would not have to curve to give them the injuries they received.
  • Ascended Extra:
    • A Sentinel (with a different design to the Mark 1 of 1973 or Mark X of 2023 in this film) very briefly appeared as part of a holographic Danger Room exercise during X-Men: The Last Stand but only its decapitated head (courtesy of Wolverine) was seen clearly. Here, Sentinels are the horrifying main adversaries that the 2023 X-Men face and the earlier versions also form part of the opposition that the 1973 cast have to confront as well.
    • Similar to First Class, Mystique has a major role in the story compared to being primarily a henchwoman in the original films. Being played by Jennifer Lawrence helps there. There are no explicit contradictions, it's only that the two different portrayals are hard to reconcile (Rebecca Romijn's Mystique was silent and coldly loyal to Magneto, Lawrence's Mystique is much more emotional and independent). Then again, being captured and experimented on in the original timeline as well as years of killing most likely led her to become much colder.
  • As You Know: A good chunk of the Bad Future is explaining what went wrong, something the characters shouldn't need to recap to each other.
  • A-Team Firing: The Sentinel prototypes exercise this skill during the Disastrous Demonstration as none of their bullets seem to hit anybody. Part of the family-friendly Bloodless Carnage pervading the entire movie.
  • The Atoner: Ian McKellen invokes this while discussing his character in the "Double Take: Xavier & Magneto" documentary.
    "The Magneto that you see with me is a man of conscience, and a man with an unhappy life behind him. He's come through a great deal, and isn't taking on single-handedly, or even with the help of his Brotherhood, society as a whole. He's joined up again with his old friend, Professor X, and together, they're going to try to move things forward."
  • Back from the Dead: Thanks to Cosmic Retcon, Cyclops, Jean Grey, Storm, Beast, Iceman, Colossus and everyone else we see killed in the Bad Future didn't die because the Sentinel Program never gets off the ground and Dark Phoenix didn't show up. That is, until 20 years later.
  • Bad Future: The premise of the movie is preventing a horrific dystopian future ruled by the worst scum of humanity and dominated by Sentinels, by changing past events.
  • Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: A Sentinel tries to kill Erik during the climax. It's hopelessly one-sided in Magneto's favor, but the fight distracts Erik long enough for Mystique to shoot him.
  • Bad Present: This is the premise of the film. Unlike the original comic book story, the "Bad Future" is actually the present day timeline and Wolverine is sent into the past to avert it.
  • Bait-and-Switch: The final scene sets you up to believe that it's a Call-Forward tying in to previous, chronologically later movies, but switches gears at the last second. Wolverine's past self has been recovered by William Stryker, apparently setting up his involvement with Weapon X. Then we find out Stryker is actually Mystique in disguise.
  • Barrier Maiden: Dr. Bolivar Trask is a male example. His murder by Mystique will generate a Crapsack World where mutants and humans who are carriers of the X-gene are slaughtered en masse, leaving only the worst of humanity in charge.
  • Battle Butler: Hank essentially fulfills this role for Charles. In addition to looking after his ex-mentor's needs and maintaining the mansion, McCoy also serves as Xavier's bodyguard. He gets into a scuffle with Logan at the start.
  • Battle Discretion Shot: Wolverine goes inside the mansion to seek the Professor and moves upstairs, ignoring the protests of Hank McCoy. So McCoy turns into the Beast, chases after Wolverine, and the camera changes view back to the empty stairs just before Wolverine is heard screaming and sent flying across them from off-camera.
  • Bavarian Fire Drill: Played for Laughs. The '70s Xavier tries this on a couple of guards in the Pentagon, but lacks the somber gravitas of his future self. Logan listens with exasperation as Charles rambles in an unconvincing fashion, eventually losing patience and knocking out the guards.
    Logan: Oh, I'm sorry. Are you finished?
  • Beard of Sorrow: Young Charles has one when Wolverine first visits him in 1973. He finds a man broken by despair. It's played with, as he keeps it for the entire movie, even after he has moved beyond his personal pain.
  • Became Their Own Antithesis: The once effervescent and idealistic Xavier we saw in X-Men: First Class has crumbled into a heap of melancholia and cynicism after 1963. His telepathy, which he had been at ease with since he was 12 years old, has suddenly become a heavy burden that he avoids using at all costs. Charles' social drinking has deteriorated into alcoholism, and he gives up on other activities that he used to enjoy, such as teaching, scientific research and womanizing, in favor of a self-imposed exile from everything that exists beyond his mansion. Xavier has more or less reduced himself into a Manchild who is completely dependent on Hank, when in the other movies, various mutants rely on the paternal telepath for emotional support. Even the way he dresses has changed dramatically; the impeccable suits that define Professor X's style have been replaced by a gaudy paisley shirt paired with a brown leather jacket, or if he's feeling especially lazy, just an undershirt with jeans. Charles has also neglected his grooming, which makes him look like a confused hippie or a hobo instead of a well-adjusted, upper-class academic.
  • Been There, Shaped History: Magneto was arrested for his involvement in Kennedy's death (as in the magic bullet; the Viral Marketing raises the hypothesis that Mystique in guise of Lee Harvey Oswald was the one who shot), and the Paris Peace Accords that closed America's involvement with The Vietnam War now has Dr. Bolivar Trask, Major William Stryker and some mutants in attendance.
  • Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: Magneto shot JFK. Who else could make the bullet curve? Magneto claims that he was actually trying to save him because JFK was a mutant, but was interrupted by an unidentified party. This movie is an odd example of this trope, because while this specific example falls under Plausible Deniability, the movie and series overall are clearly set in a reality that Never Was This Universe with a radically Alternate History. According to the writer, the example of Plausible Deniability is likely true, and JFK's mutant power was probably some form of telepathy for persuasion.
  • Behind the Black: When Wolverine awakes to the new future and meets Jean, he walks right up to her, but doesn't notice Scott although he should be in his field of view. Well-disguised since his initial approach has Scott on the other side of the door from him as Jean stands in the doorway, although this becomes less justified as they converse.
  • Berserk Button:
    • Beast flies into a murderous rage after Magneto attempts to kill Mystique. Hank still harbours feelings for her.
    • In The Rogue Cut, Magneto, who spent his childhood getting experimented on by Sebastian Shaw, gets a moment of Tranquil Fury when he sees scientists experimenting on Rogue, and threatens them with their own equipment.
  • Beware the Superman: The reason for Trask to build the Sentinels is to prevent the extinction of Homo sapiens by Homo superior.
  • BFG: Bishop wields one which he charges with his powers. On closer inspection, it appears to be connected to his circulatory system. It's one of the few things capable of inflicting permanent damage on the Sentinels.
  • Big Bad Ensemble: The film has three villains who are acting largely independently and are often at cross-purposes, and their deeds lead to the Bad Future: Bolivar Trask, Mystique, and Magneto.
  • The Big Bad Shuffle: Mystique and Bolivar Trask compete for title of villain; it's Trask's Sentinels that lead to the Bad Future, but it's Mystique killing him and being captured for experimentation that leads to the Sentinels getting approved by the government, making her the one whose Evil Plan needs to be stopped. Additionally in the future Trask and Mystique are dead, making it the Sentinels themselves that are the villains. And then in the past Magneto ends up becoming a third villain when he decides to kill Trask and the President.
  • Big Brother Instinct:
    • When the younger Charles sees Mystique again for the first time in 11 years, he caresses her hair and shoulder as a gesture of comfort while telling her that he will keep her safe among other soothing words. When Magneto then points a gun in her direction, Xavier stands in between the barrel and his foster sister, and Erik later has to use his power to change the bullet's trajectory so that it won't hit Charles in the head. Despite their estrangement, Xavier is willing to die for Raven to save her life.
    • Peter Maximoff is seen playing with his little sister. He's even willing to sit down and watch television with her, which is heartwarming considering how hyperactive the guy is.
  • Big Good: The elderly Professor X and Magneto share the leadership role among the remaining X-Men and the Free Mutants. Wolverine's mission is to guide Xavier's younger self towards the process of growing into this by accepting both his powers and his duty to his fellow mutants.
  • Big "NO!": Past Charles directs this at Erik, who at the time has started levitating metal kitchen utensils and cutleries in an attempt to kill the surrounding guards. Charles is even trying to hold him back physically.
  • Blatant Lies:
    • When Past Xavier (who is drunk and looks like he just got out of bed) is initially unwilling to hear Logan's plea for help, his excuse is:
      Charles: Well, tell whoever it was who sent you that I'm... busy.
    • When confronted by guards in the Pentagon kitchen, Charles attempts to reassure them that he and Logan are important personnel, but one part of his speech is especially unconvincing.
      Charles: We are special operations C-B-F-E-C-I-C.
    • There's a glitch in Logan's Mental Time Travel, resulting in his past self waking up at the worst possible time, in the middle of a botched assassination, surrounded by strange people (some of whom are blue), days after he last remembers anything. Charles briefly tries to explain the situation to him truthfully, before giving up.
      Charles: ...You're on acid. Someone gave you really bad acid.
  • Blessed with Suck:
    • After slipping into a deep depression, the younger Charles views his telepathy as a curse because he can no longer control it. He is unable to shut out the clamor of thoughts that he doesn't want to hear, and this causes a tremendous amount of agony. He becomes addicted to a serum which numbs his ability, just to allow himself to sleep at night.
    • At the age of nine, Xavier believed that he was mentally ill (schizophrenia, most likely) due to the voices in his head, and it took him three whole years to recognize that he was actually telepathic — as dysfunctional as he is in 1973, his childhood experience must have been downright nightmarish in comparison.
    • This is Beast's attitude towards his physical mutation. He goes through great lengths in order to mask what he perceives to be his body's grotesque deformities.
  • Bling of War: Blink has the most beautiful combat uniform in the film, according to producer Lauren Schuler Donner in the "Two Worlds, Two Battles" documentary on The Rogue Cut.
    "The costume that stood out to me the most is the one that Fan Bingbing wears. That costume weighs minimum 25 pounds. [..] What Louise [Mingenbach] did was she went off to vintage stores, found beaded collars and put them all together in this amazing design, which she puts on the back of the jacket and on the epaulettes."
  • Bloodless Carnage:
    • Iceman gets decapitated and Colossus gets ripped apart, but since they are in their "iced-up" and metal forms respectively when it happens, there is no blood.
    • The Sentinels impaling the normal-ish mutants like Blink don't so much as spill a drop, and Mystique gets a bullet through the leg yet walks it off with only a few drops spilled here and there.
    • Trask's headshot entry wound on his forehead is tiny with almost no blood showing.
  • Blue Is Heroic: Xavier's past self is subjected to a Palette Swap that marks the return of his familiar blues and greys to designate that he has taken up the mantle of being a hero again.
  • Body Horror:
    • Happens to Wolverine during the film's climax, when Magneto impales him with several rebar pipes, entwining them within his flesh and leaving him to drown in the Potomac.
    • Several of the deaths in the Bad Future. First time out, Colossus has his head caved in whilst in his metal form and Iceman's head is snapped from the rest of his body in his frozen form, only for the events to later be defied. In the climax, Bishop explodes due to being "force fed" too much energy, Colossus is ripped in two, Sunspot loses an arm, and Iceman has most of his torso vaporized.
    • The autopsy photos of the many mutants (including Angel Salvadore and Azazel) who were experimented upon by Bolivar Trask are very graphic and gruesome. Angel's wings have been amputated.
  • Bookends:
    • The film opens and closes with narrations from both the old and young Charles Xavier, respectively; the former contemplates the future while the latter reflects on the past.
    • Logan waking up in a daze to Roberta Flack's 1969 cover of "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" in both 1973 and the new Alternate Timeline (playing on a hits-of-the-'70s streaming playlist).
    • The mutant boy who is about to be fried by a Future Sentinel just before the main titles unexpectedly reappears in the Alternate Timeline as one of Professor X's students, safe and sound.
    • The first sequence depicting the Bad Future is a Curb-Stomp Battle given by the Sentinels, ending in a single Sentinel energy beam approaching Kitty Pryde and Bishop just as they successfully revert to an alternate timeline. The last sequence depicting it is a battle with a similar outcome ending in Xavier shielding Kitty and Wolverine from three Sentinel energy beams just as Mystique drops her gun in the past, allowing Trask to live and successfully averting the Sentinel dominated future entirely.
  • Boyish Short Hair: Storm's hairstyle is quite short, and it's easier to maintain when she's struggling to survive the Future Sentinels.
  • Broad Strokes: The events of X-Men are implied to still have happened more or less the same way they did in the original timeline, as Rogue's got her white hair from being exposed to Magneto's machine. However, the same cannot be said about X2: X-Men United and X-Men: The Last Stand, as Jean is alive and one of the good guys.
  • Broken Bird: Time and events have really taken their toll on Young Charles Xavier. He lost Raven and Erik, Sean had disappeared several years prior (and is later confirmed dead at the hands of Trask), then most of his teachers and students were drafted, leaving Charles alone except for Hank. He's taking a serum designed by Hank that suppresses his powers and restores the use of his legs just so he can sleep at night without feeling other people's pain.
  • Brutal Honesty:
    Beast: In the future, do I make it?
    Wolverine: No.
  • Bullet Time: The film features a young Quicksilver. His scenes usually just show his movement as a blur, but his bullet-time sequence, as well as highlighting how he sees the world when he runs, shows him to be not just fast enough to dodge bullets meant for him — he's fast enough to artfully rearrange them in flight so that they do not hit his allies. This is after running a lap of the room and inventively messing with over half a dozen shooters on the opposing side.
  • The Bus Came Back: Toad finally returns for his first appearance since the original X-Men movie. He was in the military, and after Raven saves him from Trask Industries, he's working in a kitchen somewhere.
  • Bus Crash:
    • Mystique discovers partway through the film that Angel Salvadore, Azazel, Emma Frost, and Banshee (Sean Cassidy) all died (and their bodies were used in experiments by Trask) during the Time Skip between X-Men: First Class and Days of Future Past.
    • The tie-in website reveals that Angel (Warren Worthington) and Beast from X-Men: The Last Stand were killed between X-Men: The Last Stand and the Bad Future of this film's opening. When the younger Beast asks, Wolverine admits that Beast died at some point in the Bad Future.
  • Butt-Monkey: Despite his prominence in the overarching franchise (and his role as The Dragon to Trask), William Stryker suffers the most injuries and beatdowns out of anyone in the film. He's blasted by Havok in the opening scene, tasered after Mystique's failed assassination of Trask, and beaten again when Nixon and his team discover Mystique is in the room with them. It's really no wonder he seems to hate mutants so much later on, when he spends all of his screen time in this one getting his ass beaten by them.
  • Call-Back:
    • To persuade Congress to consider his Sentinel program, Trask quotes Xavier's Oxford dissertation from First Class on the near-immediate eradication of the human sub-species Homo neanderthalensis upon the appearance of their "mutated, more-evolved cousins," Homo sapiens, alluding to the idea that mutants will eventually drive ordinary humans into extinction.
    • The younger Charles suspects that Logan works for the CIA because the organization wanted to apprehend him and his students after the Cuban Missile Crisis.
    • Logan's "Go fuck yourselves" from First Class comes back to bite him in the ass, courtesy of Charles Xavier, no less.
    • The first thing 1973 Xavier does when he sees Erik is punch his former friend for crippling him.
    • When Logan sees the young William Stryker for the first time, he has violent flashbacks to his confrontation with the older Stryker from X2.
    • A restored scene from The Rogue Cut features Mystique asking Beast if he remembers one of the last things he said to her ("...your natural blue form will never be deemed beautiful"), and the last thing she said to him ("Mutant and proud").
    • In The Rogue Cut, Iceman suggests Rogue could fill in for Kitty on the grounds that she did the same for Magneto.
    • It appears that by 1973, all of the younger mutants who had survived the Cuban Missile Crisis (save for Havok) are dead, as Erik chastises Xavier on the plane to Paris for not helping to protect them, and Mystique sees them in grisly autopsy photos while impersonating Trask, implying they have been captured by Trask to help accelerate his work on the Sentinels.
  • Call-Forward:
    • 1973 Erik's "Imagine if [your claws] were metal" remark to Logan.
    • When '70s Erik goes to retrieve his helmet from the Pentagon, he's shown wearing a fedora and dark suit ensemble very similar to Magneto's civilian appearance in the first X-Men film. He also uses small metal balls, like in X2.
    • When Logan passes through a metal detector, he's briefly surprised that it doesn't go off. It doubles as a Call-Back to the first X-Men film and also to The Wolverine.
    • It's used for Dramatic Irony when Trask says to Stryker that by the time the upcoming human-mutant war arrives, his son will be old enough to fight in it. Stryker's son does become a victim of this war, as he's a mutant and his own father turns on him.
    • In his New Era Speech, 1973 Magneto mentions "a Brotherhood of our kind."
    • In the finale, Beast uses a handful of hypodermic needles of his serum to supress his mutant genes, in order to hide from a Sentinel's sensors. In the finale of X-Men: The Last Stand, Beast uses a handful of hypodermic needles of a different serum to suppress Magneto's mutant genes and gain the upper hand on Alcatraz.
    • Mystique uses her shapeshifting skills to break into Bolivar Trask's office to get files on mutants. She would do this again years later, when infiltrating Lady Deathstrike's office in X2: X-Men United.
  • The Call Knows Where You Live: The young Charles Xavier gives up on his school and on helping mutants in general. The future Logan goes to find him in the mansion to persuade him to take up the cause again at his older self's request.
  • The Cameo:
    • The film ends with appearances from Anna Paquin as Rogue, James Marsden as Cyclops, Famke Janssen as Jean Grey, and Kelsey Grammer as the older version of Beast, all of whom were restored to life after the heroes stopped Mystique from killing Trask.
    • A young version of En Sabah Nur, a.k.a. Apocalypse, appears in The Stinger.
    • Alex Summers from X-Men: First Class can be seen as one of the mutants Mystique rescues from Saigon. A younger Toad is also featured there, even appearing in a later scene watching Magneto on TV to allude how he will join the Brotherhood.
    • Ink gets three: one in the Bad Future as a concentration camp inmate, one in Vietnam as a soldier, and one near the end, watching Magneto's New Era Speech.
    • While Magneto moves the stadium through the air, a little red-haired girl officially stated to be Jean Gray watches the structure passing.
    • While the Scarlet Witch is absent in the film in spite of her relationship with Quicksilver, a girl with red hair is later seen with him. Interestingly, she is only credited as "Peter's Little Sister," making her identity ambiguous (some think she's Peter's half-sister Polaris), though it definitely counts as a Mythology Gag. Bryan Singer says there was a cut-out scene where the little girl was told to "go bug your sister." This scene is restored in The Rogue Cut.
  • Canon Discontinuity:
    • X-Men: The Last Stand may have been erased through the Cosmic Retcon, but it's featured in flashback scenes and its existence is at least acknowledged. X-Men Origins: Wolverine however (aside from a flashback scene from Victor crushing Logan's claws), is very hard to reconcile with the events shown: William Stryker is played by a younger actor and holds a different rank and job, which could be just The Other Darrin, and all of Wolverine's flashbacks to his adamantium coating come from X2. In addition, it's strongly implied that he doesn't know Wolverine yet, and this movie takes place around the end of the America's involvement The Vietnam War, but according to Origins they met during it. It is possible that Origins had yet to occur as Stryker had seen Logan and went to find him.
    • In The Last Stand, Bolivar Trask is played by Bill Duke, a 6' 4" plump black man while in Days of Future Past he is played by Peter Dinklage, a 4' 5" white man. Many assumed that Duke's Trask in the The Last Stand was indeed Bolivar Trask, however his first name was never confirmed as he was only referred to as "Trask." As a result, Duke's Trask has been retconned into "Secretary Trask" whereas Dinklage is confirmed as the true Bolivar Trask.
    • Wolverine in the Bad Future still has his adamantium claws, despite having lost them in The Wolverine. Word of God said since Wolverine in the Bad Future is working with Magneto, he could have recoated Wolverine's claws if he desired. Also, his character is depicted as The Heart rather than a walking knife, which is an extension of his Character Development in that film.
  • Cape Busters: Sentinels are programed to hunt and kill mutants.
  • Cassandra Truth: When he's first sent back to 1973, Wolverine wakes up in the bed of a mob boss's daughter who he has apparently slept with repeatedly, and her father's goons aren't happy. He notes that they probably won't believe that he's traveled back in time.
  • Catapult Nightmare: In The Rogue Cut, when Rogue takes over the Mental Time Travel job from a wounded Kitty, 1973 Wolverine wakes up this way. However, it's averted for Mood Whiplash on the two occasions he time-jumps.
  • Celebrity Paradox: An re-runned episode of Star Trek: The Original Series is shown in the 1970s; Patrick Stewart, who plays Charles Xavier in the future, is also known for his role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
  • Central Theme: The importance of maintaining hope, even in the face of hardship and tragedy, because hope can conquer anything, and that just because someone has lost their way, it doesn't mean they're lost forever.
  • The Champion: Hank puts his entire life on hold for a decade in order to assist and defend the emotionally dysfunctional Charles. Since McCoy is no longer Professor X's student, they both should be on equal footing, yet Beast continues to readily defer to Xavier's authority. This steadfast devotion demonstrates that Hank values Charles' well-being and safety above his own.
  • Character Development: The story focuses primarily on Charles Xavier's transition from a Broken Bird to gradually embracing the role of an All-Loving Hero. As Simon Kinberg explains in the January 2014 issue of Total Film:
    "...very early on we made the decision that it was young Charles' arc, and that really the emotional story of the movie is watching him go from the guy who's lost his legs, lost his best friend, lost his sister, and in some ways lost his mind, to a guy who will become the all-powerful, benevolent Professor Xavier. McAvoy is really about as far as one can be from the Patrick Stewart that we know from X1, and we're really watching him take the first big step towards owning that chair and being a leader."
  • Chekhov's Boomerang: Trask's device for the guidance system. It helps him to spot Mystique at the Peace Conference. It comes in handy a second again when spotting her at the President's bunker.
  • Chekhov's Gun:
    • The Power Nullifier that both Charles and Hank have been using to suppress their powers is useful when dealing with robots that can detect mutant powers.
    • There's also a literal example: the plastic guns that were invented after the US government's encounter with Magneto, issued to his prison guards. Mystique uses one near the end to shoot him in the neck, as it's the only gun around that he can't control.
  • Chekhov's Skill: Erik says that he used his power to curve a bullet to prevent the JFK assassination. He later uses this power to try and kill Mystique when a gun is knocked from his hand after firing a single bullet.
  • Chess Motifs: During the plane ride to Paris, Erik tries to convince Charles to play chess for old time's sake; the latter refuses at first (it's an indicator of their practically non-existent friendship), but eventually relents. Xavier tells him, "You have the first move," a rare instance where Lehnsherr is assigned the white side for the game, which apparently symbolizes that he's on the X-Men's team. The first thing Magneto does once they reach the Parisian hotel is betray them.
  • Civvie Spandex: Quicksilver does not wear a costume, but instead has a "cool jacket" and a pair of goggles.
  • Closest Thing We Got: Xavier was the first choice to be sent back to 1973, but Kitty explains that his mind wouldn't be able to take the strain of the transference. Logan volunteers instead, reasoning that his Healing Factor will allow him to cope with the damage, but he freely admits to the young Xavier that he's the wrong person to inspire anyone.
  • Close-Enough Timeline: Logan's actions prevent the post-apocalyptic Sentinel-ravaged future, thus dramatically altering the landscape of 2023. In that the new timeline is a status quo broadly similar to the one in the first trilogy. He told Charles specifically to make it happen.
  • Color Wash: The color and lighting in the 1973 scenes deliberately invoke the feel of 40-year-old movies.
  • Comes Great Responsibility: Xavier coming to terms with the responsibilities of his powers and his role as mutant leader (and the personal sacrifice it requires) is a major plot point.
  • Comically Missing the Point: When Hank unveils his set-up so that any mention of what happened in Paris on TV is recorded, he proudly notes that it'll record from all three networks and PBS. Logan, coming from a future where there are far more than three networks, makes a sarcastic comment about it. Hank, not understanding what Logan is getting at, gets slightly offended and reiterates he's also got it set-up to record PBS.
  • Comic-Book Movies Don't Use Codenames: The X-Men series has a long tradition of ignoring this trope.
    • When Wolverine tells Xavier about his future, he advises him to search for people with certain names: Scott, Jean... and "Storm." Having just read Logan's mind, Xavier certainly would know who he's talking about, but still it's weird.
    • Quicksilver is never called by that name.
    • Erik is only referred to as "Magneto" in a newspaper article, and once by Logan.
    • When talking about their Sentinel avoiding plan, Kitty uses codenames: "Warpath" spots the sentinels, "Blink" scouts a new location, etc.
  • Composite Character:
    • The future Sentinels are the fusion of the regular Sentinels with the Nimrod Sentinel's Adaptive Ability.
    • Rachel Summers's role in the original comic (sending the time-traveler back) is given to Kitty Pryde, while Kitty Pryde's role (as the time-traveler) is given to Wolverine.
    • Bolivar Trask is given Senator Kelly's role from the original story.
    • Quicksilver looks and acts like his nephew, Speed, and even wears a similar pair of goggles.
    • The mutant soldier who appears in the camp alongside Havok, Toad and Ink has Spyke's surname (Daniels), Quill's porcupine spines protruding from his face, and Vertigo's ability to render people unconscious.
  • Concealing Canvas: Mystique discovers Trask' safe behind a painting in his office.
  • Condescending Compassion: Played with. A nurse tells Mystique that she feels sorry for the blue-skinned woman she saw on the TV because it must have been such a shame to be born looking like that, but she's unaware that she's talking to the woman in question.
  • Conspicuously Public Assassination: Mystique tries to assassinate Trask for revenge at the Paris Peace Conference, and when that fails, at the Sentinel demonstration at the White House. It's a very bad idea as such public violent action spurs hostile countermeasures like the Sentinel programme, as Xavier points out.
  • Continuity Nod: Has its own page.
  • Continuity Snarl: A justified example involving Ripple-Proof Memory. Prior to the release of the film, producer Lauren Donner Schuler went on record saying that the film made X-Men Origins: Wolverine and X-Men: The Last Stand non-canon. However, the film still references Logan's memories using scenes from X-Men: The Last Stand, and from X-Men Origins: Wolverine, namely Logan killing Jean at Alcatraz and finding Kayla "dead" in the forest. This is because it is established early on in the film that if Wolverine is successful, he will still remember the timeline that leads to the war with the Sentinels, which still exists, up until it diverges when Mystique no longer kills Trask. He himself points this by saying the history he knows is different than what new Xavier knows.
  • Conveniently Coherent Thoughts: A justified case near the climax. Among the cacophony of thoughts at the White House, Xavier can distinctly hear Mystique's inner voice speaking, "This is for you, brothers and sisters." When you are Professor Charles Xavier, it's not convenience; it's skill.
  • Conveniently Timed Distraction: President Nixon emerges from the bunker and tells Magneto to spare his men and kill only him, but Magneto disagrees and still plans to kill all of them. While Beast is dealing with a 1973 Sentinel, he uses his serum to temporarily suppress his mutant powers, which causes the Sentinel to turn its attention towards Magneto, who easily tears it apart. With Magneto distracted, Mystique reveals herself to be disguised as Nixon, and slightly grazes Magneto's neck with a plastic gun before knocking him out.
  • Cool Car: Wolverine drives a Buick Riviera in 1973.
  • Cool Chair: Patrick Stewart invokes this on the "Two Worlds, Two Battles" documentary on The Rogue Cut when speaking about his floating wheelchair.
    "I have a chair that hovers. I don't mean hovers through CGI or through other kind of elevated or animated aspects. No, I have a chair that actually hovers, on the same principle as what a hovercraft does. How cool is that?"
  • Cool Plane: The future X-Jet, as usual. In the Bad Future, it seems to be powered by a Tokamak-style fusion reactor. Which Storm and Magneto cook off to nuke the Sentinel carriers.
  • Cool Shades: In 1973, Logan, Charles and Erik sport fashionable '70s-style sunglasses.
  • Cosmic Retcon: The end of the film fixes the Bad Future, but also Logan wakes up in the same time period in the Xavier Institute to see the school thriving, everyone alive who died against the Sentinels. But more specifically, the events of the movies excepting First Class must have also gone differently, as both Scott and Jean (who's still taken to wearing red) are alive after having died in X-Men: The Last Stand. X-Men Origins: Wolverine also gets discontinued, as when Logan is recovered from the river William Stryker is a disguised Mystique, hinting at an altered Weapon X program.
  • Crapsack World: The future is a war-torn hellhole where major cities have been reduced to ruins, and anybody with mutant DNA is either killed or imprisoned in concentration camps.
  • Creator Cameo:
    • Len Wein and Chris Claremont appear as members of the government committee Trask speaks to.
    • Mystique disguises herself as cinematographer Newton Thomas Siegel as she walks away from the commotion at the Paris Peace Accords.
    • Immediately after Past Magneto uses his power to throw several Parisian police officers backwards, Bryan Singer can be seen as a bystander filming him.
    • Stan Lee, who makes regular cameos at all the films based in Marvel Comics (regardless of studio), does NOT appear in this one.
  • Crisis of Faith: 1973 Xavier begins with one; because of all the things he lost he's become disillusioned to his case. He eventually gets better.
  • Crucified Hero Shot: There is a brief moment where the younger Charles, who is bleeding and Looks Like Jesus, is trapped under beams which form the distinctive shape of an X, almost like a cross.
  • Cruel and Unusual Death:
    • Since the Reset Button is in full effect here, the film does not shy away from doling out horrible deaths to the future characters, who are guaranteed to survive for another go-around. Decapitated, ripped apart, melted; the Sentinels pull no punches.
    • Warpath gets his goddamn face burned off. Slowly. It's easily the most brutal Sentinel-related death.
  • Cruel Mercy: Trask, instead of being murdered by Mystique, gets arrested for selling secrets to enemy interests (i.e. the boardroom full of communist national leaders in Paris). In The Rogue Cut mid-credit scene, he's seen specifically in the same prison beneath the Pentagon that once held Magneto.
  • Curb-Stomp Battle:
    • Wolverine vs. Magneto. Even without adamantium covering his bones, Magneto has a baseball stadium full of metal to weaponize, preventing Wolverine from even landing a hit before he's disabled.
    • Magneto's fight with a 1973 Sentinel only lasts a few seconds, as he rips the metal bars inside the android, tearing it limb from limb.
    • Subverted with Wolverine's fight with the mafia goons. The audience and Wolverine himself believes that it won't even be a problem for him, but then we learn that Wolverine doesn't have his adamantium (which besides making his claws super-sharp, also protect him from a headshot and absorb the impacts of the bullets). Wolverine still wins fairly easily (he's still Immune to Bullets because of his Healing Factor), but it's not entirely one-sided.
    • Warpath doesn't stand a chance when facing three Sentinels with only a knife in the opening battle.

    Tropes D to F 
  • Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Wolverine keeps forgetting that he doesn't have metal claws in the past and falls behind in fights because it takes him a moment to adjust his fighting style.
  • Danger Room Cold Open: The opening action scene was designed to illustrate the characters' various powers.
  • Dark Action Girl: Mystique. She's a main villain in 1973 and kicks tons of ass.
  • Darker and Edgier: The film adapts one of the darkest X-Men storylines ever, and, while it has many humorous moments, the overall tone (especially that of the Bad Future scenes) is pretty bleak.
  • Darkest Hour: The X-Men's situation in bleak at the end. Most team mates have died during the Final Battle, the Sentinels are about to break through the door and the link to Wolverine in 1973 is about to break. The only thing they can do is pray that the changes to the timeline were enough...
  • Dark Secret: By 1973, Charles had never revealed to anyone — not even Raven, Erik or Hank — that as a nine-year-old kid, he thought he was going insane when he was hearing voices in his head, and he didn't learn until he was twelve that they were not voices in his head, but in others' heads.
  • Deadpan Snarker:
  • Decoy Protagonist: Although Wolverine starts out as the main character, Charles Xavier is The Hero of the movie. Wolverine's primary role is to simply help motivate the younger Charles to change the future. When the final battle begins, Magneto simply impales him with rebar and throws him into a nearby river, quickly ending his importance in the film.
  • Defrosting Ice King: In a Power of Friendship example, Wolverine's bond with the elderly Professor X must have grown quite strong during the Time Skip in between The Wolverine and Days of Future Past because after Logan meets the younger Charles — who is practically a stranger to him — he gradually sheds his outer "macho armour." Compared to Wolverine's normally gruff exterior (especially towards other male characters), he really is quite gentle with Xavier in a few scenes where it's just the two of them, like the plane ride to Washington, D.C. and the heart-to-heart talk they share in the Alternate Timeline.
  • Delinquents: Peter Maximoff is a juvenile delinquent whose favourite hobby is shoplifting.
  • Demoted to Dragon: After serving as the Big Bad in two movies, William Stryker is Dr. Bolivar Trask's second-in-command.
  • Demoted to Extra:
    • Rogue only appears in a non-speaking cameo and doesn't even get a close-up. This is because all her other scenes were cut out and then restored on The Rogue Cut Blu-Ray/DVD release.
    • Havok is rescued by Mystique near the beginning and never shows up afterwards. At least he survived, unlike the rest of the First Class cast, with everyone who didn't appear in the earlier/canonically later films being unceremoniously killed off between films.
    • Storm kicks some serious ass, but gets little screen time overall, and doesn't have many lines until midway into the movie.
    • Compared to the prominence of her role in the comic version of "Days of Future Past", Kitty Pryde's part is mostly being the means by which Wolverine gets into the past.
  • Despair Event Horizon: When Xavier is forced to close his school after the first semester due to The Vietnam War conscription, he gives up his ambition to be a leader and protector of mutants, and becomes a self-medicating recluse.
  • Determinator:
    • The conversation between Erik and Logan, in the past, when the latter refers to them both as being a "survivor." Unfortunately for Logan, the younger Magneto is able to prove his superiority in battle when he impales him with pipes and sends off to drown with a taunt of how unlike a survivor he is compared to Magneto.
    • Kitty, who must keep the link open, is stabbed by Logan when his present body reacts violently to mental trauma in the past. Due to how time runs concurrently in the past and present, it's implied that it takes a few days before Logan and co. can properly stop Mystique, which means that she is slowly bleeding out and can't sleep for that period. In The Rogue Cut, Kitty also proves capable of moving from the main room of the X-Men's hideaway, grabbing an injured Magneto and bringing him through the door during the final battle, while still bleeding.
    • Mystique is on a one-woman crusade. Throughout the film she finds more and more damning evidence that Trask really needs to be killed. It's not until the very end that Charles manages to talk her out of it.
    • The Prototype Sentinel that goes after Magneto definitely is this. Even as it's being torn to pieces, it still tries to grab him.
  • Deus Exit Machina: Quicksilver easily takes out the guards in Magneto's prison, and is faster than anybody, even two powerful mutants — and one with enhanced senses — can react. Combining him with Xavier in locating either Trask or Mystique would've wrapped the plot up in far shorter time and with at least half the damage. So naturally, he's out of the story once the break-out scene is over, save for a cameo near the end.
  • Disappointed in You:
    • Magneto believes that Mystique has grown soft when he sternly asks her, "What's happened to you? Did you lose your way while I was gone?"
    • It's subtle, but there is resentment in Past Charles' voice when he says, "Goodbye, Erik."
  • Disastrous Demonstration: Magneto hijacks the Sentinel prototypes at their public debut to provide a high-profile platform for his attack and New Era Speech.
  • Does This Remind You of Anything?:
    • Between going through a personal hell, his mind clearly not working straight, it being the '70s and him shooting up to dull the pain, Xavier really resembles a shell-shocked Vietnam veteran. James McAvoy has even called it his Born on the Fourth of July look.
    • There is Jesus imagery surrounding Charles; his story arc is almost a metaphor for Jesus accepting his role as a martyr, with Xavier having to choose between life as a man, or getting in that wheelchair and suffering to save the world.
    • The footage of the mutants fighting at the Paris Peace Conference is eerily reminiscent of the Zapruder film, right down to the small format and shaky cam.
    • The images from the Bad Future of mutants being branded to identify them, camps full of mutants, and those who helped them being marched to off-screen executions is strongly reminiscent of the Holocaust. Given the X-Men series' penchant for drawing that parallel, it's undoubtedly deliberate.
  • Don't Call Me "Sir": Past Charles insists that Logan not address him by his professor title.
  • Don't Create a Martyr: The plot is driven by the need to stop Mystique from killing Bolivar Trask, creator of the Sentinel program, because his death at the hands of a mutant will only drive others to finish his work. In addition, since Mystique is captured when she does it, they are able to adapt her mutation to give the Sentinels Adaptive Ability, which made them unstoppable.
  • Do with Him as You Will: Mystique stuns Magneto and takes his helmet off, leaving him for Xavier. It's less brutal than most instances of the trope, since Mystique knows that Xavier won't hurt Magneto if he can avoid it.
  • Downer Beginning: In the year 2023, we get a glimpse of a post-apocalyptic world where mutants (who are near extinction) and their human allies are either placed in internment camps, or are outright murdered en masse.
  • Dramatically Missing the Point: The Magneto of 2023 tells Wolverine that they'll need to attain his younger self in preventing the Bad Future, intending that both himself from 1973 and 1973's Xavier work together in order to make a better future. After discovering what will happen and what causes it however, 1973's Magneto instead tries to kill Mystique and then when that fails, attempts to murder Bolivar Trask and the President of the United States on live television and demonstrate mutant superiority as his means of preventing the Bad Future. As a result, 1973 Magneto very nearly manages to make things much, much worse than they already were.
  • Drama-Preserving Handicap: At various points in the movie, the most powerful mutants are incapacitated or kept from using their powers to full extent, thus allowing the plot to advance. This includes Xavier losing his mental powers due to the effects of the drug which allows him to walk, Wolverine dazed by flashbacks of being tortured by Stryker and allowing Magneto and Mystique to escape (as well as missing his Adamantium), Magneto kept in a prison of concrete and plastic, etc.
  • Dramatic Curtain Toss: The giant American/Trask flag is tossed aside to reveal the Sentinels behind it.
  • Dramatic Irony:
    • 1973 Magneto is the most unsympathetic portrayal yet, while the future Magneto is the first time he's shown as an outright hero. Near the end, Magneto in 1973 attempts to assassinate the president on live television in order to start a race war, and Magneto in 2023, dying from injuries obtained in a Last Stand, regrets that he wasted so many years fighting with Xavier and reconciles with him.
    • Trask sees mutants as a common enemy which can unite all the human race and end the Cold War. In the Bad Future, Trask's inventions have become the common enemy that united all the mutants. He also says that they are programmed to attack only mutants, when the audience is told earlier that they started attacking everyone.
  • Dramatic Slip: During her rescue mission, Rogue falls down and delays the escape as they run across a corridor.
  • Dream Deception: Logan mentally time travels back to the 70s, essentially hijacking his younger self's body. Later, some psychological trauma breaks his mental connection for just long enough for 70s-Logan to briefly regain consciousness—in the middle of trying to thwart an assassination. Charles Xavier, to prevent 70s-Logan from freaking out, starts to explain what's happening, then realizes how crazy it sounds and says instead: "You're tripping. You took some acid and you're having a bad trip."
  • Dressing as the Enemy:
    • Quicksilver dons the uniform (which conveniently fits him perfectly) of a Pentagon guard that he has Bound and Gagged so that he can reach Magneto's prison cell.
    • Although she's technically not actually dressing, Mystique does this all the time with her shapeshifting.
  • Drink-Based Characterization:
    • The Vietnamese general orders whiskey for both himself and Mystique. In the case of the latter, it represents her tough and determined nature.
    • 1973 Xavier is frequently seen consuming whiskey. It is generally viewed as a "manly" drink, but it's inverted in this case because he's an extremely depressed Manchild.
  • Dropped a Bridge on Him:
    • In the tie-in material, it's revealed that Warren Worthington III is killed by Sentinels during a mutant protest. He is likely brought back later by the Cosmic Retcon.
    • According to the tie-in material, Future Beast gets dragged from his home and murdered by a mob of mutant-hating humans akin to the "Friends of Humanity" from the 90's animated series. Doubles as a Call-Back if you're watching the prequel before watching the main X-Men trilogy.
    • X-Men: First Class spent a good bit of time introducing some new mutants, such as Banshee, Emma Frost, Angel, Azazel, Riptide and Havok. One sequel later in this movie, Havok gets a few minutes of screen time before being rescued by Mystique. As for the rest, Riptide isn't mentioned, and Banshee, Emma, Angel, Azazel are all pronounced dead by Young Magneto. While they were killed between films, Raven/Mystique infiltrates Trask's office, where the audience is then treated to some photographs of the aforementioned mutants... post-autopsy. Beyond the autopsy photo appearance, one of Angel's wings can also be seen in a vault (this is unrelated to her death as that wing was lost during the climax of First Class).
  • Drowning My Sorrows: The younger Xavier attempts to escape from his emotional torment by consuming copious amounts of alcohol.
  • Duct Tape for Everything: Played for Laughs. A Pentagon guard is Mugged for Disguise in an elevator by Quicksilver. When he next steps into the elevator we see what happened to the guard, who's bound to the wall with an excessive amount of duct tape, covering everything but his nose and eyes.
  • Dwindling Party: Done twice in the Bad Future where the Sentinel kill one mutant after another with both ultimately stopped by Kitty's time travel power.
  • Earn Your Happy Ending: After nearly drowning, Logan wakes up in the Sentinel-averted future to find all the X-Men and children at Xavier's school. Also, this is the first film to give Wolverine a perfect happy ending. He's a teacher!
  • Eiffel Tower Effect: The iconic landmark is used twice for Establishing Shots of Paris.
  • Emotional Powers: In the "X-Men Unguarded" group discussion, James McAvoy explains why his character's distress causes his telepathy to go haywire, and more specifically, why Xavier can no longer separate everyone else's pain from his own.
    "[...] Charles as I've had the opportunity to play him, is a voyeur. So he's a genius, and he's got this ability to read people's minds. But his real power is a very human thing, his real gift is empathy. He can empathize with people's problems and he can help them. But as a young man, I think, certainly the way I tried to play him, is that he was much more kind of like a posh guy fascinated with working class guys. [...] And then what happens in this movie and the end of [First Class], you give him his angst, you give him his thing that makes him just like everyone else. And therefore he can't be a voyeur inside people's minds anymore. He's a passenger on the same train, and the train is going to hell."
  • The Empath: Although Xavier is a full-fledged telepath, he's the personification of empathy. He can be finely attuned to the emotions of others, feeling exactly what they feel. At its worst, he suffers from Power Incontinence, which turns his existence into a living hell because his mind is perpetually engulfed by people's pain. However, the elder Professor X asserts that empathy is their most precious quality when he consoles his younger self.
    Professor X: It's not their pain you're afraid of. It's yours, Charles. And as frightening as it can be, that pain will make you stronger. If you allow yourself to feel it, embrace it, it will make you more powerful than you ever imagined. It's the greatest gift we have: to bear their pain without breaking."
  • The End... Or Is It?: The last scene reveals Mystique disguised as Stryker. The message is that she is still to be reckoned with.
  • Enemy Mine:
    • Xavier and Magneto unite against the Sentinels that threaten all of mutantkind with extinction. Although Magneto ends up attempting his own plans for mutant superiority and, ironically enough, winds up jeopardizing the plan to save mutantkind.
    • Trask and Stryker are shown handing over their plans for the Sentinels to the Dirty Communists at the Paris Peace Conference. Trask is even grateful for the mutants for providing a common enemy which will unite humanity in a struggle for survival.
  • Everybody Lives: In the Good Future, everyone seen to die in the Bad Future is saved, and indeed, so too are a great many characters who died in previous films. Several supporting characters from First Class remain dead, but since that happened between movies it's not material. Every single named character in the story of this film is saved in the end (even the bad guys).
  • Every Car Is a Pinto: During the Disastrous Demonstration, a Sentinel shell hits a limousine which explodes, sending Wolverine and Hank flying through the air.
  • Evil Is Not a Toy: Wolverine and Professor X free Magneto from his metal-free prison to get him to stop Mystique. He soon develops his own agenda...
  • Exactly What I Aimed At: Mystique fires a bullet through Magneto's neck but doesn't hit any major arteries. Magneto thinks she's lost her edge, but she insists that the shot would have hit something important if she was serious. She wasn't trying to kill him; she only wanted to stun him long enough to get his helmet off.
  • Exact Words: In a scene, Mystique tells Charles Xavier to "get out of my head." He gets around it by possessing various people around her to talk to her long-distance in a truly creepy display of his telepathic power. He eventually decides to cast an illusion of himself to talk to her instead.
  • Expy:
    • The future Sentinels bear more than a passing resemblance to The Destroyer from Thor, with their height, metallic exterior, Nigh-Invulnerability, and faces that open up to reveal a Death Ray.
    • Their grey coloration, lack of facial features apart from monochromatic eyes and adaptability also evoke the version of Amazo from Justice League Unlimited.
  • Extreme Doormat: Hank has willingly reduced himself to this so that he can keep a constant eye on the self-destructive Charles. Xavier is the sole person McCoy has left who fully accepts him for who he is, so Beast does everything he can to ensure that nothing bad happens to his Only Friend.
  • The Extremist Was Right: Bolivar Trask said "You are not fighting a skirmish on the other side of the world, you are fighting people who could be amongst you, in your offices and homes, and who may have already taken over. And then you will have suffered a worse defeat than in Vietnam." Now jump forward to the climax, with Magneto surrounding the White House with a full stadium levitated from across the state and with the life of the President in his hands, and with another mutant already infiltrated among the President's most trusted people... and say again that Trask was exaggerating, or that his concerns were unjustified. Of course, it was his actions that provoked them to do this, so it's a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.
  • Face Death with Dignity: In the flashback of Trask's assasination, he's notably calm, almost defiant, when confronting Mystique.
  • Face–Heel Turn: The younger Magneto temporarily joins Charles, Logan and Hank, but quickly carries out his own agenda.
  • Family-Unfriendly Death: A lot during the Bad Future. Iceman gets beheaded and melted, Colossus gets torn in half, both Storm and Blink get brutally Impaled with Extreme Prejudice, Warpath's face is pulled into a heat beam during the Final Battle...
  • Fantastic Drug: Xavier's serum both suppresses his mutant powers and enables him to walk despite a crippling spine injury. The suffering he feels when he stops taking it is about the closest a PG-13 film can come to depicting the effects of drug abuse and withdrawal.
  • Fantastic Racism:
    • Played with: Bolivar Trask claims to Stryker that he does not hate mutants. He respects them, but wants to use them in order to make humanity band together. However, he still thinks of them as research material rather than people. It's emphasized even further when Mystique gets into the presidential safe-room, and Trask refers to her as "it" when he insists that they not shoot it because he needs her for research purposes. Earlier than that, during the Congressional hearing, one of the senators not-too-subtly suggests that Trask is pushing for the Sentinel program out of a prejudice against mutants. Trask notably doesn't bother addressing it.
    • Magneto grows stronger in his loathing of humanity.
  • The Farmer and the Viper: 1973 Magneto's sole contribution to the venture is to derail things the moment he sees a chance to advance his cause at the expense of everyone else. As the endings of First Class and X2 show, this is something of a habit for him.
  • Fashionable Asymmetry: Both Magneto's capes are shorter on one side than on the other.
  • Female Gaze: Wolverine's first appearance in 1973 provides a very good Fanservice shot for anyone in the audience who might be attracted to men.
  • First-Name Basis:
    • While the public and most other characters refer to Erik (Magneto) and Raven (Mystique) by their mutant code names, Charles and Hank still remain on a first name basis with both of them, and vice versa.
    • This is the first time in the franchise where Logan uses Charles' first name when speaking to Xavier directly. It's the result of the close friendship they developed during the Time Skip after The Wolverine.
    • Surprisingly, the elderly Magneto calls Bobby by his first name instead of his codename (Iceman). This indicates that Erik must have gotten to know Bobby on a more personal level during their war against the Future Sentinels.
  • Five-Token Band: The new mutants consist of Bishop (black), Blink (Chinese), Warpath (Apache), and Sunspot (Brazilian). This is something of an Enforced Trope considering there is nothing in-universe to suggest Chinese ancestry in the otherwise Euro-mutt/Semitic Clarice Ferguson.
  • Fix Fic: The film uses a Cosmic Retcon involving time-travel to undo some of the more unpopular plot points from X-Men: The Last Stand, and it takes special care to give a wide range of characters their own subplots — Mystique, Beast and Professor Xavier noticeably take center-stage far more often than they did in previous movies — to answer criticisms about Wolverine constantly hogging the focus from other characters. By the end of the movie, Cyclops, Jean Grey and Professor Xavier are alive again, Rogue and Bobby are still together, Rogue has her powers back, and Jean and Cyclops are back to Official Couple status.
  • Flashback Cut: Two snippets of Raven from First Class appear when the Future Professor X discusses their sibling-like relationship to the other X-Men.
  • Flat Character: The Free Mutants are nothing more than Red Shirts who Hold the Line for Kitty. They don't even introduce themselves; she does that for them.
  • Flight:
    • The Future Sentinels have the capability to fly.
    • The Prototype Sentinels can fly through a thruster adapted from a Harrier jet, which is mounted in their chest.
  • Foil:
    • Both past and future Magneto contrast each other in the film. 1973 Magneto continues to move forward with mutant supremacy and attacking Charles and his group, while future Magneto was fighting to protect both mankind and mutants while lamenting his pointless struggles with Charles in their younger years. Past Erik is very much on his own, but his elderly counterpart is a valuable team member.
    • Past Magneto and Past Xavier were both inactive and isolated in between 1963 and 1973 (the former due to imprisonment, the latter due to depression). Erik shows signs of wanting to repair some of their previous friendship, but a bitter Charles isn't interested for the most part. Magneto tries to kill Mystique while Xavier tries to protect her. Hank remains unwaveringly devoted to Charles, but Erik loses Mystique's loyalty after the murder attempt. In X-Men: First Class, Erik personified "rage" while Charles embodied "serenity," but their roles are reversed in 1973. Xavier is now the one who is full of pain and anger, and therefore has great trouble wielding his telepathy, whereas Magneto is (relatively) calm and controlled, still possessing great mastery over his power despite being deprived of metal for a decade. (We even see Erik adopt a meditation pose in his prison cell, which makes him appear Zen-like.)
    • Wolverine and the younger Magneto are violent individuals who love Xavier, but whereas Jerk with a Heart of Gold Logan possesses Undying Loyalty towards Charles, Jerk with a Heart of Jerk Erik is quick to betray him, again.
  • The Foreign Subtitle:
    • In Germany, it's known as X-Men: Zukunft ist Vergangenheit (Future Is Past).
    • The English translation of the Japanese title is Future and Past.
    • In Quebec, Canada, it's called X-Men: Jours d'un avenir passé (a direct translation of the English name), but it's averted in France, which keeps the English title.
  • Foreshadowing:
    • "She can transform into anyone. A general, a secret service man, even you, Mr. President."
    • Mystique's line when the Vietnamese general is hitting on her.
      General: A pretty girl interested in politics...
      Mystique: Looks can be deceiving.
  • Forgot I Couldn't Swim: Wolverine forgets that his '70s body doesn't have adamantium on his bones or claws several times; he's surprised when he doesn't set off a metal detector and tries to cut a Sentinel prototype, even though his uncoated claws have points but no edges.
  • For Want Of A Nail: The Bad Future faced by the cast of the original trilogy all came about due to the assassination of Bolivar Trask in 1973.
  • Freeze-Frame Bonus:
    • Bryan Singer has confirmed in his commentary that the little red-haired girl who watches the stadium floating overhead is Jean Grey.
    • The Rogue Cut includes a scene where Warpath offers a prayer to the dead, and behind him on the makeshift shrine dedicated to lost loved ones, you can spot Nightcrawler's rosary and Pyro's lighter.
    • When Mystique is masquerading as an Army officer in Saigon, the name on his (her) shirt says "Sanders." That's right, she is disguised as "Colonel Sanders."
  • Frying Pan of Doom: Wolverine knocks out one guard of a pair using one and throws the next guard across room after disarming him with it.
  • Full-Frontal Assault: Mystique does most of her fighting in her mutant form, with no clothes on. This is lampshaded at one point when she's seducing a target and returns to her normal form, who up until that point was quite excited at the prospect of seeing her naked.
  • Future Badass: As noted above, the future Sentinels are a serious improvement over the 1973 versions.
  • The Future Is Noir: The Bad Future is a dark place.

    Tropes G to L 
  • Genghis Gambit: Bolivar Trask believes uniting the world against mutants will create a brighter, more peaceful future.
  • The Ghost:
    • The Rogue Cut reveals that Peter has another sister who isn't shown on-screen. His younger sister (who is shown in the regular cut) was told by their mother to go upstairs and "bug" said sister.
    • Speaking of Peter, his older incarnation isn't shown in the original and new 2023 timeline, leaving his fate unknown.
  • Glamour Failure: Mystique's eyes sometimes turn yellow, even revealing her at one point.
  • The Glasses Come Off: When Mystique seduces Hank, she takes his glasses off.
  • Glassy Prison: Large panes of glass form the ceiling of Magneto's cell underneath the Pentagon; both to keep an eye on him and because metal bars are out of the question.
  • Glowing Eyes of Doom: The Sentinels have glowing yellow eyes.
  • Godzilla Threshold:
    • The main characters' plan is to erase themselves and everyone else from existence, because in the new future they would be different people with different experiences and no memory of the originals. Everybody understands it, yet they go through with it without question anyway: the current situation is just that bad.
    • Having failed to convince Congress to fund the Sentinel program, Trask and Stryker decide to hand over the plans to the Communist bloc, even though the technology could be used against the United States.
  • Gone Horribly Right:
    • The Sentinels were programmed to hunt and destroy mutants amongst the non-mutant populace and they proved extremely effective in this task. However, they soon began targeting people who could potentially have mutant children and then those who might have mutant grandchildren. Eventually they began wiping out the entire human race to fulfil their purpose.
    • Bolivar Trask wanted to make the Sentinels to create peace, and got it, in the form of the apocalypse. The peace of the grave.
  • Good Flaws, Bad Flaws: Past Xavier is no longer a cad like we saw in First Class, but he has developed additional "good" flaws such as alcoholism, drug addiction, cynicism, and cussing. The guy is utterly messed up, but the writer was careful not to make the character too "bad" (Charles has to eventually become an All-Loving Hero, after all).
  • Gotta Get Your Head Together: Charles grabs his head when he misses a dose of his Power Nullifier serum and the thoughts of many people flow in.
  • G-Rated Drug: Charles' usage and administration of Hank's serum draws parallels to heroin addiction, especially with his Post-Vietnam Heroic BSoD.
  • Grand Theft Me: Logan essentially steals the body of his counterpart from the new timeline when he snaps back after changing the future. For instance, he's apparently a teacher but he, himself, has no memory of that.
  • Great Offscreen War: The war against the Sentinels. When the film starts, the war is over, and the Sentinels are just hunting the last mutant survivors.
  • Grew Beyond Their Programming: The Sentinels' original programming was to go after any Mutant and mutants only. Then they started going after any human that could give birth to a mutant (themselves being human but having the mutant gene to pass on), and humans that opposed them.
  • Half the Man He Used to Be: Colossus gets ripped in half courtesy of the Sentinels.
  • Happy Flashback: 1973 Charles briefly reminisces about the first time he met Raven, which was a much happier and more innocent period of his life than his current state of abject misery and self-destruction. One difference between his memory of the event and what we saw in First Class is that Charles as a kid never said, "And that's a promise," right after he told Raven that she would never have to steal again.
  • Hate at First Sight: Judging by the harsh glare the younger Magneto gives to Logan just before he walks away from the Pentagon kitchen, he plainly dislikes the clawed mutant even though the latter hasn't done or said anything negative. It seems highly unlikely that Erik would remember a rude stranger that he once tried to recruit in a bar 11 years prior, and even if he did, his behaviour is rather antagonistic for such a minor insult.
  • Head Crushing: A Sentinel kills Colossus by knocking him into the ground and punching his head flat.
  • Healing Factor: Wolverine's healing factor is still active because that is his inherent ability; bullets just hurt more without the metal skeleton. He still recovers from them. In-Universe, this is the reason why Wolverine is sent back in time instead of Professor Xavier, whose mind would not survive the trip.
  • The Heart: Ironically, it's Wolverine's major role in the film, with very few fight scenes. He's more there to galvanize the younger Xavier into action.
  • Head Blast: The future Sentinels have a laser gun stored inside their heads. When they open their faces, they can fire a beam of concentrated energy to incinerate their foes.
  • Heel–Face Revolving Door: Magneto, as usual. In the Bad Future, he makes a final peace with Charles. In the past, he plays both sides. Furthermore, we see Past Magneto fully ascend to the Big Bad even as Future Magneto and Charles share the Big Good role among the future X-Men. As such, this movie shows him at his most good and his most evil.
  • Heel–Face Turn:
    • Magneto seems to have made the turn between X-Men: The Last Stand and his cameo appearance at the end of The Wolverine, because in this movie, Future Magneto is firmly on Professor X's side throughout and ultimately makes a Heroic Sacrifice against the Sentinels during the climax.
    • Mystique eventually decides to give up her vendetta against Trask to prevent future bloodshed against Mutants. She also saves Nixon and his cabinet from Magneto.
  • Heroic BSoD:
    • What Xavier has been in since the end of First Class. A lot has happened in the Time Skip between the two movies, resulting in the deaths of most of the characters from First Class who don't appear here. It's also stated that Charles lost many of his students and teachers to conscription and The Vietnam War, effectively closing down his newly budding school.
    • Wolverine also has one when he sees Stryker, and his is more like a PTSD flashback.
  • Heroic Sacrifice:
    • The future team's strategy to escape the Sentinels boils down to this. Warpath and the mutants with offensive abilities throw themselves at the androids to stall for time, so that Kitty can send Bishop's consciousness to the past and prevent the attack from ever happening.
    • In The Rogue Cut, Iceman dies holding back a trio of Sentinels so that Magneto can escape with Rogue.
  • Hero Killer: Future Sentinels are downright unstoppable; even a combined team of half-a-dozen really powerful mutants can't defeat them. They kill most of the characters in the Bad Future, some of them more than once, and the only way to escape from them is to run before they even find you.
  • He's Back!: After receiving a pep talk from his future self, Charles finally pulls himself out of his depression and is able to use his powers to their fullest extent.
  • Heterosexual Life-Partners:
    • Played straight with the elderly Magneto and Professor X (the moment where they're holding hands is the closest that we've seen them since First Class), but averted with their younger selves. In 1973, Charles never once calls Erik "friend" (although the latter uses the endearment twice), which goes to show how broken their relationship is.
    • Hank and Charles are each other's Only Friend for a decade, so it's inevitable that they would develop a very close bond. There are moments of non-verbal (and non-telepathic) communication between the two men, like when Xavier gently taps Beast on the chest after he mutters to Logan, "I think I'd like to wake up now." McCoy immediately understands that the gesture means, "You can calm down now, our visitor is not a threat," and he reverts back to his human form.
  • Hide Your Otherness: 1973 Magneto invokes this as he's shouting at Xavier, "Hiding, you and Hank, pretending to be something you're not!" Beast in particular is very uncomfortable with his blue, furry form, and he creates a serum which temporarily suppresses his mutation so that he can appear human.
  • Hijacked by Ganon: The film initially sets Bolivar Trask as the main villain of the 1973 setting, being the creator of the Sentinels that are hunting mutants to extinction in the future. While the younger Erik initially forms a shaky alliance with Logan and Charles to prevent this, he eventually goes off on his own and sabotages Trask's Sentinel prototypes to turn them on the humans, taking over as the main threat in the climax.
  • Hilarious Outtakes: This is the first movie in the franchise to include a gag reel on its Blu-Ray/DVD release.
  • Historical Domain Character: President Richard Nixon as one of the most famous leaders in the 1970s.
  • Historical Hero Upgrade: Double Subverted with Richard Nixon, perhaps the most vilified president of the twentieth century, who gets a big, heroic Take Me Instead moment during a hostage situation only for it to turn out that it's a disguised Mystique getting the drop on Magneto. Then the real Nixon calls off the mutant genocide when one of them saves his life.
  • Historical In-Joke:
    • Nixon is shown deactivating a tape recorder prior to his discussion with Trask, both referencing the recording system that would eventually lead to his downfall and providing an explanation for those recordings missing 18 minutes.
    • Magneto being present at the assassination of JFK, and taking credit for causing the bullet to "curve mid-air", although he claims that he was actually trying to save the president, since JFK was also a mutant.
  • Hoist by His Own Petard:
    • Magneto's standard MO. He laces the 1970s sentinels with iron so that he can control them, and then turns them on the non-mutants at the demonstration. This is in part what averts the bad future - between Nixon being spared by Mystique and proving mutants aren't dangerous unless provoked, the Sentinels being shown to be more dangerous and Trask selling out the USA to other countries, Trask and his sentinels were doomed.
    • Trask is seen handing out plans to his new Sentinel units to the foreign powers at the summit in Paris. This turns out to be a major mistake on his part, as he gets arrested for selling military secrets to other countries in the new timeline. Once the President had a chance to take a closer look at the activities he has been involved in to advance his work, it was prison for Trask.
  • Holy Backlight: When Past Xavier first meets Logan, the former stands in front of very large windows with his family's crests, which are made out of stained glass. This gives the scene a church-like feel, and the sunshine is quite bright compared to Charles' dark silhouette, so it gives the impression that he's bathed in holy light.
  • Hopeless War: The one waged by mutants of the future. Their eradication by the Sentinels is a predetermined outcome; even with Kitty Pryde's Mental Time Travel powers, they can only postpone their inevitable demise.
  • Hope Spot: At the beginning of the Sentinels' attack on the temple, when Magneto and Storm combine their powers to throw the X-Jet into the horde of advancing Sentinels, then detonate the plane's reactor core to create a massive explosion that obliterates all on-screen Sentinels and send a shower of metallic shards in all directions, it looks as if the X-Men might have fended off the attack. However, as the camera switches between the X-Men and focuses on Magneto, he winces, and it pans down to his torso in a Mortal Wound Reveal, as he had been stabbed in the abdomen by a large fragment. Mere moments later, Storm is impaled by an undamaged Sentinel that suddenly emerged from ''below'' the cliff. It is then revealed that several Sentinels had scaled the cliff from above and below for a surprise attack.
  • Hulking Out: Beast uses a serum that allows him to maintain a balance between his human and mutant appearance. When he's angry enough, his mutation kicks in, and he returns to human form once he's calmed down.
  • Humans Are the Real Monsters:
    • This trope has exploded in the Bad Future, with only the worst of the human race left to rule the world while the Sentinels exterminate the remaining mutants and those humans who stand by them. Charles' use of Cerebro indicates humans are terrorizing any remaining mutants they find, and in the Rogue Cut, human scientists apparently in league with the Sentinels are conducting experiments on Rogue.
    • And then there's Bolivar Trask's Mengele-level experiments on mutants in the past, Stryker shipping mutant soldiers who served in Vietnam off to Trask for those experiments, and the Sentinel program in itself which created the entire Apocalypse How in the Bad Future.
  • Hunk: Stryker was quite buff as a younger man.
  • Hypocrite:
    • At the climax of the movie, Past Magneto has his most blatant moment of hypocrisy in the entire film series. After all the bravado both before and after about protecting mutantkind, he deliberately pits a Sentinel against Wolverine and Beast, ordering it to "do what you were made for."
    • In the plane, Magneto calls Xavier out for abandoning the mutants out there to be killed or experimented on. Given how X-Men: First Class ends, Xavier can reasonably say that Beast, Havok, Banshee, and himself (who was newly shot in the spine) could have easily ended up as guinea pigs for either the US or the Soviet Union because Magneto left them stranded in Cuba with no transportation.
    • Throughout both films, Charles is often criticized or distrusted by those around him for using his telepathy. Considering Erik's and Raven's out-and-proud stances on mutantkind, it is very hypocritical that either of them would request that he create a block between them (Raven most specifically) and his mind, especially since it's implied several times that brushing against people's minds is an innate part of Charles' mutation that he can't just shut off. After they're reunited, Erik again criticizes Charles for taking a telepathy-blocking drug that allows him to sleep since it drowns out all of the voices that are constantly bombarding his mind.
  • Hypocritical Humor:
    Charles Xavier: I'm just not very good with violence.
    [the elevator opens, Magneto inside]
    Erik Lehnsherr: Charles...
    [Charles punches him, knocking Erik to the ground]
  • Idle Rich: For a whole decade, Past Charles hasn't done anything the least bit productive; he is a reclusive alcoholic who wallows in self-pity within his Big Fancy House.
  • I Hate Past Me: An unusual variation where it's not stated by the time-traveller Wolverine himself. Right before Kitty sends Wolverine's consciousness back to the past, Future Erik briefly mentions that he worries that his and Charles' past-selves won't understand the nightmarish situation in the Bad Future. Future Charles doesn't want to discuss it further. At the climax, in the Dramatic Irony moment no less, we can say Future Erik is right to worry about his own past-self.
    Magneto: You really think this will work?
    Professor X: I have faith in [Wolverine].
    Magneto: It's not him I'm worried about, it's us. We were young, we didn't know any better.
    Professor X: We will now.
  • Immediate Self-Contradiction:
    Charles Xavier: I'm just not very good with violence.
    [the elevator opens, Magneto inside]
    Erik Lehnsherr: Charles...
    [Charles punches him, knocking Erik to the ground]
  • Immune to Bullets: Wolverine. The bullets he receives from the thugs when he awakes in 1973 have no chance to kill him. His Healing Factor even pushes them out of his body as he regenerates.
  • Impaled with Extreme Prejudice:
    • The Sentinels just love to stab people with the Blade Below the Shoulder and this is by far the nicest way they kill people.
    • Blink. Twice by Sentinels, thanks to the Reset Button. She got it three times in succession the second time.
    • Storm by a Sentinel in the climatic battle. Thankfully the Cosmic Retcon later spares her life.
  • Implied Love Interest:
    • Much like The Last Stand, it's left rather vague whether or not Bobby and Kitty had anything going on. The Rogue Cut makes it explicit because they kiss twice. Come Cosmic Retcon, Bobby is back to being in a relationship with Rogue. Kitty and Colossus co-teaching a class may mean something between them as well.
    • Erik and Raven. When she's holding a spike to his throat, he just quips, "It's been a while since we were this close." There is also a hint when Charles asks Erik for the second time, "How is she [Raven]?", and Charles' facial expression when he hears the answer reads, "Oh, god, he has slept with my sister."
      Erik: She was... we were... I could see why she meant so much to you.
    • In the "Double Take: Xavier & Magneto" featurette on the Blu-Ray release, Michael Fassbender mentions that his character is "...very close to Mystique, he has very strong feelings for her." On one of the commentaries of The Rogue Cut, Bryan Singer states matter-of-factly that Erik was Mystique's lover.
  • Impossible Thief: Quicksilver; his super speed allows him to steal anything he can carry without getting caught.
  • Info Dump: A lot of exposition occurs in between the first fight scene and Wolverine's arrival in the past, explaining how the future X-Men operate, how the Sentinels grew so powerful, how the time travel plan works and why Wolverine is the best man for the job.
  • Innocently Insensitive: After Mystique escapes the peace conference, she is outed as a mutant on the news. She manages to get to a hospital and get her leg bandaged in her normal human guise. The nurse who is doing it is watching the earlier footage and pities Mystique's appearance, wondering "It must be hard waking up each day and seeing that in a mirror." Ouch.
  • Insecurity Camera: Hank uses a device to disable the security cameras at the Pentagon, allowing Quicksilver to free Erik undetected.
  • Instantly Proven Wrong: At the Peace Conference Dr. Bolivar Trask states that his mutant detector could not work in that very room.
    Trask: If I turn it on, the system couldn't even activate in here.
    [ping!!! device activates — surprised looks all around]
    Trask: Unless there's a mutant.
  • Internal Homage:
    • The younger Xavier is a shadow of his former self and hides from the outside world after he loses the people he loves, his Only Friend is a "beast," he lets his hair grow long and has a Beard of Sorrow... which is the same state Logan was in at beginning of The Wolverine. Both characters reject being addressed by their title/codename.
    • There are numerous references to X2: X-Men United, which include Xavier and Magneto uniting to prevent a potential mutant genocide, Mystique sneaking into the Big Bad's office to steal information, Magneto's non-metal prison (and guards with plastic weapons), weaponized metal balls, and turning a device created to destroy mutants against its human creators: Dark Cerebro in X2, the Sentinels here.
  • Invincible Villain: The only way to truly stop the future Sentinels (and the main plot of the film) is to attempt to rewrite history so that they were never created to begin with.
  • Ironic Echo:
  • Irony: The person who led the extermination of the mutants is also a mutant, in this particular case an achondroplasic dwarf.
  • It Has Been an Honor: Future Magneto and Xavier have such a moment as Magneto lays dying while the Sentinels are closing in, and expresses regret that they spent so many years fighting each other.
  • "It" Is Dehumanizing: Played with, as Trask uses gender pronouns when referring to Mystique and her mutation, but slips into "it" when faced with a mutant in person.
  • I've Never Seen Anything Like This Before: This is especially serious as it's coming from Wolverine, whose Bad Future self would be 191 years old and and has seen more fucked up shit in his life than normal people could possibly imagine.
    Wolverine: I've been in a lot of wars... but I've never seen anything like this...
  • I Want Them Alive!: A Justified Trope. Specifically, Trask wants Mystique alive, since he needs not just her blood (which he gets), but also her brain tissue and spinal fluid for what he plans to do with her abilities. In The Rogue Cut, President Nixon misunderstands his intentions.
    Trask: And I want her. For research purposes, of course.
    Nixon: I don't care who you screw, as long as it's not me.
  • I Was Quite a Looker: Major William Stryker was a Hunk in 1973.
  • I Will Find You: Charles, to Raven, in The Rogue Cut. Unfortunately, since he means it as a warning, it just pisses Raven off, and provokes her to travel to the mansion and smash Cerebro to prevent him doing so.
  • Jade-Colored Glasses: James McAvoy observes in the "Double Take: Xavier & Magneto" featurette that his character's experience with Erik in First Class had crushed Charles' rose-coloured glasses.
    "Erik challenged his world view so much, and then violently took away not just the ability to walk, but also his belief in other people a little bit."
  • Jedi Mind Trick: The man in the wheelchair and the two others with him have their invitations in order. Move Along, Nothing to See Here...
  • Jerkass: After Young Magneto gets into a fight with Young Charles on the plane over the events and aftermath of First Class (and Mags losing control of his powers when he loses his temper nearly causes it to crash), Wolverine remarks that he was always an asshole.
  • Jerkass Has a Point:
    • Trask justifies the need for his Sentinels to Nixon by pointing out Mystique can shapeshift into any person; she could impersonate Nixon himself, walk into the White House, and order a nuclear attack. Considering all the other things we've seen her do with her powers over the franchise, including the infiltration of the government in such a manner as he warns, his concerns are perfectly valid.
    • He also points out Magneto's power of metal control and the obvious fact that nearly every conventional weapon is made of metal (and especially with what we've seen he can do at the end of First Class), the need for something new is hard to argue against. Magneto proved that Trask was completely right.
  • Jumping Off the Slippery Slope:
    • Young Erik has grown increasingly amoral since his actions in First Class. Mystique isn't far off, either. The two split right before Dallas.
    • Trask Industries' Sentinels originally targeted mutants, but as time passed, their programming came to include regular humans whose offspring would be mutants. Eventually, they targeted anyone sympathetic to mutants who stood in their way. This ultimately brought about the Bad Future where the worst of humanity lord over the remnants of civilization, using the latest Sentinels to finish off the mutants once and for all.
  • Just in Time: Wolverine, Charles, and the rest arrive just in time to prevent Mystique from assassinating Trask.
  • Just Plane Wrong: A downplayed example. While the Gulfstream II, the plane the X-Men use to fly to Paris, was first manufactured in the 1960s, the wingletsnote  seen on this particular example were not part of the original design and were first available as an aftermarket retrofit in the 1990's (though much like the Blackbirdnote  this is justifiable by Xavier's immense personal fortune and Hank's engineering know-how allowing for a custom, one-off modification). Also, the plane's tail number of N540EA reveals that it was manufactured in 1975, two years after the setting of the film.
  • Karma Houdini: Nixon and his cabinet were perfectly happy for Trask to build an army of robots capable of genocide. The worst they get is a bit of a scare from Magneto's attack. Yes, they changed their mind, but they went along with a guy planning genocide right until their own lives were saved by mutants. (They don't even arrest Trask for torture and vivisection, just for selling military secrets.)
  • Killer Robot: The mutant-hunting Sentinels, manufactured by Trask Industries. They've wiped out most of humanity by the Bad Future the film starts in.
  • Killing for a Tissue Sample: After studying Mystique's DNA, Bolivar Trask decides he wants more samples in order to create new kind of technology with Adaptive Abilities. Among the samples he needs are brain tissue, spinal fluid, and bone marrow, implying that, if he got the chance, he would pick Mystique apart piece by piece.
  • Kleptomaniac Hero: Quicksilver frequently shoplifts behind his mother's back along with a lot of other hijinks, such as breaking into the Pentagon to spring Erik.
  • Know When to Fold Them: Erik makes it clear that he's not willing to take on Charles without his protective helmet; he knows that he stands no chance against the telepath in a straight fight. When he loses his helmet at the end of the film, he retreats.
  • Laser-Guided Karma: Bolivar Trask, in The Stinger of The Rogue Cut at least, is imprisoned in the same cell the Pentagon used for Magneto when his double-dealing is exposed.
  • Leaning on the Fourth Wall: All of the dialogue about the mutants being on the "verge of extinction" and the possibility of starting over has been read by some critics as commentary on the possibility of Days of Future Past "saving" the franchise after the damage done to it by The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
    Magneto: We've been given a second chance.
  • Leitmotif:
    • Composer John Ottman elaborates on Professor X's theme in this interview.
      Radio host: We talked about Xavier's theme which almost acts as the central theme for the film because his story is so important, and it hovers around him. Since the film is about hope, and his character is about hope and rediscovering his hope, kind of a lost soul, where did you really draw the music from [...]?
      John Ottman: [...] I knew what the character's challenge was, what the film was about, so I tried to create a piece of music or a theme that could play both sides, sort of despondent and tortured, but also be designed so that it can be hopeful as it evolves later in the movie. I started sketching on an electric piano, and it sounded so cool and vintage [...]. Early in the movie, when it's just very subtly underscoring him, it's a lot of electric piano within the strings.
    • In this featurette, Ottman brings up Magneto's theme.
      John Ottman: Magneto's theme is a very simple "baauum baaaaw." That's basically it, it's so simple you can identify with it and feel it. [...] When he does his stuff at the end and you hear that big sound, it's bigger than it ever was before, and it ties things together.
  • Like Brother and Sister: Said by the older Professor X when he mentions that Mystique was like a sister to him. It's later alluded to when a nurse wonders if the blue, scaly woman at the Paris Peace Accords has a family, and Raven replies, "Yes, she does."
  • Literally Shattered Lives: Iceman at the hands of a sentinel during the first battle. Two Cosmic Retcons later, he's back alive.
  • Living Emotional Crutch: Hank is this to the dispirited Charles; the latter is so desperate to escape from his mental pain that he would most likely have died from alcohol poisoning if McCoy wasn't around to supervise him. But it works the other way around, too, as the approval-seeking Hank has voluntarily suppressed his individuality (i.e. he has no career, hobby, or social life) just to attend to Xavier's needs 24/7, and is thus defining himself exclusively through his dutiful service to his ex-mentor. These are strong indicators that they are both trapped in an unhealthy codependent relationship.
  • Living MacGuffin: Mystique is the lynchpin to the Bad Future in more ways than one. Her murder of Trask not only drives others to complete his work, but her subsequent capture provides them with the key to making Sentinels unstoppable, which is why Erik tries to kill her before she can kill Trask.
  • Logical Weakness:
    • So, the Sentinels are made of a "space-age polymer" and contain no metal, and Wolverine has no adamantium in his body anymore? No problem, Magneto just bends some metal into their bodies so he can still restrain and/or control them with his powers.
    • The future Sentinels exploit several logical weaknesses in their battles with the future X-Men. They deliberately focus firepower on Bishop and forcefeed him so much energy that it overloads him, use extreme heat and fire to negate Iceman's powers, and after all the other X-Men are dealt with, they focus on swarming Blink, attacking her from so many angles that she can't think to make portals fast enough. As mentioned above, they're made of an advanced polymer, meaning Magneto has to fall back on using outside sources of metal to fight them, making it easier for them to take him on.
  • Logo Joke: The film brings back the previous Logo Joke of having the "X" in "TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX" fade out a few seconds after the rest of the logo, as well as adding the first few notes of the X-Men theme at the end of the Fox fanfare.
  • "London, England" Syndrome: Surprisingly averted. The cities of "Moscow," "Saigon" and "Paris" are listed without the corresponding country.
  • Long-Lost Relative: Simon Kinberg confirms that Magneto is Quicksilver's father, so the trope is played with in this case because although Erik suspects that Peter is his son after the teen mentions that his mother once knew a guy who could control metal, the older mutant doesn't try to seek out the truth or inform anyone else about the potential blood relation.
  • Looks Like Jesus: Young Professor X not only sports longer hair and a Beard of Sorrow, but he ultimately becomes an All-Loving Hero at the movie's climax.
  • Loser Protagonist: Past Xavier is the central figure, and he has been a totally unproductive member of society in between 1963 and 1973 because he's clinically depressed. He's a heavy drinker and substance abuser.
  • Ludicrous Speed: Peter uses his mutant super speed to zip Magneto down a hallway. He holds the back of his head to prevent whiplash, but he's visibly ill and dizzy for a bit after it's over.

    Tropes M to O 
  • Magic Pants: Hank's clothes show little to no damage when he morphs into the Beast.
  • Manchild: The younger Charles rejects all adult responsibilities after he succumbs to depression, and McCoy has to look after him.
  • Manly Facial Hair: Iceman sports a moustache and a beard. Shawn Ashmore has stated in interviews that the new design is meant to represent his character's maturity.
  • Meaningful Look:
    • Kitty and Bobby share one as they cross paths during their battle against the Sentinels, and this may allude to them being in a relationship.
    • Mystique, disguised as a colonel, winks at Alex in a reassuring manner which says, "Don't worry, I'll get you out of this." Alex is unaware that the colonel is his former friend, though, so the wink confuses him.
    • Hank and Charles exchange an amused "Why am I not surprised?" glance (the former even adds a raised eyebrow) after Peter asks them, "I saw your flight plan in the cockpit; why are you going to Paris?"
    • When Trask mentions that the Sentinel program will cost a lot more given that Congress shut it down, he pointedly looks at said congressman who's in the room with them.
  • Meanwhile, in the Future…: Past and Future timelines run simultaneously until the connection is finally broken. It's explained by the specifics of Kitty Pryde's ability.
  • MegaCorp: Trask Industries, the company owned by inventor Bolivar Trask and the creator the Sentinels.
  • Mental Time Travel: 2023 Wolverine's mind gets beamed back in time into his younger self's body in 1973. It also goes in reverse when Young Charles has a conversation with his future self by way of Logan's mind.
  • Mess of Woe: In 1973, Charles' neglect of his mansion is a reflection of how utterly forlorn he is. His bedroom and study are extremely cluttered, plus the grass on his estate is overgrown. Hank does his best to clean up some of the mess that Xavier carelessly leaves behind (at one point we see McCoy picking up empty liquor bottles).
  • Messy Hair: 1973 Charles doesn't bother with his grooming because he's too depressed to care.
  • Metal Detector Checkpoint: There is one on the White House lawn; it beeps when Xavier passes through because of his wheelchair, and when it's Wolverine's turn... nothing happens because his 1973 body is adamantium-free. This is a subversion of a running gag throughout the X-Men films going all the way back to the first film.
  • A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Read: When Charles was in between 9 and 12 years old, he was Hearing Voices and wasn't aware that he was telepathic, so he had assumed that he was going mad from an acute mental illness. His past self is so broken that it's torture for him to be bombarded by the thoughts of others, and he uses a serum designed by Hank to block out the ceaseless "chatter" in his head. In order to visit his future self, Xavier has to go through Wolverine's mind, which is full of traumatic memories; it's a pretty shocking experience for him. Likewise, when he attempts to use Cerebro, all he can sense is people crying out all over the world in loneliness and pain.
  • Mirror Scare: A variant where a security guard spots Quicksilver in the reflection on the elevator wall after he picks up his hat from the ground.
  • Misplaced-Names Poster: A particular ridiculous example is this poster where Hugh Jackman is the only one credited yet isn't even on the poster.
  • Mission Control: In The Rogue Cut, the older Professor X telepathically guides Magneto and Iceman through the mansion's secret corridors from the relative safety of the X-Jet.
  • "Mister Sandman" Sequence: When Wolverine wakes up in 1973, the first thing he sees is a lava lamp, and then he takes in the '70s decor of the rest of the room and discovers he's lying on a waterbed, as a Roberta Flack song plays on the radio.
  • Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal: Magneto's attempt to kill Mystique essentially derails her off his path of a race war, though for most of the film she's still determined to kill Trask for his crimes.
  • Moment Killer: Wolverine wakes up in the Good Future and sees Jean Grey is still alive. Stunned, he reaches out to touch her hair, only for Cyclops to intercept his hand.
  • Monumental Damage:
    • In 2023 Moscow, the Kremlin and other Red Square monuments are in shambles (although scaffolding indicates someone is at least trying to repair it).
    • Magneto uses one national monument as a weapon against another in the climax. Specifically, he picks up RFK Stadium, levitates it across DC, and drops it in a circle around the White House. Later in the fight, he pulls a panic room out from under the White House through the walls and floors to get at the people inside it.
  • Monumental Theft: Magneto steals a stadium.
  • Mood Whiplash: The 1973 scenes in the first act are filled with jokes and humorous moments (such as Quicksilver's antics) which clash with the bleak tone of the 2023 scenes and the somber mood of acts 2 and 3. In fact, the 1973 scenes in general can come across as this. Even during their darkest moments, the more colorful backdrops and blatantly '70s hairstyles, clothes and aesthetics can be jarring.
  • Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: Scientist Dr. Bolivar Trask, who likes to experiment on mutants.
  • Mortal Wound Reveal: Old Magneto at the end, revealing a severed Sentinel claw sticking out from his lower torso. Given that it's not made of metal, it wasn't stopped like the wreckage from the destroyed X-Jet.
  • Movie Superheroes Wear Black:
    • The Bad Future X-Men wear practical black body armor.
    • Young Magneto wears a costume that's a cross between his red comic book outfit and the black suit Ian McKellen wore in the original trilogy.
  • Mr. Fanservice: Logan appears entirely naked when first waking up in the past.
  • Ms. Fanservice: Jennifer Lawrence. Mostly seen in a skin-tight bodysuit as Mystique or alternatively with a midriff-baring outfit as Blondie.
  • Mugged for Disguise: Quicksilver mugs a Pentagon security guard for his uniform during the jailbreak sequence. He leaves the real guard duct-taped to a wall and gagged.
  • Mundane Solution: They need to find Quicksilver fast, but Charles makes it clear that Cerebro is out of the question, and the Internet hasn't been invented yet. So they use a phonebook instead.
  • Mundane Utility:
    • Magneto uses his metal-controlling powers to stitch his head wound and to raise the volume control knob on the television set.
    • Quicksilver uses his speed to play ping-pong with himself.
  • My Future Self and Me: Unable to cope with his powers, to use them properly and deal with all the stress caused by the things at stake, and with a guy like Wolverine who can't be anyone's mentor, Charles Xavier got the help of the best mentor that Wolverine knows about: Charles Xavier! To accomplish this, 1973 Xavier reads Logan's mind, allowing him to manifest outside of Wolverine's future body (which is essentially "dreaming" in the future) and talk with his future self.
  • Mythology Gag: A lot (enough for its own page).
  • Naked on Arrival: Logan wakes up in the past naked... because his past self just spent the night in bed with the woman he's supposed to be guarding.
  • Narrative Filigree: The tour guide in the Pentagon explains that the building has twice the number of bathrooms that would be actually needed, because it was built when racial segregation was still in effect. Even though that has passed, it would cost too much to remove them.
  • Near-Villain Victory: In both the past and the future. Magneto almost succeeds at eliminating American leadership and ushering in an era of mutant tyranny backed by the reprogrammed Sentinels, and the Sentinels almost succeed in eliminating the last of the X-Men.
  • Neck Snap: Mystique kills one of the guards at the Paris Peace Conference by snapping his neck while back-to-back with him.
  • Nerd Glasses:
    • Hank clearly likes the horn-rimmed kind because he continues to wear them 11 years after First Class. The surface area of the lenses are slightly larger and more square-ish to reflect the style of The '70s.
    • Dr. Bolivar Trask's glasses are a tad too big for his face, but they were considered fashionable during this time period. His eyewear is meant to denote his status as an engineer (more specifically a weapons designer).
  • Nerds Are Sexy: In his human form, McCoy is quite the Pretty Boy after he loses his Nerd Glasses near the end of the movie. This is further accentuated in The Rogue Cut when Raven removes Hank's eyewear in order to see his face more clearly, and she kisses him shortly afterwards.
  • Never Trust a Trailer:
    • The first official trailer gives the impression that Wolverine is being sent back in time to recruit the primary mutant characters we met in X-Men: First Class, including Mystique (with a clip showing off her badass fighting skills coupled with spliced-together dialogue stating, "[We need her] because she's a cold-hearted bitch"), so that they can unite with the present-day cast to battle the Sentinels. This is actually the farthest thing from the truth: Logan's the only one who ever travels through time in the film, and it's for the purpose of uniting Charles and Erik so that they can stop Mystique from committing the assassination that will bring about the creation of the Sentinels in the first place.
    • The "I don't want your future!" line from Young Charles is directed to Logan and his memories, not to Future Charles as the trailer implies.
    • In the first trailer when Logan asks Magneto where he will find him, Erik says "A different path, a darker path"; he's referring to Mystique in the movie, not himself.
  • New Era Speech: 1973 Magneto proclaims a new era of Mutant supremacy to the American leadership and the entire world. For added irony, it's interspersed with scenes of the X-Men fighting and dying in the future.
    Magneto: You built these machines to destroy us. Why? Because you are afraid of our gifts. Because we are different. Humanity has always feared that which is different. Well, I'm here to tell you, to tell the world, you're right to fear us! We are the future! We are the ones who will inherit this Earth! And anyone who stands in our way will suffer the same fate as these men you see before you! Today was meant to be a display of your power. Instead, I give you a glimpse of the devastation my race can unleash upon yours! Let this be a warning to all of you. And to all my mutant brothers and sisters out there, I say this: no more hiding. No more suffering. You have lived in the shadows in shame and fear for too long. Come out. Join me. Fight together in a brotherhood of our kind! A new tomorrow, that starts today!
  • New Powers as the Plot Demands: Kitty's new ability to send people's consciousnesses back through time is a far throw from intangibility. It's strange but not unprecedented, as in the comic-book continuity a few of the X-Men develop "secondary mutations" spontaneously or as a result of stress.
  • The New '20s: The Bad Future is set in 2023.
  • Newscaster Cameo: Will Lyman, the longtime host of the PBS current events documentary series Frontline, narrates one of the viral marketing clips for the film, "The Bent Bullet: JFK and the Mutant Conspiracy", which is formatted in the style of a trailer for Frontline.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
    • Magneto tries to kill Mystique because experiments performed on her were used to give the future Sentinels their adaptive abilities. However, this attempt spills her blood, allowing it to be collected and sent to Trask Industries. It's downplayed in that Trask still needs the living specimen.
    • Likewise, the same attempt leads to Mystique, Magneto and Beast all jumping out the window and being seen on TV doing incredible things, which causes a public scare bad enough that Nixon gives Trask the funding he needs to produce prototype Sentinels decades ahead of schedule. Again downplayed in that they all get destroyed in the end anyways.
    • The heroes' decision to break Magneto out ultimately does more harm than good. Given Mystique's happy reaction to Charles's presence, it seems leaving Erik in prison would have saved a lot of problems. It's even discussed by Xavier when he tells Logan, "It was a mistake freeing Erik."
    • Depending on how you interpret The Stinger, it seems that, in preventing the Bad Future, the X-Men have somehow inadvertently set the stage for Apocalypse to rise up and attack mankind in the new timeline.
    • The Rogue Cut adds two more examples:
      • In freeing Rogue, Iceman is killed, and the Sentinels gain the means to track the X-Men to where they where hiding, via a Sentinel arm stuck on the jet.
      • Hank allows Raven back into the mansion and doesn't tell Charles or Logan, allowing her to gain access to Cerebro and smash it, before fleeing into the night, making them unable to track her.
  • No Kill like Overkill: This seems to be the Future Sentinels' general philosophy when taking out targets. As such they commit a string of ruthlessly brutal and outright cruel murder during the film, seemingly to ensure their targets are taken out for good. There is some cold justification for this considering how much punishment some mutants can take, though it doesn't make what they do any less horrific.
  • No Medication for Me: In the end, past Charles decides to drop the serum that helped him block out the voices in his head.
  • Non-Action Big Bad: Dr. Trask isn't skilled in combat.
  • Non-Action Guy: 1973 Charles invokes this trope to explain to Logan why he always tries to talk his way out of a problem (even if it results in ineffective rambling) instead using brute force. However, Xavier can still throw a mean punch if someone really pisses him off despite not being much of a fighter.
  • Non-Uniform Uniform: The future X-Men mostly wear black (except for Rogue, who wears white), but that seems to be the only real "rule". Storm, Magneto, and Bishop's costumes all have capes, Kitty Pryde's has a jacket, Blink, Warpath, and Sunspot all have individual markings and design elements, etc.
  • Non-Verbal Miscommunication: A minor example when Raven (in disguise as a military officer) tries to indicate her identity to Alex — by winking at him. The look on Alex's face is priceless.
  • Nothing but Hits: All your favorite tunes from the '70s. The first thing Wolverine hears in 1973 is Roberta Flack's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face"; Quicksilver listens to Alice Cooper's "Hello Hooray" and Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle"; the disco in Paris is playing Claude Francois's French '70s hit "Stop au nom de l'amour."
  • Nothing Is the Same Anymore: After all the time-travelling takes place, the course of history has been altered with only Wolverine and Professor X aware of what went on previously, Jean Grey and Cyclops are both Back from the Dead, Rogue apparently has her powers once more, Mystique has apparently undergone a Heel–Face Turn, and the public became aware of the mutant presence two decades earlier than it did in the original timeline. Also, the events of The Last Stand and Origins have been confirmed to never have transpired in the new timeline, and the events of X-Men and X-Men United occurred differently if they occurred at all.
  • Not in This for Your Revolution:
    • Initially, Xavier does not help because of the future mumbo-jumbo, which he did not believe, but because of Raven.
    • Maximoff does not care at all about the whole problem, but he helps them free Magneto from the Pentagon just to prove that he would dare.
  • Not Wearing Tights: The film Zig-Zags on this. The future X-Men wear costumes (mostly black but with some ornamentation), while most of the 1973-era characters just wear their street clothes. However, the younger Magneto wears a red costume that looks much closer to his comic design than any of the previous cinematic takes on the character.
  • Official Couple: Bobby and Kitty are explicitly portrayed as a couple in The Rogue Cut. In the Alternate Timeline, that is erased because Bobby is with Rogue again, and Kitty is hinted to be with Colossus.
  • Oh, Crap!:
    • When the Vietnamese general sees Mystique shapeshift in front him.
    • Hank is very alarmed when Magneto points a gun in Mystique's direction, with Charles standing directly in the line of fire.
    • Beast panics when he notices how many people are staring at his blue, furry form after his brawl with Magneto.
    • Past Charles has a moment of terror when he realizes that a very large piece of falling debris will crush him to death unless he gets out of its way.
  • Older Than They Look:
    • Charles (aside from the beard and long hair), Erik, Hank and Alex Summers all physically look the same as they did in X-Men: First Class despite the fact that it's been over a decade since the events of that film. (Mystique is excused, since her mutation slows her aging process.) Honest Trailers even made the mistake of describing McAvoy's character as a "young man," a term usually reserved for males who are under 30; Xavier is in his late thirties/early forties in 1973, but it's easy to forget that because the actor appears younger than his actual age.
  • Old Flame: In The Rogue Cut, Mystique and Beast definitely still have feelings for each other despite being separated for over a decade. Mystique was even romantically involved with Magneto before he was incarcerated, but her first choice back in 1962 was Hank.
  • Old Money: Past Charles can afford not to work for a decade because he can simply mooch off his inherited wealth. The Xavier family crest on the tail of his personal plane, his plane's elegantly decorated interior, and even the design of the chess set he brings along for the trip are a visual cue to the audience that he is this trope, and not the tacky (or so the stereotype goes) Nouveau Riche.
  • Ominous Floating Spaceship: An Ominous Floating Stadium casts large shadows on the ground as it slowly hovers across the city.
  • Omnidisciplinary Scientist:
    • Hank, per First Class, is not only an accomplished engineer but a skilled biologist. He's improved on the latter, as his serum now works as intended (more or less).
    • Trask seems to be a pioneer robotist, building robots that work in the 1970s, but he is also a skilled biologist, who can study mutants and understand how their powers work at the cellular level.
  • Omniglot: Mystique is fluent in Vietnamese and French.
  • One-Woman Wail: Can be heard on the soundtrack after Storm gets impaled by a Sentinel and falls to her death.
  • Only Friend: After Past Charles isolates himself from the outside world due to his severe depression, Hank becomes his sole companion. Hank also doesn't seem to have a social circle, as he has taken it upon himself to be Charles' caretaker, which appears to be something of a full-time job.
  • Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping:
    • As in the previous film, James McAvoy loses his English accent in favor of his native Scottish one when he shouts, "I don't want YA FUTCHA!" It's even more apparent when he's yelling at Erik on the plane because it comes out as, "YA ABONDONED MEH!"
    • Interestingly, it's averted with Michael Fassbender who maintains an Ian McKellen-esque English accent rather than slipping into his own Irish one as he did repeatedly in First Class. Fassbender acknowledges the change in his character's speech pattern in the "Double Take: Xavier & Magneto" documentary.
      "For this film, I've been studying more [McKellen's] voice than I did in [First Class], sort of incorporating that a little bit more. I hope it doesn't seem a little bit weird from the last one, but ten years have passed, and I believe Magneto is doing elocution lessons by himself in solitary confinement."
    • The English Nicholas Hoult's American accent is pretty good, but he frequently messes up on the word "professor."
    • Hugh Jackman's Australian accent slips out in Wolverine's very first line of dialogue.
  • Opening Monologue: The opening lines about the dystopian future are narrated by old Charles.
  • Out-of-Character Alert: Dr. Trask's secretary is surprised when he compliments her scarf, which is something he doesn't normally do. We learn a few seconds later that "Trask" is actually Mystique, who hasn't quite mastered gender roles yet.
  • Overshadowed by Awesome: Happens to Wolverine, of all people. He's The Heart here, helping 1973-era Charles Xavier deal with his issues. Against the various security guards and soldiers, Wolverine pulls his weight, but he's not nearly as effective as Quicksilver or Magneto without his adamantium bones and claws. Against Sentinels, he's not even as effective as Beast. Even when this takes away his normal vulnerability to Magneto, he's still quite outclassed.

    Tropes P to S 
  • Palette Swap:
    • Magneto always had some red and/or purple colour on his outfit, but in 2023, his uniform is completely black and grey, signifying that he's now part of the X-Men.
    • Costume designer Louise Mingenbach described Past Xavier's switch from his brown-and-pink casual wear to his more formal blues and greys that is typically associated with the character in the other movies.
      "At the beginning of the film, Charles is medicating, and very possibly on hallucinogens, so we had that come through in his shirt. As he pulls himself together, he wears a nice blue oxford like all good, put-together men — a progression from that psychedelic Cat Stevens-wear."
  • Parental Substitute:
    • Charles invokes this trope when he claims that he had raised Raven, but Erik corrects him — they grew up together. He is not her father. This ties into the end of the film, when he stops trying to control her and lets her make her own choice.
    • Downplayed in the scene where Charles interacts with Peter before the former departs for Paris. Xavier instinctively behaves in a paternal manner when he's around a young mutant, especially one who doesn't have much of a direction in his life (in Quicksilver's case, he's a juvenile delinquent who grew up without a father). Peter's smile at the end indicates that he appreciates the sentiment.
  • Patrick Stewart Speech: The older Professor X gives one to his younger self, convincing the latter to "hope again," and that despite what happens (or in 1973 Xavier's case, will happen) to mutants, humanity can still be shown "a better path."
  • Peace Conference: Mystique plans to murder Trask during the signing of the Paris Peace Accords.
  • People Puppets: Xavier possesses various people around Mystique at the airport to talk to her in a casual display of how creepy his power can be when he gets creative. He temporarily prevents Mystique's body from moving once he determines that she's pretending to be a secret service agent, although he still permits her to speak. President Nixon, his cabinet and Trask are put on "pause" when Charles tells Raven he won't push her anymore and that she's free to decide Trask's fate. After the climax, he also controls Magneto when Mystique knocks the latter's helmet off to free himself from the metal debris that fell on him earlier.
  • Period Piece: More than half of the movie is set in 1973. Everyone has long hair, drives funky cars, and wears garish colors, Hank McCoy is proud of developing a way to record "all three networks and PBS" at once, and Sentinels are described as being made from a "space age polymer." Seventies pop music is also prominent.
  • Perma-Shave: Professor X, Magneto, Warpath and Colossus in 2023 have very little facial hair despite living in a post-apocalyptic world where they're being hunted down by Sentinels.
  • Perma-Stubble:
    • Hank has light stubble throughout the movie which is meant to make him look older than his clean-shaven appearance in First Class.
    • Sunspot sports a 5 o'clock shadow, making him unique among the Free Mutants.
  • Personal Arcade: Quicksilver has a highly overclocked Pong machine in his basement.
  • Phlebotinum Overload: In one iteration of reality, Bishop blows up after absorbing too much energy from three Sentinels' beams.
  • Playing with Syringes: Apparently a pastime of Trask, given he does this to all of the Dropped a Bridge on Him mutants from First Class and intends to do the same to Mystique.
    Professor X: They captured her that day... tortured her, experimented on her.
  • Plucky Comic Relief: Quicksilver is the main source of comedy with his high-speed shenanigans.
  • Porn Stache: Bolivar Trask has a glorious one; it was a very popular form of facial hair for men in the 1970s.
  • Portal Cut: Blink takes off a Sentinel's arm when one of her portals closes on it. Unfortunately, it closes because said arm has just stabbed her. If the X-Men had thought to weaponize this, as it is one of the few things that unambiguously damages a Future Sentinel, they might have actually had a chance against them.
  • Portal to the Past: Although there's no actual portal, Kitty's new time powers have a very specific set of rules that match the trope closely: she can't physically send people back in time, only their consciousness, time passes at the same rate for their bodies in the present and their minds in the past, and whatever changes they made to the past only affect the future once they wake up — meaning the Bad Future stays bad until Wolverine finishes his mission, instead of changing incrementally as he alters history. While Logan's mind gets sent back to inhabit his body in 1973, his 2023 body (and the rest of the X-Men) are still threatened by the approaching army of Sentinels, meaning that he only has so much time in the past to Set Right What Once Went Wrong.
  • Posthumous Villain Victory: In the original timeline, Mystique kills Bolivar Trask to avenge his killing of Xavier's other students. This just convinces the rest of the world that Trask's anti-mutant prejudice was correct, and Trask's Sentinel Program continues without him—eventually leading to the Bad Future where Sentinels have hunted mutants to the brink of extinction. Fortunately, Logan is able to travel back in time to stop this from coming to pass. Appropriately enough, stopping Trask's Sentinel Program requires keeping him alive, and discrediting him instead.
  • Power at a Price: A tough decision for Xavier: he can either take the serum and be able to walk, or don't take it and have his mutant power (which includes being able to help Raven). He can't have both things, legs and power; he must choose.
  • Power Incontinence:
    • Erik nearly crashes the plane when he's yelling at Charles because his magnetism messes with the instruments.
    • Charles subjected himself to a Power Nullifier because he was losing control over his powers.
  • Power Nullifier:
    • When Logan first arrives in the past, Charles doesn't have his psychic powers to verify his story or make their mission easier. This is because he's taking a serum that lets him walk, at the expense of suppressing his telepathy. Considering the Heroic BSoD he's in the middle of, he doesn't mind. The same serum lets Beast look normal with no apparent ill effects, but it has to be taken periodically by both of them.
    • Nullification collars are used in the Bad Future on mutants in the Sentinel-controlled camps.
  • The Power of the Sun: Sunspot's mutant ability involves the sun; hence the code name.
  • Power Tattoo: Ink, a minor X-Men member in the comics, appears in Vietnam with Toad and Havok, as well as the Bad Future in a concentration camp. He possesses his phoenix, telepathy bolts and biohazard tattoos at least, the latter of which he uses to incapacitate some guards.
  • Pragmatic Adaptation: The ageless Wolverine gets sent back in time instead of Kitty Pryde, as film Kitty wouldn't have been born in 1973.
    • Along similar times, due to Senator Kelly having appeared as an old man in the relatively-present day first film, there’s no way he’d either be worthy of assassination in the past, so Sentinel creator Bolivar Trask becomes the target that needs saving.
  • Pre-Asskicking One-Liner: "What's the matter, baby? You don't think I look pretty like this?"
  • Precision F-Strike:
    • Charles Xavier, of all people, tells Wolverine to "Fuck off" in a Call-Back to their first encounter.
    • The Rogue Cut has President Nixon grumpily utter "Fuck me" after watching news footage of the Paris Peace Accords.
  • President Superhero: If you believe what Magneto says, John F. Kennedy was a mutant. And Magneto didn't assassinate him.
  • Pretentious Latin Motto: If you do a Freeze-Frame Bonus on the Xavier coat of arms, located on the tail of Charles' personal plane, the family motto reads, "Fratrem tuum adjuva," which means "Help your brother." Not only does this fit Professor X's compassionate personality to a tee, but it also suggests that his Old Money ancestors on his father's side were philanthropists. Assisting those who are less fortunate must have been regarded as a sacred duty, as those Latin words supposedly designate what the Xavier family values the most.
  • Pretty Boy: Peter Maximoff is baby-faced with reddish lips and cute in an impish way. It's a visual cue to the audience that he's an immature prankster who doesn't take life seriously.
  • Pretty Little Headshots: In the flashback, we see Mystique giving Trask a headshot which only leaves a tiny entry wound on his forehead.
  • Product Placement:
    • Quicksilver is shown to be a fan of Hostess Twinkies and Ding-Dongs. In real life, Hostess released a line of Days of Future Past-themed Twinkies to promote the movie.
    • A drink order is called, specifically for a bottle of Johnnie Walker (which blend is yet unclear). Also it would appear that all other bottles of whiskey in the film are likewise Johnnie Walker, of which quite a lot is drunk, especially by Charles Xavier.
    • When Magneto lifts up RFK Stadium, ads for Mountain Dew, Adidas, and various other brands can be seen, though this can be at least partly justified by the fact that sports stadiums do in fact have lots of advertising on and around them. Kind of interesting that there's no advertising visible of any companies that have since gone out of business, though...
  • The Promise:
    • Wolverine requests that the younger Xavier form the X-Men regardless of the outcome of their mission.
      Logan: Whatever happens today, I need you to promise me something. [...] The X-Men, promise me you'll find us. Use your power, bring us together. Guide us, lead us. [...]
      Charles: I'll... do my best.
    • And later:
      Logan: It's good to see you, Charles. It's good to see everyone.
      Professor X: [smiles warmly] Well, I had a promise to keep.
  • Prone to Tears: Past Xavier's psychological health is so poor that the slightest thing can upset him, and he's regularly seen with wet, reddened eyes or tears streaming down his face. Unlike most male examples of this trope, it's Played for Drama, not for laughs.
  • Pstandard Psychic Pstance: When Xavier uses his telepathy, McAvoy accentuates it by placing his fingers against his temple. When using Logan as a conduit to the future, on Logan's temple.
  • Psychoactive Powers: Charles can't control Cerebro until he gets some advice and encouragement from his future self and stabilizes emotionally, after which he's fine.
  • Purple Is Powerful:
    • The 1973 Sentinels are a complicated example. They are purple and certainly powerful, but they pale in comparison to their solid-grey future counterparts.
    • Blink's Battle Aura and Facial Markings are purple and she is indeed a powerful mutant.
  • Put on a Bus:
    • His role in the first act concluded, Quicksilver is promptly told to go his own way, only making a brief cameo at the end at his house, away from the action.
    • Moira MacTaggert, who was last seen in First Class, doesn't appear in this movie, but she returns in X-Men: Apocalypse.
  • Race Lift: Blink, a white Bahamanian in the comics, is played by Chinese actress Fan Bingbing. It's not too much of a stretch, since Blink is purple in the comics, despite her white ancestry.
  • Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: According to screenwriter Simon Kinberg, this film unites ALL the future mutants: "It's this dysfunctional family and these desperate people who are outcasts in their own lives, and they come together, and that's not as emotionally satisfying as an outcast on their own."
  • Reaction Shot: According to Bryan Singer's commentary, Ms. Maximoff's expression as she watches Magneto's speech on her TV conveys both her shock and recognition of the man who fathered her son Peter.
  • Reasonable Authority Figure:
    • The head Congressman who's against Trask's Sentinel project. The incident from ten years ago notwithstanding, mutants are a very small portion of the population and haven't been causing trouble.note 
    • Richard Nixon himself gets this treatment, unlike most examples. While he does go along with the Sentinel Program, it's out of a desire to protect the nation from super-powered beings rather than any genuine malice. When Mystique saves his life from Magneto, it's implied he gave her a pardon and jailed Trask for trying to sell secrets to America's enemies.
  • "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Erik delivers one of the Type 1 or Type 4 variety, depending on how one interprets the scene, calling Charles a mutant traitor for failing to protect the others and suppressing his own power.
  • Recycled Trailer Music:
  • Red Shirt: Warpath, Blink, Bishop, Sunspot and Colossus are glorified extras whose main purpose in the story is to serve as cannon fodder for the 2023-era Sentinels. And damn do they look good doing it!
  • Refuge in Audacity: Quicksilver blatantly uses his super speed when he first meets Wolverine, Professor X and Beast because he knows no-one would believe what they said about him. It's implied this is how he gets away with everything he does.
  • Refused by the Call: Xavier was the initial option to make the time travel, but it was not to be. He would die if they attempted it. So it had to be Wolverine, whose mind can heal as fast as it gets hurt by the procedure.
  • The Reliable One: Hank assumes responsibility for Charles and the estate after his friend becomes an emotional train wreck.
  • Remake Cameo: In the French dub, Senator Brickman is voiced by Bernard Tiphaine. The latter was also the voice actor for Beast in the 90's X-Men: The Animated Series cartoon.
  • Remember the New Guy?:
    • When debating how to break out Magneto, Wolverine casually announces he "knows a guy." Said guy turns out to be Quicksilver, who has not appeared or been mentioned in any of the six previous X-Men movies.note 
    • The future portion of the film fully incorporates the idea from First Class which established that Charles and Mystique grew up together. It can seem a bit jarring to see Patrick Stewart's Xavier sadly recounting how he once loved Mystique and considered her his sister, when there is absolutely no indication at any point in the original trilogy that the two were ever close or even knew one another.
  • Reset Button: For the entire franchise, as Wolverine's interference has essentially made First Class the only film in the series which is (still) canon with respect to the new timeline. By the end of the movie, Scott, Jean and Professor Xavier are alive again, Rogue has her powers back, and she and Bobby are dating again.
  • Reset-Button Suicide Mission: The X-Men send Wolverine into the past to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, and perform a heroic last stand to protect his body and buy him enough San Dimas Time to succeed. No matter what happens, they won't survive it.
  • La Résistance: The X-Men of the Bad Future fight against the Sentinels, but by the time the movie starts they seem to be able to accomplish little but stay one step ahead of the enemy.
  • Restored My Faith in Humanity: Future Charles Xavier does this for his younger self by convincing him to hope again.
  • Retcon: X-Men: The Last Stand features a man named Trask as the head of homeland security, who was originally intended to be the Bolivar Trask of this continuity. However, with the release of this film, "Secretary Trask" retroactively becomes a different character who just happens to have the same last name.
  • Ret-Gone: This fate befalls the future Sentinels when the murder of the program's creator is averted; he isn't able to create them so they never existed.
  • Retraux: The 1973 Sentinels are clearly based on their Silver Age comic inspirations. In sharp contrast, however, the 2023 Sentinels look more alien than robot.
  • Revenge: Mystique is motivated by her desire for vengeance after seeing what became of the mutants whom Trask abducted.
  • Riddle for the Ages: Since Wolverine was the one who pushed Xavier out of his Achilles in His Tent in the altered timeline, what event prompted him to do the same in the original timeline?
  • Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Wolverine is told up-front that he (and only he) will remember the Bad Future should he succeed in changing history. In the end, he wakes up in the "good future" with his memories diverging from real history since it was changed in 1973.
  • Robo Cam: The 1973 Sentinels' vision indicates to them if a life form in sight is a mutant or not.
  • Robot War: The mutants' struggle against the Sentinels in the future.
  • Ruins of the Modern Age: A matter of decades after the present in the Bad Future, New York's skyline consists of bombed-out looking shells of buildings, the X-Mansion isn't much better, and the only place we see that seems largely untouched by the apocalypse is the monastery high in the Tibetan Alps.
  • Rule of Cool: It's unlikely that a functional interior room like a kitchen at the Pentagon would be designed with a circular shape, but it makes Quicksilver's Wall Run look cooler, so who cares?
  • Rule of Sexy: In the March 2014 issue of Empire magazine, James McAvoy states that he was more than willing to get rid of his luxurious locks for this movie, but as with First Class, the producers nixed the idea.
    James McAvoy: I wanted to go bald in this one, [...] but they didn't go for it. I was gutted.
  • Rule of Symbolism: The presence (or at least the desire to have it) or absence of Magneto's telepathy-blocking helmet is a fairly good gauge of how unhealthy or healthy his relationship with Professor X is. As Simon Kinberg puts it, the finale marks the beginning of the characters' Friendly Enemy dynamic:
    "At the end of the movie, [Magneto] flies away without his helmet, with the implication that he'll go off and continue to be Magneto in some form, but not be able to hide it from Charles, who'll be able to read his mind and track him. There's a truce of some kind between Charles and Magneto, but there's a part of Magneto that will always be the Magneto we know from the comics."
    This article has made the following observation about the elderly Erik
    "From the photos, we see that Ian McKellen's older Magneto has no need for his iconic helmet that protects him from mutant telepaths since he's once again allied with his old friend Charles Xavier."
  • Sabotage to Discredit: Erik turns Trask's Sentinel show into a Disastrous Demonstration in order to discredit the project.
  • San Dimas Time: Justified — Kitty's powers behave more like a Portal to the Past (even though Wolverine can't go back and forth). Also, the fact her time powers are occupied on Wolverine means they have no chance to do a short restart and try again like at the very beginning of the film.
  • Sarcastic Confession: Shortly after arriving in the past, Wolverine is confronted by some thugs who want to kill him for sleeping with their boss's daughter. Wolverine tries to convince them that it was his past self who did it and that they shouldn't be punishing him, all the while cracking some time travel jokes.
  • Satellite Character: Despite receiving a fair amount of screentime, Hank doesn't undergo any proper character development, as his existence completely revolves around Charles.
  • Save Scumming: This is essentially how the X-Men in the Bad Future stay ahead of the Sentinels for so long; every time they are about to be wiped out (Game Over), Kitty sends one of them (usually Bishop) a few days into the past to alert them and avoid the situation that led to them being trapped in the first place.
  • Save the Villain: This is the heroes' main objective, because if Mystique kills Trask, it will trigger the awakening of Sentinels which will bring about the apocalypse. Trask doesn't get off a Karma Houdini as he is arrested for selling military secrets.
  • Save This Person, Save the World: Wolverine time travels from 2023 to 1973 to team up with the younger Xavier and Beast in order to stop Mystique from assassinating Dr. Bolivar Trask. If Trask is murdered, it will set off a chain of events which will lead to the extinction of mutantkind.
  • Say My Name:
    • In 1973, Xavier angrily screams "ERIIIIIIIIK!!!" when Sentinels begin shooting at the crowd that has gathered at the White House. Although Magneto (who is wearing a telepathy-blocking helmet) has not yet appeared in his line of vision, Charles just knows that no-one else would be causing this mayhem.
    • Logan hollers "CHARLES!" to warn his ally (who is wheelchair-bound) that he's about to be hit by a large chunk of the stadium.
    • In The Rogue Cut, a newly rescued but weakened Rogue is Forced to Watch Bobby's Heroic Sacrifice, and can only scream his name numerous times in horror before Magneto bars the passageway and takes her back to the Blackbird.
  • Seeing Through Another's Eyes:
    • Past Charles is able to figure out where Raven is heading because when he had temporarily "possessed" a stewardess who had bumped into his foster sister, the stewardess had picked up Raven's plane ticket from the floor, and he can read its contents from the stewardess' field of vision.
    • In The Rogue Cut, Future Xavier can view the mansion through Magneto's and Iceman's minds, and he gives them instructions as they walk in hidden passageways towards the Cerebro room.
  • Sensitive Guy and Manly Man: Charles in 1973 is more accurately an Overly Sensitive Guy with Wolverine in the Manly Man role. Logan has to act as the "glue" which barely holds the emotionally fragile Xavier together in order to complete their mission. Their opposite natures are most directly contrasted in the Pentagon kitchen scene, where Charles attempts to persuade the guards that he and his partner have a valid reason to be there, while Wolverine just knocks them out with a frying pan.
  • Sequel Escalation: The film is an adaptation of one of the most epic and ambitious storylines in the comic's history, upping up the stakes, action, and the sheer number of mutants.
  • Sequel Hook: Two of them. First, Mystique rescues Wolverine from the river Magneto threw him in, foreshadowing her more heroic role as a rescuer of mutants in X-Men: Apocalypse. The Stinger gives us a glimpse of Apocalypse and his Four Horsemen.
  • Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The main plot is their quest to avoid the Bad Future, by sending Wolverine's consciousness back in time in order to stop the events that would lead to the dystopian future.
  • The Shangri-La: The last refuge of the mutants in 2023 is an abandoned temple or monastery atop some windswept mountains in China.
  • Shapeshifting Seducer: Mystique does a sultry variation of her Raven form and pretends to be a disco-loving interpreter to gain access to a Vietnamese general's hotel room in order to steal his invitation to the Paris Peace Accords.
  • She-Fu: Mystique's preferred fighting style uses a lot of kicks and acrobatics.
  • Shirtless Scene: The younger Magneto has one when he's analyzing the Sentinel schematics.
  • Shoo Out the Clowns: Every mutant introduced in X-Men: First Class except Havok was killed off at some point between films. First Class is easily the most lighthearted of the X-Men movies and the characters killed — Emma Frost, Angel Salvatore, Banshee, and Azazel — represent its more colorful tone. The comical Quicksilver is also sent home after the Pentagon mission.
  • Shout-Out: Has its own page.
  • Shown Their Work: Quicksilver's cassette player? The one that everyone was deriding as "unrealistic" and "not existing till the '80s"? Turns out it's a real thing that was patented but never developed beyond the prototype phase.
    • Also, averting Artistic License – Physics in at least a few cases, Quicksilver knows to hold Erik's head so he doesn't get "whiplaaaash," and he wears goggles to protect his eyes while at superspeed.
  • Sibling Yin-Yang: Eleven years after First Class, Charles and Raven have not only become estranged, but also polar opposites, especially in regards to ideology and diplomacy. Her sparing of Trask and the president shows that Raven isn't quite as far gone as originally believed.
  • Sigil Spam: The Trask symbol is found everywhere in the 1973 timeline; even on the American flag.
  • Sinister Suffocation: Magneto stabs Wolverine with several metal wires and tosses him into the bottom of a lake, intending to have him drown. The scene then cuts to Xavier's future self, who is aware of the hero's predicament due to reading his mind, but can do nothing but stare at him with an expression of sheer horror.
  • Skyward Scream: Blink lets out a small cry towards the heavens after being stabbed by three Sentinels.
  • The Slow Path: In the ending sequence, Logan may be the only one with a Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory, but having interacted with Future Logan in 1973, Charles immediately understands what has happened when Logan wakes up disoriented in the altered future.
  • Smart People Play Chess: Xavier and Magneto have a chess game on the plane, but, in this case, it was more like discussing with a chess table between them, without playing much. The lack of play and banter symbolizes the extreme distance and hostility (perhaps the worst in the series) between them, including Erik's violent outburst just minutes earlier.
  • Soft Glass:
    • A glass ceiling that has been cracked into a thousand pieces falls right on top of Erik, and he doesn't get a single scratch. In Real Life, the stunt double suffered from mild injuries, according to Bryan Singer's commentary, because real glass was used for that scene.
    • Mystique jumps through a glass window to escape Magneto when he shoots her. The only injury she sustains is the bullet wound itself.
  • Sophisticated as Hell: The younger Xavier specifically fulfills the "A normally formal character resorting to profanity due to intense circumstances" example. This is the first movie where the otherwise polite and erudite Charles uses coarse language such as "fuck" and "shite."
  • Spared by the Adaptation:
    • In the original story, future Wolverine died during an ill-fated attack on the Sentinels headquarters. In the movie, he's the one who travels back in time to Set Right What Once Went Wrong.
    • In the original comic, Future Magneto was the first to die, sacrificing himself early on by providing an off-panel diversion so the remaining resistance could escape their imprisonment. During the Last Stand in the film, although he's badly wounded, he never succumbs to his wounds before the timeline is reset.
  • Stealth Pun:
    • The temp score used in the Comic Con trailer is a Hans Zimmer piece called "Time."
    • In Vietnam, Mystique, disguised as a male army colonel, frees some quarantined mutants. His name is Sanders.
    • Trask is told by Congress that his Sentinel program "ain't gonna fly." When the program is reactivated, that's exactly what the Sentinels do.
  • Story-Breaker Power: Quicksilver gets Put on a Bus after the Pentagon raid because, as that raid shows, he is downright unstoppable. While moving at Super-Speed, simply tapping a person is the practical equivalent of getting hit by a heavyweight boxer, and he can take out an entire room of armed guards so quickly that their bullets weren't even able to reach the people they had shot at when he started.
  • Superpowered Mooks: The future Sentinels are faceless enemies, but with their Adaptive Ability, they are almost invincible.
  • Super Window Jump: Mystique tried this to escape from Magneto. It did not work very well because Magneto can make the bullet follow her.
  • Swapped Roles:
    • Professor X was Wolverine's mentor in the original trilogy, but in 1973, Logan has to try to motivate and counsel an emotionally damaged Xavier.
      Professor X: Logan, you're going to have to do for me what I once did for you. Lead me, guide me.
    • Not surprisingly, the abrasive Wolverine is bad at this task, and it's discussed in the following exchange:
      Charles: I'm sorry Logan, but they sent back the wrong man.
      Logan: You're right, I am. Actually, it was supposed to be you, but I was the only one who could physically make the trip.
    • This also applies to Charles and Hank. In X-Men: First Class, Xavier acted as a big brother figure to McCoy (they're about a decade apart in age), but after 1963, Hank becomes responsible for Charles. Although McCoy certainly prevents his friend from doing anything too self-destructive, he inadvertently becomes Xavier's enabler by inventing an addictive telepathy-blocking serum. Considering that Hank was probably only around 21 years old when he suddenly found himself in the position of being Charles' long-term caregiver (plus he has no experience looking after someone who is mentally ill), it's understandable that he couldn't help his former mentor as well as he would've liked.

    Tropes T to Z 
  • Take a Moment to Catch Your Death: Towards the end, when it looked like the plan to let the X-Jet detonate amongst the Sentinels worked out and everybody takes a breath, a Sentinel sneaks up from behind and dramatically impales Storm.
  • Take a Third Option: Erik asks Mystique, "Are you still Charles's Raven... or are you Mystique?" (What Magneto is truly referring to with the latter is if she's still his soldier.) In the end, she chooses her own path. She doesn't adhere to her foster brother's pacifism, and she rejects her former lover's warmongering.
  • Talking to Themself: Future Charles and Past Charles are able to have a heartfelt conversation, with the former ultimately reviving the latter's broken resolve.
  • Tap on the Head: The security guards, that get punched out in the kitchen thanks to Quicksilver's doings, are out for an unrealistic long time, allowing for the main characters to talk things out.
  • Teleport Spam: Blink's main tactic in fight scenes. Opening portals in the paths of projectiles, Beam Spam, and even blades to make Sentinels injure each other or themselves.
  • Tender Tears: A huge part of Charles's character development is centered around his huge capacity for empathy, and how he needs to learn to move past his own pain for the benefit of others, so he spends a good percentage of the film either on the verge of tears or outright crying.
  • That Man Is Dead:
    • When Hank tells Logan that "the Professor isn't here," Xavier is still living at his estate, only he has lost his powers and the will to lead mutants, thus dissociating himself from his identity as Professor X. It doubles as a Call-Back to the previous movie when he insisted that "You don't get to be called a 'professor' until you actually have a teaching position."
    • At the beginning, Mystique tells Alex that Raven isn't her name anymore. Given how the film ends, it's ambiguous if she still feels this way.
  • There Are No Therapists: You'd think that Hank would try to get a therapist to help Charles with his depression and substance abuse, yet it doesn't happen. It could be justified that Xavier wants to avoid mental health professionals because it's suggested that he was treated like a schizophrenic patient as a child (and considering how a few psychiatric practices of the 1940s are viewed as unethical today, Charles has no desire to risk a repeat of his past experience) or because he cannot simply find a therapist whom he can trust with the knowledge of the mutants' existence.
  • Thinking Up Portals: Blink has the mutant power to create these at will for transport and to redirect attacks.
  • Thou Shalt Not Kill: Most of the characters in the X-Men Film Series are perfectly okay with using lethal force, but this is a specific plot point in this film. It's stated that the young version of Mystique never killed anyone (even the people she used her Shapeshifting powers to impersonate), but Jumped Off the Slippery Slope when she decided to kill Bolivar Trask. Her decision to kill him set off a chain of events resulting in a Bad Future, which is the main reason Wolverine travels back in time to stop her.
  • Three Plus Two: The 1973 trio of Charles, Logan, and Hank are joined by Peter, then Erik. Subverted in that Peter is Put on a Bus immediately after rescuing Erik, and then Erik re-assumes his Big Bad position.
  • Three-Point Landing: The Sentinels have a habit of landing this way.
  • Time-Freeze Trolling Spree: Using his Super-Speed, Quicksilver has enough spare time while redirecting bullets to position the cops that shot at him to punch themselves, give one a wedgie, steal someone's hat and, because this takes place in a kitchen, taste one of the dishes.
  • Time-Shifted Actor: James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender return as the young versions of Professor X and Magneto, while Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen portray them in the Bad Future segments of the movie. Jennifer Lawrence once again plays the young Mystique. Josh Helman plays young William Stryker, replacing Danny Huston as middle-aged Stryker and Brian Cox as old Stryker. Evan Jonigkeit portrays a young version of Toad (played as an adult by Ray Park in the original movie), and Nicholas Hoult returns as the young Beast, while Kelsey Grammer reprises his role in the surprise Everyone Lives ending set in the future.
  • Time Stands Still: Peter Maximoff uses the super-speed version to mess with some Pentagon guards, and redirect the bullets they'd just fired.
  • Time-Travel Tense Trouble:
    • "A long time ago, actually, a long time from now..."
    • Also, the movie title.
  • Took a Level in Badass:
    • In comparison to X-Men: First Class where her only physical scenes involve weight training and her shape-changing abilities used only as a distraction to aid someone else, Mystique has developed into using some of the acrobatic fighting style that her older counterpart from the first trilogy excels at.
    • In X-Men: First Class, Havok lacks accuracy with his destructive powers, but shows signs of improvement by the end. In his brief scene here, he neutralizes a soldier using a non-lethal blast with little effort.
    • Iceman has taken several more levels in comparison to the previous films, including the debut of the iconic ice slide from the comics.
  • Tracking Device: In The Rogue Cut, a Sentinel does an Outside Ride on the X-Jet. Xavier is able to throw it off with some aerobatics, but its severed hand is shown beeping away, drawing the other Sentinels to their location.
  • Tragic Intangibility: Professor X projects a mental image of himself to try to talk his adopted sister, Mystique, out of going on a killing spree. She dismisses his concerns and strolls through his image, showing how strained the two siblings have become.
  • Trekkie: It's hinted that Hank is a fan of Star Trek: The Original Series (an episode is playing on one of his TVs), which is fitting considering that he's a nerd. He describes Peter's mutation as "fascinating," which is a reference to Spock. Bryan Singer's favourite fandom is Star Trek, so it's natural that he would want to bestow that quality on the character (who, coincidentally, can be called Dr. McCoy). His Trekkie-ness is more obvious in The Rogue Cut because Beast is enjoying the episode while sipping a beverage.
  • Triumphant Reprise: John Ottman's title theme music from X2 returns as the title theme for this movie, which also signifies the return of Bryan Singer to the director's chair.
  • Trophy Room: The room that Erik snatches his helmet from has parts of mutants in it on display.
  • Trust Password: Logan convinces 1973 Charles to hear him out by telling him some details about his childhood that he learned from future Charles and that the younger Xavier hadn't told anyone up until this point in time.
    Logan: I know your powers came when you were nine. I know you thought you were going crazy when it started, all the voices in your head, and it wasn't until you were twelve that you realized all the voices were in everyone else's head.
  • Uncomfortable Elevator Moment: Happens between the just-freed Erik, Peter and the duct-taped guard. Erik feels dizzy as the result of being carried by Peter in his Super-Speed mode. Peter then asks Erik whether he's done a serious crime in an annoying tone (which after Erik sheepishly answers, Peter expresses his awe to the duct-taped guard who responds in kind with his eyebrows as if he wanted to say "Told ya this guy is a bad news" to Peter). The young mutant inquires whether Erik knows karate (which Erik cheekily responds with "I don't know karate, but I know crazy"), whether Erik can control metal, and finally he tells Erik that his mom once knew a guy who could also do that. Erik seems to realize at this point that this pesky teen might be his son.
  • Understatement:
    • Wolverine reminds Professor X that "Patience isn't my strongest suit."
    • Kitty warns Logan that her power "might sting a little"; he then screams at the top of his lungs when she activates it.
  • Undying Loyalty:
    • There are plenty of other things that Hank could do with his time, yet he chooses to stay by Xavier's side, taking care of him during the latter's decade-long Heroic BSoD. Hank may even be a little too loyal because he serves as Charles' enabler by providing a serum which worsens his friend's already bad case of substance abuse.
    • Wolverine has developed this for Xavier during the Time Skip after the post-credits scene of The Wolverine. Although both Magneto and Professor X are co-leaders of the remaining mutants in 2023, Logan only defers to Charles' authority. When Erik tells him that, "You'll need me as well [in the past]," Wolverine is wholly against the idea, but he reluctantly agrees after Xavier nods in approval.
  • Unkempt Beauty: Charles' appearance in 1973 is rather sloppy and disheveled, especially in comparison to the other movies, yet he is still an attractive man. This was done on purpose by the filmmakers (see the Rule of Sexy entry), and it conveniently evokes the Looks Like Jesus trope, as Christ is often depicted as being handsome in art.
  • The Unmasqued World: The existence of mutants was already known within some government organizations (in fact, they had Magneto in prison), but the world at large ignored it. Then, the peace talks for Vietnam were interrupted when a blue woman that could shapeshift jumped from the window, followed by a man that controlled metals with a gesture and a blue feral man. And, as if that was not enough, this mutant levitated a stadium across a state, hurled it against the White House, extracted the panic room from it, and gave a New Era Speech for the television. Now, absolutely everybody knows about mutants.
  • Unreliable Expositor: According to Erik, he curved the bullet in an attempt to save JFK, since he was actually a mutant, but failed. We don't know for sure either way.
  • Unstable Genetic Code: Seems to be the case with Mystique, as her blood cells constantly change when under a microscope. Trask even says that her DNA might be the "key to mutation itself."
  • Unstoppable Rage: Beast against Magneto, which is decidedly in Beast's favor, to the extent that Beast almost drowns him. Magneto only barely manages to save himself by using a nearby sculpture to restrain Beast.
  • Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Mystique's plan was simply to avenge a number of dead mutants by killing the man who had experimented with their corpses. That man had projects, rejected by the Congress, to build powerful robots to kill mutants. His death proved his point that mutants were a genuine menace, and so his projects were restored and continued by other people. The Sentinels would prove so deadly and effective that they would cause the apocalyptic future seen at the beginning of the story.
  • Vanity License Plate: The license plate of Wolverine's 1973 Buick Riviera reads "U-LUCKY." This is how he deduces that it belongs to the man with the rabbit's foot keychain that he stole.
  • The Villain Must Be Punished: Discussed. Bolivar Trask has already killed several mutants (Professor Charles Xavier's first students from the previous movie, no less) with his experiments, so Mystique insists he needs to pay with his life for what he's done. But Xavier tries to dissuade her from killing Trask, because he's learned (thanks to a time-traveling Logan) that it will do more harm than good. Killing Trask will make him a martyr, seemingly legitimize his paranoia against mutants, and ultimately lead to a Bad Future where killer robots are driving mutantkind to extinction. At the climax, Mystique finally comes around to Xavier's point of view and spares Trask's life at the last minute. Then she finds another way to punish and discredit him: getting him arrested for trying to sell his technology to North Vietnam.
  • Villain Has a Point: During Charles and Erik’s argument on the flight to Paris, Erik makes a valid point about how Charles abandoned everyone, as while he and Hank were too busy hiding and pretending to be something they’re not, fellow mutants, including Angel, Azazel, Banshee, and Emma, were experimented on and killed.
  • Villain Respect: Bolivar Trask expresses his respect for the mutants because of their abilities and how they will unite all of humanity against them.
  • Villains Never Lie: 1973 Erik claims he's never lied to Raven, while manipulating her towards his cause.
  • Violence Is Not an Option: Logan has to remain calm because violence or sudden bouts of emotion would disrupt the Mental Time Travel that he's using, and thus remove him from the situation entirely without doing anything to fix it.
  • Visionary Villain:
    • Trask genuinely believes that uniting humanity against mutantkind is the gateway to creating world peace.
    • Conversely, Magneto has a vision of a world where mutants lord over mankind, which, in his opinion, is the only way they can coexist with humans.
  • Visual Pun: In the Rogue Cut, Peter's younger sister is holding a wand. This is an obvius Mythology Gag as Peter famously has a (twin) sister named Wanda.
  • The Voiceless: Sunspot doesn't speak in the theatrical version, though he does get one line in The Rogue Cut.
  • Vomit Indiscretion Shot: Ink's superpower forced several soldiers to puke on-camera.
  • War Is Hell: The first scene's sole purpose is to demonstrate just how terrible the world has become for mutants and humans who carry the X-gene after regular humans began eradicating them. The "lucky" ones are imprisoned in a concentration camp, and the rest are slain en masse by Sentinels. The remnants of the X-Men and the Free Mutants appear to be the only resistance group left standing, and they're painfully aware that they're on the losing side of this war.
  • Was It Really Worth It?: As the older Erik lies dying in the Bad Future, he laments to Charles about all the time they had lost to ideological and political differences when they could've been close friends and fighting alongside each other instead. Considering their current circumstances, it looks like it wasn't worth it.
    Magneto: All those years we wasted fighting each other, Charles...
  • Watching Troy Burn: In The Rogue Cut, the older Professor X is crestfallen as he observes from the X-Jet his home being consumed by flames.
  • We All Die Someday: When Logan confronts Xavier on not caring about the mutant genocide in the future, he responds with this trope as a sign of how broken he is.
  • Weaponized Teleportation: Blink uses her portal powers to jump on a Sentinel in the opening fight. It doesn't help much.
  • Wedgie: Peter gives a guard at the Pentagon a pants wedgie.
  • Well-Intentioned Extremist: Magneto, Mystique, and Trask all want to do what's best for their people. All three of them are willing to go to any lengths to accomplish this.
  • We Will Wear Armor in the Future: The future X men all wear armor which might as well be considered useless against the Sentinels, but considering the desperation of their situation, they still wear it.
  • What Beautiful Eyes!: 1973 Xavier collapses after the serum wears off, and there are a few close-ups of his eyes. The colour of his irises is quite vivid, and they fully express his mental anguish and vulnerability in that scene. It's a stark contrast from his hopeful and confident Innocent Blue Eyes in First Class.
  • What Did I Do Last Night?: Happens when the Mind Time Travel is used. When Wolverine returns to 1973, he has no idea of where he is, or who the girl is he had just had sex with (more probably, he just can't remember). When he wakes up in the new future, he has no idea about anything he had been doing for the last five decades.
  • What Happened to the Mouse?:
    • Mystique is shown impersonating William Stryker at the end of the movie, but what she did with the real Stryker is unclear. Given that in the next film, Strikers turns up alive and well and with Logan in his power, it seems Mystique's plan didn't work, whatever it was.
    • Magneto doesn't mention Riptide's death alongside the other deceased Brotherhood members.
    • What became of future Magneto and Mystique in the new timeline isn't shown.
    • Angel (Warren Worthington III) is the only X-Man killed in the Bad Future not to appear in the Alternate Timeline. In fact, he doesn't appear in the movie at all. Even future Beast, who debuted in the same movie as Angel, got to make a cameo! This is explained in X-Men: Apocalypse: in the alternate timeline, Angel became Archangel, one of Apocalypse's Four Horsemen, and was killed during a fight with that timeline's fledgling X-Men.
    • Nightcrawler also remains absent since his first appearance in X2: X-Men United, but a Freeze-Frame Bonus on The Rogue Cut reveals that he had passed away before 2023 because his rosary hangs on a makeshift shrine dedicated to the dead.
  • What the Hell, Hero?:
    • Logan calls Charles a little shit for his cavalier attitude about the future.
    • Young Magneto goes into an outburst about how fellow mutants were being killed left and right while Young Charles has been in hiding with Hank.
      Erik: Angel, Azazel, Emma, Banshee. Mutant brothers and sisters, all dead! Countless others, experimented on! Butchered! Where were you, Charles?! We were supposed to protect them! Where were you when your own people needed you?! Hiding! You and Hank! Pretending to be something you're not! You abandoned us all!
  • What You Are in the Dark: Invoked by Charles. In the climax, he's urged to put Mystique out of commission so she won't kickstart the Bad Future. However, he realizes that Mystique has spent her life being influenced by others, so he instead tells her that he will do nothing to stop her, but hopes that she will see there is a better way. She agrees and stands down.
  • The White House: The 1973 section of the climax occurs on the lawn in front of the White House, which culminates in Magneto's attempt to assassinate President Nixon and his cabinet.
  • Who Shot JFK?: The Bent Bullet, part of the ARG campaign for the film, has Magneto as the man on the grassy knoll, having used his powers to alter the trajectory of Oswald's bullet, which led to Kennedy's death. However, it is implied that Magneto is trying to stop the shooter... who was actually Mystique and not the real Oswald. (Though this would seem out of character with her portrayal in the film, where she is stated to have never tried to kill anyone before Trask.) In the film itself, Magneto is being held in the Pentagon for it, but claims to Xavier that he was trying to save Kennedy because he was a mutant. We never find out if he was lying or not. It's further muddied when in the next scene he attacks Mystique using the very method he claimed to have been trying to prevent showing he has the proficiency. None the less, it's still never explicitly said what really happened.
  • With Great Power Comes Great Perks: Quicksilver uses his super-speed for shits, giggles, and petty larceny.
  • Wolverine Publicity: Although Hugh Jackman has the most screen time of any single actor, the central character of the story is the younger Xavier, but James McAvoy takes up a meager amount of space on the official poster (see the image at the top of this page). Jennifer Lawrence is more famous than McAvoynote , so Mystique's prominence on the poster is equal to Wolverine's despite her role being smaller than Charles'. Moreover, McAvoy is absent from the Blu-Ray/DVD cover for The Rogue Cut, which has Michael Fassbender's Magneto (who also is a bigger star than McAvoy) as its largest figure.
  • Worf Had the Flu: Wolverine is accustomed to his adamantium skeleton and claws in the future, and going to a time period before having them makes him take a few seconds to adjust his strategy now that he isn't quite as invulnerable nor has impossibly sharp blades. His fight with a Sentinel in the climax in particular, as he realizes bone claws aren't that useful against what is described as space age polymer.
  • Would Harm a Child: Bolivar Trask and the people working on the Sentinel program. It's subtly confirmed when Mystique finds the autopsy reports, one of which belongs to Sean Cassidy (Banshee). It's very likely that Sean was still a teenager when he disappeared.
  • Would Hit a Girl:
    • Major Stryker successfully tasers Mystique, but he fails to shoot her in Saigon and inside The White House's underground bunker.
    • Magneto would have murdered Mystique if it weren't for Beast's timely intervention.
  • You Have to Believe Me!: Played for Laughs when Logan himself has a memory loss. "You're on really bad acid..."
  • You Cannot Kill An Idea: The Bad Future is set off by Mystique killing Trask, since he was the head of the Sentinel program. Killing him only convinced others to continue his work, and the future happened. When it comes down to it, the aesop is that you cannot kill an idea, but must discredit it.
  • You Can't Fight Fate: Discussed. Hank theorizes that the flow of reality eventually corrects itself, so one can't change the future by changing events in the past, compared to ripples from a rock thrown into a river. It's Played with from then on. The Sentinel-ravaged post-apocalyptic future is averted. However, the last scene in the altered future suggests that for the most part, the history of the X-men unfolded more or less the same way. Word of God themselves admit as much. No matter how much history changes, Professor X will always form the classic X-men; Cyclops, Jean, Storm, Wolverine, Rogue, Iceman etc. will always end up at the Mansion; and Stryker or no Stryker, Logan always gets his adamantium claws. Status Quo Is God in other words!
  • You Don't Look Like You: Beast's makeup in this film is less feline-looking, and more reminiscent of Kelsey Grammer's Beast.
  • You Monster!: The younger Charles considers Magneto to be a monster, which is why he initially resists Logan's suggestion that they break Erik out of the Pentagon.
  • You Shall Not Pass!: A dying Magneto uses the remnants of the Blackbird to armor up the door leading to Kitty, Wolverine, and Professor X. Bonus points for Sir Ian McKellen invoking the trope.

"We need you to hope again."

Alternative Title(s): Days Of Future Past

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Sentinel

The Sentinel fires its trademark head laser.

How well does it match the trope?

4.67 (3 votes)

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Main / HeadBlast

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