Fox has put together a killer viral website for the upcoming X-Men: Days of Future Past movie. This sleek, surely Windows 8-inspired website is for Trask Industries, the company responsible for building the giant mutant hunting Sentinel robots.  Check out this video:

At first I was hesitant about Brian Singer coming back on to direct this movie, which is technically the sequel to Matthew Vaughn’s spectacular swinging sixties reboot, X-Men: First Class, and will be the 7th in the 14 year old X-Men franchise.  Singer’s initial X-Men movies,  X-Men (in 2000) and X2: X-Men United (in 2003), were both watershed moments in the development of the modern superhero movie genre.  The same cannot be said of Superman Returns, his singularly misguided love letter to the Superman movies of the 1980’s.  And while I haven’t seen either Valkyrie or Jack the Giant Slayer, I have no problem in rushing to judgment on both of them and I won’t even dignify them with links to their Wikipedia pages.

What’s heartening about this Trask Industries website and the video in particular, is that they prove Singer’s gift for illuminating logistical details is still in full effect.  In the first X-Men films, Singer made a point remind us that there would be small real world consequences of, say, having an Adamantium skeleton, summoning lightning bolts,  or “coming out” to your parents as a mutant.   These details were always glossed over in the X-Men comics, but Singer knew they would be important for building a believable human space for these movies to exist in.

That there is a company that makes weaponized mutant-hunting robots in the X-Men comics is easily taken for granted — what the comics never address is how a multi-billion dollar corporation answers for the fact that its products have been designed to HUNT DOWN AND KILL AMERICAN CITIZENS PREEMPTIVELY, especially in this modern age of watchdog civic organizations and media scrutiny.  What we have never considered is that Trask Industries, much like real-life evil corporations Philip Morris and BP, must market itself.  That it markets itself as a benevolent company is great in the same way that Wolverine’s skeleton setting off a museum metal detector is great.  It’s an obvious real-world detail that should have occurred to us immediately.

Also, it doesn’t hurt that the incomperable Peter Dinklage plays Bolivar Trask, inventor of the Sentinels.