Two things made me wonder before watching Bryan Singer's 'X-Men - Days of Future Past'. The enormous advance praise the film received (the film has an IMDb rating of 8.5 - the equivalent of James Cameron's 'Aliens') and the declining star of Bryan Singer, who has not always been lucky with his last films.

So I was left with the questions: Can Bryan Singer return to his successes of X-Men (2000) and X-Men 2 (2003)? Can the swarm intelligence be trusted? Is the new X-Men movie really that good?

The short answer: yep. The film and director are on the cutting edge, or rather wrest new, interesting aspects from the time travel theme.

In the dystopian year 2023, the so-called 'Sentinels', robots with superpowers, are hunting mutants and humans. A small group of X-Me under Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) tries to avert the extinction of mutant and humanity by sending the spirit of Wolverine (Hugh Hackman) into the past.Arriving in 1973, Wolverine meets the young Charles Xavier, who is no longer interested in anything or anyone and can only be reluctantly persuaded to help. But to prevent the mutant Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from turning the tide of history against humanity by assassinating the scientist Bolivar Trask (Peter Einklage), the X-Men must free Xavier's arch-enemy Magneto (Michael Fassbender) from prison and persuade him to help.

Much like Gareth Edwards' 'Godzilla', the new X-Men is simply fun. And this fun mainly stems from the fact that Singer takes the genre of comic book adaptation seriously. Quicksilver (Evan Peters), berated in advance for his costume, steals the show from everyone in the film's best scene (and whets the appetite for more, as the Quicksilver character will also play a role in the upcoming Avengers film). The fear that the X-Men will degenerate into pure showmanship without the intervention of Marvel Studios (like the new Spider-Man films) is fortunately not fulfilled. The ensemble is phenomenal and X-Men is solid, well-made cinema entertainment that, incidentally, makes up for the shortcomings of the third X-Men film and gives X-Men an interesting future in both timelines.