Marvel has created a site called The Bent Bullet, a promotional website and video that weaves X-Men mutants in with a JFK conspiracy theory, blending the real and fictional in a quasi sort of alternative history genre getup.
A new viral site promoting the upcoming X-Men: Days of Future Past has hit the web: The Bent Bullet, which explores President John F. Kennedy’s assassination — with an unfamiliar twist.
According to The Bent Bullet site, which went up last night, Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald — with the help of Magneto (played in his young incarnation by Michael Fassbender in the movie), who allegedly used his powers on Oswald’s wild shots to ensure the president’s death. This, it seems, will be the incident that splits the X-Men timeline, triggering the dystopian Days of Future Pastuniverse, in which mutants have been rounded up in internment camps and systematically exterminated with the aid of robotic Sentinels.
But has Magneto been falsely accused? Fictional journalist Harper Simmons seems to think so — and both Magneto’s own testimony and circumstantial evidence point to Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) committing the assassination while disguised as Oswald, then slipping away and leaving the real Oswald to take the blame. However, it’s unclear whether she did so on Magneto’s orders, or acted autonomously following a schism in the Brotherhood of Mutants.
Like the rest of what we’ve seen of Days of Future Past, the movie’s take on the trigger event is based very directly on the comic, with some major modifications. In the original story, the assassin was Mystique, leading an autonomous brotherhood — but her targets were Charles Xavier, Moira McTaggart, and hardline anti-mutant senator Robert Kelly, whose cinematic counterpart died in 2000′sX-Men and was later impersonated by Mystique.
To find out just how closely the rest of Days of Future Past adheres to the comic, will have to wait until flick hits theaters May 23, 2014 — or they’ll have to hope more of these teaser sites are on the way.
