X-Men: Days Of Future Past | 2014
- Locations |
- Québec;
- British Columbia;
- Washington DC
- DIRECTOR |
- Bryan Singer
- CAST |
- Patrick Stewart,
- Ian McKellen,
- Hugh Jackman,
- Anna Paquin,
- James McAvoy,
- Michael Fassbender,
- Michael Lerner,
- Jennifer Lawrence,
- Nicholas Hoult,
- Peter Dinklage,
- Rebecca Romijn,
- Shawn Ashmore,
- Omar Sy,
- Evan Peters,
- Josh Helman,
- Lucas Till,
- James Marsden,
- Halle Berry,
- Famke Janssen,
- Kelsey Grammer
As Bryan Singer returns to the director's chair, the franchise continues its meandering around Canada by moving on from Toronto and Vancouver to Montréal, Québec, to be based at Mel's Cité du Cinema, the huge modern production facility which has hosted filming for Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator and Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can.
Much of the film is set in Washington DC, but there were only a few days filming establishing shots in the city, at the RFK Stadium and the Potomac River.
In a Terminator-style plot, Logan (Hugh Jackman) is sent back from the time of a disastrous future war to forestall the event which triggered it off.
A small group of mutants is hiding out from Sentinels – relentless robots programmed to detect and eliminate the human mutations – in a ‘Chinese’ monastery, which was of course a set at Cité du Cinema.
It’s from here that Logan is chosen to return to 1973 to prevent Raven/Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from killing Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), the ferociously anti-mutant tech tycoon who’s developing the Sentinel programme.
Trask’s HQ is the 12-story office hi-rise 1000 St Charles Avenue, overlooking the Lac des Deux Montagnes in 70 acres of green landscaping in Vaudreuil-Dorion, west of downtown Montréal.
The ‘Saigon’ military camp, where Raven spirits away the mutants destined to be the subject of Trask’s sinister experiments from under the nose of Major Stryker (Josh Helman), was a small airstrip outside Montréal, enhanced with plenty of CGI palm trees.
To preserve visual consistency from in X-Men 2 and X-Men: The Last Stand, Hatley Castle, Royal Roads University, Colwood in Vancouver, returns as Professor Xavier’s school, where the young Hank McCoy (Nicholas Hoult) fiercely protects the burned-out Charles Xavier (James McAvoy).
Eventually convinced by Logan’s story, the three team up with Peter Maximoff/Quicksilver (Evan Peters) to penetrate the Pentagon and free Magneto (Michael Fassbender) from a secure subterranean cell. The corridors of the ‘Pentagon’, where Logan, Charles and Hank join a tour party, are the Arts Building, 853 rue Sherbrooke Ouest on the downtown campus of McGill University.
With the team complete, they take their leave of Peter and head to ‘Paris’, where Trask is about to be assassinated as he attends the 1973 Paris Peace Accords ending the USA’s involvement in Vietnam.
The ‘Hotel Royal’ in which the peace talks are being held is in fact Montréal Hotel de Ville (City Hall), 275 Rue Notre-Dame Est. Alongside City Hall, on Place Vauquelin, you can see the fountain in which Eric and Hank fight, although the abstract metal sculpture used to entrap Hank was added digitally, as were the ‘Eiffel Tower’ on the skyline and the Parisian-style mansard roofs.
‘Rue Copernic / Ave Victor Hugo’, the ‘Parisian’ metro station in which the furious Raven confronts Magneto, is the Square-Victoria-OACI station on the Montréal Metro rapid transit’s Orange Line, in Victoria Square near the Quartier international de Montréal.
Pursuing his own agenda, Magneto catches up with the train transporting the prototype Sentinels. The stretch of track he tears up and uses to take over the robots is the Train Touristique de Charlevoix line between Saint-Joseph-de-la-Rive and Baie-Saint-Paul, by the Cap-Martin Tunnel.
The whole ‘White House lawn’ press conference, with President Nixon planning to unveil the six Sentinels, was filmed on a vast 40,000-square-foot set, boxed in with a hundred shipping containers and draped with green screens on the Cité du Cinema back-lot.
It’s in Montréal’s Olympic Stadium, 4141 Avenue Pierre-de Coubertin, that Magneto lands on the turf but when he begins to levitate the entire structure, special effects replace the Montreal stadium with a digital recreation of Washington DC’s RFK Stadium, 2400 East Capitol Street SE (which was photographically captured by the Second Unit), home of DC United.
As chaos erupts and the President’s safe bunker is spectacularly ripped from the digital White House, cop cars race frantically through downtown Montreal.
There’s a brief return to DC for the long shots of Logan’s retrieval from the Potomac River alongside the Arlington Memorial Bridge, with the Lincoln Memorial in the background.
Order is finally restored, old characters return, and it’s like Brett Ratner never happened.
