Michael Fassbender plays Magneto in X-Men: Days of Future Past. Photos by Alan Markfield / Associated Press

Fan Bingbing is Blink

'X-Men: Days of Future Past' premieres in London

The major movie franchise returns with retro style and a stellar cast promising a geek field day for film fans and comic book aficionados alike. The Associated Press reports in Los Angeles.

Matthew Vaughn and a superb cast re-invigorated the X-Men franchise with cool retro style and globe-trotting intrigue in 2011's X-Men: First Class. The series' original director, Bryan Singer, continues that momentum in the vigorously entertaining X-Men: Days of Future Past.

The new film is shot through with a stirring reverence for the Marvel Comics characters and their universe. And it ups the stakes by threatening nothing less than the genocide of the mutant population, among them faces old and new.

Hardcore followers will have a geek field day dissecting the challenging pretzel logic of writer-producer Simon Kinberg's screen-play, from a story by Jane Goldman, Kinberg and Vaughn, who had originally planned to direct. The central premise comes from the 1981 Uncanny X-Men comic Days of Future Past, in which Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) uses her consciousness transference powers to return from a dystopian future and rewrite history.

Echoes of the Holocaust have rippled throughout the series, and Singer opens with present-day scenes of a desolate, burned-out New York, where mutants and mutant-sympathizing humans have been rounded up in internment camps.