I was pretty disappointed when I didn’t find out until after I bought X-Men: Days of Future Past that there was an extended edition that wouldn’t be released for another year. I’m not going to pay Fox twice for the same movie, so I just rented this one instead. And I’m glad I didn’t buy it again because there’s not a whole lot this extended edition brings to the table.
NOTE: Some spoilers follow, so you may not want to read on unless you’ve seen this.
There are some extended and additional scenes in the movie. We get to see a scene where the future X-Men actually have a chance to act as real people and not just special effects. There’s a great scene with Bishop—who appears to be the leader of this future group—debates the ethics of time travel with the older X-Men, arguing that if they do this, he and the rest of his team may never even be born. It’s a really good scene that should have been in the final cut. And I wish we got more moments of this where we can see the other characters get an opportunity to shine. It would have been preferable to rehashing the Magneto/Xavier bromance for the fifth time (and counting if my predictions about X-Men: Apocalypse prove true).
There’s also another scene where Mystique returns to the mansion and gets pretty affectionate with Beast. It was a pretty good scene, but it’s mostly held up by Jennifer Lawrence. Nicholas Hoult is still incredibly miscast as Hank McCoy. He’s got none of the humor or wit that characterizes the Beast.
It’s kind of funny that this is called “The Rogue Cut” because Rogue has such a small presence in the movie. The basis for that title is for an added sequence in the future. In the theatrical cut, when Wolverine sees Stryker in the past for the first time, he has a freak-out that causes his body in the future to spasm and he accidentally injures Kitty in the process. Kitty manages to hold it together for the rest of the movie, though. But in this cut, Iceman says she can’t hold out much longer and tells them that if they can get Rogue, she can take Kitty’s powers and keep Logan in the past. Magneto and Professor X think Rogue is dead, but it turns out she’s still alive and being held captive in the mansion, experimented on by the Sentinels’ human conspirators.
The three mount a rescue attempt, with Xavier piloting the jet and Magneto and Iceman breaching the mansion. This is a great scene where we get to see Ian McKellen being a badass Magneto (probably for the last time). They free Rogue at the expense of Iceman, who’s killed, and take her back to the base where she takes Kitty’s powers and keeps Logan in the past. It also shows how the Sentinels found the X-Men because as they were trying to escape, a Sentinel latched onto them and though it was thrown off, its arm remained, signaling its brothers.
So Rogue’s presence in this movie is pretty much the same as it was in the other movies—she’s a damsel in distress who needs rescuing and ultimately does nothing of any real consequence. Which is a real disappointment for a character who is so dynamic in the comics.
A lot of the other problems with the movie are still there. Evan Peters is still basically playing Impulse instead of Quicksilver, there’s far too much reliance on the Xavier/Magneto bromance, and I really wish we would have seen more of the future. The few glimpses we got with the human conspirators and the added interactions between the future X-Men tell me that’s where the really interesting stuff was happening.