‘X-Men: Days of Future Past’ Gave X-Fans What We Waited For: Big, Purple Robots

There are many things that X-Men fans have waited decades to see on the big screen. Items on that wishlist include blue and gold spandex, Mr. Sinister, a decent wig for Storm, a super-strong Rogue, a watchable adaptation of “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” and really any story not built around the angst of old, white men. While Fox’s X-Men franchise spent a whole lot of time and a whole lot of movies almost intentionally avoiding everything on our wishlist, there’s one item that was finally checked off the to-do list in 2014: big, purple robots.

X-Men: Days of Future Past, now available to stream on Disney+ as part of the platform’s Summer Movie Nights, finally gave the Sentinels their moment. Granted, the 2014 X-movie still committed a lot of the same boring old sins: a bad Storm wig, lackluster leather costumes, a greatly diminished role for Rogue, and it took a story that was fully about Kitty Pryde in the comics and swapped her out for Wolverine, an old, white man. But!—after a bland cameo in 2005’s X-Men: The Last Stand, Days of Future Past gave the mutant-hunting robots got their moment in the sun (diehard X-Men fans will see what I just did there).

This was a major moment, and one I feel the need to underline and celebrate now that the movie has been added to Disney+! Why was it major? Because the Sentinels are possibly second only to Magneto in terms of grand, large scale, X-villain importance—and the movies have always had a villain problem. The films either elevated minor bad guys way past their impact on the source material (Rev. Stryker only appeared in a single masterpiece before he was adapted into Col. Stryker in X2) or they changed them into completely different characters (Deadpool, Sabretooth, Sebastian Shaw, Mastermind, Callisto, even Juggernaut and Mystique to an extent!). The fact that it took 14 years and 7 movies to finally get to the Sentinels is completely bananas.

How bananas? The Sentinels were the very first big bads in the iconic 1992 X-Men animated series!

That’s how big of a threat they were—literally and metaphorically! An entire generation, myself very much included, first met the X-Men while they were chopping big, purple robots into itty, bitty pieces.

There’s precedent in the comics, too. The robots debuted back in 1965’s X-Men #14 and became the franchise’s most omnipresent threat, aside from Magneto. In fact, they were a major part of late 2019’s massive, franchise-redefining comic storyline “House of X” and “Powers of X.” And between 1965 and 2019, the Sentinels popped up in pretty much every major X storyline. There’s the definitive 1969 storyline from Roy Thomas and Neal Adams that took the X-Men from the Silver Age second-string to fan favorite heroes. Jean Grey ran afoul of the Phoenix Force in 1976 after a battle with, duh, the Sentinels. And then there’s “Days of Future Past,” the 1981 storyline that is arguably one of the greatest Marvel stories to ever be published. It’s ridiculous that we didn’t get the Sentinels before 2014’s loose adaptation of that story, but at least the movie did them justice—and there was really no expectation that it would!

Considering all the liberties the filmmakers took with every character’s look in the movies leading up to Days of Future Past, it’s absolutely nuts that we got movie Sentinels that were both big and—more shockingly—purple. The X-Men, whose team colors in the comics have always been a striking blue and gold, were still dressed in head-to-toe black or moldy, ’70s browns—but at least the Sentinels got to pop! They could have very easily been done up to look like the movie Transformers, like a massive tangle of dull silver shards and interlocking forks. They weren’t and I am grateful.

Unfortunately the Sentinels weren’t a sign that the franchise would become more comic-accurate and more fun. 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse (coming to Disney+ on July 17) cut a vital mall scene even though X-Men at the mall is totally a thing, and the movie squandered Lana Condor as Jubilee. The movie even ended with the team getting brightly-colored superhero costumes—and then they were all ditched in favor of black and gold jackets for 2019’s incredibly tepid Dark Phoenix.

So yeah—big, purple robots are something to be thankful for when you’re rewatching X-Men: Days of Future Past on Disney+. It’s not a lot, but hey, it’s something! And fingers crossed that Disney’s future X-films get around to some of the other items on our wishlist.

Stream X-Men: Days of Future Past on Disney+

Stream X-Men: The Animated Series on Disney+