10 Coolest Superhero Movie Scenes Ever
3. X-Men: Days Of Future Past - Wrestle It To The Ground Like A Demon Cobra
Bryan Singer’s return to the X-Men turned out to be a rewarding homecoming - something of a surprise, considering that his adaptation of the Days Of Future Past storyline looked godawful on paper.
Singer was even able to give the film a little seventies-style flair with the inclusion of Quicksilver - aka Peter Maximoff, Magneto’s illegitimate teenage son, a mutant capable of moving so fast that time appears to slow down for him - and this scene, nestled in the middle of the attempt to break Magneto out of his underground prison.
Of course, it’s utterly stupid. Quicksilver doesn’t actually have the power to slow time, he just runs and reacts really, really fast. In order for him to perceive bullets moving at 1,700mph as travelling at a snail’s pace, he’d need to be moving so fast that he’d be even more dangerous to the people around him than the bullets themselves. There’d be sonic booms, friction and shearing on the air and skin, shockwaves, maybe even some form of relativistic effect at his top speed.
None of that matters, because the scene is just fun, almost whimsically so. That’s something so rare in Fox’s po-faced X-Universe that it’s practically a novelty, and audiences reacted accordingly.
Quicksilver’s high speed rescue of the inhabitants of the mansion in X-Men: Apocalypse was Singer’s clumsy attempt to replicate the effect. Why did it fail so miserably? Because it took place during a moment of (supposedly) high drama involving the death of Havok and the destruction of the mansion.
Quicksilver’s scene in X-Men: Days Of Future Past was awesome because it was a breath of fresh air, cheeky and playful in a franchise full of angst and melodrama, not because of his speedfreak running.