Picoreview: Days of Future Past: The Rogue Cut: very disappointing.
There were enough longer scenes and stuff that it was clear we weren’t watching the theatre release, but we were expecting something called The Rogue Cut to, y’know, I don’t know, heavily feature Rogue, or something.
And it did, sure, more than the original, but ultimately Rogue did nothing more than what Kitty did in the theatre release, with every hope of payoff just…ffffsshhht. Washed away.
Spoilers ho.
Because it could have been great, at the end. It could have gone the way I *expected* it to, and have Rogue, all alone, as the last stand against the Sentinels. There weren’t many X-Men left for her to absorb at that point, but the ones who were left, well, she coulda given the Sentinels a run for their money. There was her, Kitty, Xavier, Magneto and Wolverine. Granted, Xavier’s not much use against machines, and they’re not *metal* machines so Magneto couldn’t affect them directly, but there was metal to be used in the area, and with Kitty and Wolvie combined, well, wow. Also, the suggestion is that Rogue’s powers have been used to make the Sentinels more adaptable, which possibly means she could have absorbed the Sentinels themselves, so that was what I was hoping for. I was hoping that she was going to beat the bastards, that she was going to be this last blaze of triumph, that the future was saved anyway, in the moment before Wolverine succeeded and everything got rewritten.
And because Wolvie *knew* in the 1970s part of the storyline that Rogue had taken over for Kitty, there could have been this great payoff for him ‘then’, too, recognizing that okay, maybe they’d lost just about everything in the future, but it was gonna be okay. It wouldn’t mean it wasn’t worth trying to save the future from what it had become, but at least it would mean if he failed there’d be hope. And that could’ve made the end of the movie much more alarming, because there could have actually been a chance he’d fail.
But no. Instead it turned out just like the end of X3, The Film Of Which We Do Not Speak. I honestly, genuinely, totally, fully, *completely* expected Rogue to come in at the end of X3, having rejected the cure because her friends needed her, and for her to swoop in and kick some *serious* ass. And she just…didn’t. And I was just as disappointed, and maybe even just as surprised as I was with X3, when it failed to happen in Days of Future Past.
So really: a sort of crushing disappointment. It could have been so great, and it…wasn’t.