So, I have seen the new X-Men film, and I absolutely loved it. This does not mean that you will. Bear with me a moment, please. I will try to make this as spoiler free as possible.

As anyone who has seen the previous films in this Bryan Singer series will know, each one is being set 10 years apart, and much of the X-Men chronology has been thrown up in the air. The primary constants of the series are Charles, Hank, Eric and Raven. This film is set in the 1980s and introduces Jean and Scott, along with Kurt, Warren and Ororo, all as teenage additions to the team. Of course the original series had a much more traditional X-Men team in it, but that series went downhill rapidly as even Singer acknowledges in this film. This film was a chance for redemption, and Singer has grasped it with both hands.

The jumbled chronology has set up some odd effects. Having been seen on television facing down Magneto in Days of Future Past, Mystique has become a hero to young mutants all over the world such as Ororo Munroe growing up in Cairo, and Kurt Wagner in Berlin. This is probably the last thing that Raven wants. Eric is trying his best to hide away from everything and lead a normal life. Meanwhile Charles and Hank have the school up running again, and are recruiting new students, the most powerful of whom is this girl with red hair.

Sophie Turner does an OK job as Jean. It isn’t her fault that when I look at her I only see Sansa Stark. She doesn’t look any more like Jean than Famke Janssen did, and neither of them has captured Jean’s personality. However, the story is there; all Singer & co have to do is tell it, and that they do very well.

I totally accept that if you haven’t grown up on X-Men and don’t have a huge emotional investment in the characters the way I have then you may get a bit bored by the long and somewhat silly plot involving some guy called Apocalypse. That wasn’t what kept me watching, often in tears, and at one point in serious danger of sobbing out loud, which I have never done in a cinema before. That was one of the defining mythologies of my childhood being played out right there on the big screen.

There were dodgy things, of course. There was rather a lot of fridging, which I do wish screenwriters would learn to do without. Scott and Alex being brothers doesn’t make much sense if Scott is a teenager now and Alex was one back in the ’60s. We can’t have Wanda because she’s in the Avengers universe, and Quicksilver’s name is Pietro, not Peter.

There is one thing, of course, that I am very sad about. But then nothing is perfect.

On the other hand, there was good stuff. I loved the scene where Scott, Jean and Jubilee take Kurt to see Return of the Jedi (and no one bats an eye at the teenager with blue skin because those kids are obviously science fiction fans). There are probably more brown-skinned Egyptians in the introduction than in the whole of Gods of Egypt. Alexandra Shipp is delightful as the young Ororo, as is Lana Condor as a very young Jubilee. As you have probably heard, Weapon-X makes a brief and bloody appearance. The Quicksilver time freeze sequences are as much fun as ever, if even more improbable.

There’s an awful lot of new X-Men material in production. Fox appears to be determined to turn the X-Men into as massive a franchise for themselves as the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is for Disney. Eventually this has to be bad, because Claremont happens and we all know that things will go to shit in the end. But maybe there will be a few more movies before that happens. Also, of course, Singer hinted at the end of Days of Future Past that the universe in which the first three films existed (and Patrick Stewart is the Professor) had changed, and that possibly the events of Last Stand would not happen. If he’s prepared to do that, maybe he can make changes here too. After all, Emma is already dead in Singer’s universe. Who knows what might happen?