Most of the Hollywood film studios now have their own in-house super heroes. At Warner Brothers it is Batman and Superman; Sony has Spiderman; over at Disney it is Ironman, Thor, Captain America and the rest of The Avengers and 20th Century Fox has The Fantastic Four and X-Men.

They've all become crucial to the economic well-being of these studios and to the health of the multi-national corporations that own them. In the last fourteen years we've had six X-Men movies, including a couple of spin-offs, all of them set in a world where various attempts are made to exploit the differences between the mutant super heroes of the titles and their human counterparts.

The new one, X-Men: Days Of Future Past (it opened in cinemas on Thursday) is set in a dark dystopian future where the mutants have been outlawed and are chased down and annihilated by Sentinels- menacingly realistic robots that seem similar in size and power to the Cylons in Battlestar Galactcia. The leaders of the mutants, Prof. X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) realise that the only way they can survive is by changing history and by sending one of their number, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back in time- to the early 70s when Richard Nixon is in the White House - to alter the events that caused the world to turn on them.

Wolverine must stop fellow mutant Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from killing scheming robot designer Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage from Game Of Thrones),whose death fuelled  anti-mutant sentiment and led to the rise of the machines. Days Of Future Past has several things going for it- a string of wonderfully accomplished set pieces, especially an early slo-mo sequence during a break out at the Pentagon (and, the first appearance of Evan Peters as the mischievous Quicksilver). Unlike Godzilla it has a sharp, mocking sense of humour and the charisma quotient rises considerably every time Michael Fassbender (as the younger Magneto) and Jennifer Lawrence appear on the screen. Its main problem is that it has too many principle characters as it necessarily merges the cast of the first batch of X-Men films with those from the 2011 reboot, X-Men: First Class and that, of course, means that several of the regulars lose out in terms of screen time. But overall, it is good fun.

Official Trailer:  'Xmen: Days of Future Past' (2014)