(steam engine whistles)

Oh, beware, beware!

I bring an important message from the future.

From the autumn of the year 2014.

Do not go see X-Men: Days of Future Past.

Its scrambled timeline will reduce

your brain to mush.

My mutant power is an uncanny ability to detect

when a franchise's continuity is irrevocably broken.

And this new X-Men movie has my geek sense tingling

like I'm about to get my copy of Giant-Size #1

autographed by Len Wein.

This new film attempts to knit together

three distinct X-Men sub-franchises.

First, the mainline X-Men movies, most recently,

the 2006 film, X-Men: The Last Stand.

Second, the terrible Hugh Jackman

spin-off movies about Wolverine.

And third, it's also somehow the sequel to the prequel film,

X-Men: First Class, an origin story set in the 1960s.

Oh, and it's loosely based on the run

of The Uncanny X-Men comic book, that travel between

the book's then-present day of the early 1980s

and the distant dystopian future of 2013,

which is now our present.

We are through the looking glass, people!

Now I get that the Marvel multiverse is made up of

more alternate realities than Shia Labeouf's Twitter feed,

but sorting out these timelines is going to take

a PhD with a player hater degree.

Having both, I might even be up for it,

but my logic muscles were already knocked out of commission

by being asked to accept that Michael Fassbender

grows up to be Ian McKellen!

Only one man could salvage this scrambled chronology.

It's Shane Carruth, the director of Primer,

and the true foe of time paradoxes.

Future Shane, please climb into your Primer box

and travel back in time to fix Days of Future Past.

Also, bring me a DVD of Age of Ultron.

We should be extremely wary of any movie

whose title is based on a Moody Blues album.

What prog rock song cycle would you like to see

turned into a summer blockbuster?

Let me know in the comments.