The closest X-Men fans came to seeing Sentinels on screen wasn’t very close at all. The towering robotic assassins were part of a Danger Room sequence in Brett Ratner’s forgettable X-Men: The Last Stand, though the only thing we really were able to see was Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) standing next to the severed head of a Sentinel after Colossus sling-shot him off screen … you know, where we couldn’t see the action. (Great choice, Mr. Ratner.)
In an earlier piece, Eric picked up notes from a recent Mark Millar interview in SFX Magazine where the comic guru and current creative consultant at 20th Century Fox promised a beefed-up role for Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) in Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Days of Future Past. Further down in the same piece, though, Millar also confessed that the Sentinels would be “a big feature of this story.”
"They will be cool and this will deliver on all of the teasers. We’ve all been waiting for this ever since X-Men: The Last Stand showed us one of their heads. Now it is finally coming, and we only have to pay ten quid to see it in the cinema whereas they’re having to pay $100 million to deliver it. So I’m delighted.”
The X-Men have a lengthy roster of enemies that can (and should) be brought over to the silver screen in subsequent films. As good as Sir Ian McKellen is, every damn X-Men doesn’t have to revolve around Magneto. And I’m more pissed at Ratner for screwing up on Juggernaut than I am at him short-changing fans on the Sentinels. But yes, future X-Men movies need to make room for the Alliance of Evil, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and the Marauders.
Until then, it sounds like we’re going to get Sentinels, which are giant freaking robots (to paraphrase Guillermo Del Toro) programmed to hunt and kill mutants. They are a major part of Future Past, and you really couldn’t adapt that storyline without them.
