X-Men Apocalypse. Review

This film is lazy and not fun.

The X-Men film franchise has always nearly been good, the first two are solid popcorn movies as are First Class and Days of Future Past. But something has never quite clicked in the movies for various reasons; some people think they focused too heavily on Wolverine, or the lack of developed female characters, or abandoning fan favourites to give Halle Berry more screen time. As I said, a variety of reasons.

Apocalypse suffers from something else, it’s boring and there are no real stakes. When the entirety of a movie can be solved with one character effectively saying ‘you can do it, all you have to do is believe’ I checked out as soon as that happened. #PhoenixExMachina

X-Men Apocalypse is set 10 years after Days of Future Past and mutants are slowly being accepted into society although Magneto is still being hunted for his attempt on the presidents life. Speaking of Mr Fassbender, once again one of the only good and consistent things about the new X-Men movies is brilliant in the 4-5 scenes he really gets to shine. His characters false identity being discovered is really well done and has good emotional investment and payoff. If only the actual villain of the movie was this complex or interesting we might’ve had a decent film on our hands.

Apocalypse, the thousands of years old blue meanie, is apparently played by Oscar Isaac but his prosthetics are so over the top and his accent is unrecognisable it could be someone else and no one would know. It would be more impressive if it was just a blue Oscar Isaac but he had all the same powers, would’ve made a more charismatic leader and impressive display of multiple powers from a seemingly normal person as opposed to the monstrosity we saw instead.

The main problem with this movie is not its terrible villain, it’s that Bryan Singer somehow forgot how to manage the tone of the film.

Now I’m not gonna say that a movie should be a certain way nor that it has to be happy or sad, on the contrary It’s very satisfying when a tonal adjustment helps the audience and narrative in one fell swoop. Past X-Men movies have done this before very well especially X-Men First Class which balances juvenile fun with serious political and moral issues. Apocalypse just switches between whatever the hell it wants at any time and the worst culprit of this is Quicksilver.

STOP WRITING PREEMPTIVE COMMENTS. I really like Quicksilver and his moment to shine in DOFP is one of the best superhero scenes of all time but watching this movie made me realise something. The Fox Quicksilver belongs at Marvel and the Marvel Quicksilver belongs at Fox, having this fun and happy-go-lucky character facing (literally) the apocalypse as well as having to deal with meeting his estranged father again just feels weird and his super speed scene in this movie happens out of nowhere and is sort of insulting to what is actually happening on screen. What we needed was Aaron Taylor-Johnson looking sullen at his dad and pouting while shedding a silent tear while emotional strings fill the surrounding noise. Instead we got Evan Peters making badly timed jokes in odd situations.

Oh and Wolverine is in the film for less time that you’ve been reading this. Because apparently we needed/wanted that… nope? Me neither.

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