X-men Apocalypse review
If there’s one section of the super-hero movie landscape that I feel accurately reflects everyone’s complaints about super-hero fatigue, it’s the X-men movies. The original X-men popped up in 2000 during the “Dark Age” of comic-book movies, where the safest bet for adapting any kind of comic-book hero was to strip down most of the wacky stuff and make it resemble whatever was cool back then. In the X-men’s case that meant stripping down all the colorful costumed characters and totally bonkers story-lines that make the X-men interesting, if somewhat problematic to adapt, in favor of everyone wearing stupid black leather and only concentrating on the “Protecting a world that hates and fears us” story. Since then the X-men movie’s have basically been jogging in place for 16 years, and while they’ve been pretty decent for the most part with a few exceptions, I do find that when taken as a whole I think the X-men movies often get a little too much credit.
On the other hand as the Hollywood landscape keeps evolving at an increasingly fast rate, we’re well out of the infancy stage of the super-hero movie genre. Think about it: In the 16 years that the X-men movies have been going we’ve had the Sam Raimi Spider-man movies, a Spider-man reboot series that failed spectacularly, a whole cinematic universe based on Marvel’s Avengers property that’s basically cracked some kind of holy code on how to continually make good versions of these, Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, and now we’re on the birth of a DC cinematic universe with a VERY uncertain future. And in those 16 years the X-men movie’s have basically only managed to turn out 1 legitimately great movie, and that was when someone other than Bryan Singer was actually given the reigns to do something fun with it in X-men: First Class. The rest have either aged badly like the original first X-men or X2, been straight up terrible like X3 or Origins: Wolverine, or been just pretty good but mainly gets by on nostalgic navel gazing and a few cool moments like Days of Future Past. At this point SOMEONE at Fox seems to have realized that in order for the X-men franchise to be remotely relevant in today’s cinematic landscape, maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for them to take a closer look at their source material for new ideas. So I was actually excited for a bit when X-men: Apocalypse showed up on the scene actually resembling the comics for the most part. They had a good character line-up, a good villain who could bring a lot of interesting things to the table, promising new cast members, and the hope that the X-men movies might finally evolve… And instead the movie audiences have gotten is essentially Fox attempting to emulate the Avengers movies and falling flat on their face. For 144 minutes.
(Minor spoilers for the next paragraph:)
Any legitimate positive’s to be found in Apocalypse are few and usually unintentional. For example, there’s another cool Quicksilver slow-mo sequence in here again, complete with awesome song choice that I won’t spoil since it’s honestly the highlight of the movie. But you can tell it’s only here because Fox know’s how much everyone liked Quicksilver’s scene from the last movie. And when that’s honestly the best compliment I can give the movie, I think that’s a bad sign. I can say that it’s incredibly funny to watch poor Oscar Isaac try to act intimidating as Apocalypse himself, but the material he’s given (and his costume) wouldn’t be out-of-place in an episode of Power Rangers. What’s also super disappointing is how the movie seems to have comparatively little interest as to what usually makes Apocalypse an interesting villain, his horsemen. Usually seeing the people Apocalypse recruits makes for some interesting stories and characters within themselves, but the movie hardly spends any time on any of them except for Magneto, who’s going through basically the same character arc he’s been going through since First Class. It’s pretty sad since not only are the actual characters Apocalypse chooses some of my personal favorite X-men, but the actual actors have no time to register as a presence. I guess it’s a good thing then that the new actors playing Jean Grey, Cyclops, and Nightcrawler are mostly all right but the story really doesn’t give anything new to do here. And now I guess we get to the main problem with Apocalypse; the story itself is just really, REALLY dull. It’s literally just another “Superhero’s need to save the world” story and that’s it. Barely any interesting plot nuances are added, there’s a 20 minute interlude section that mainly just manages to serve as a pacing-destroying Wolverine cameo, and the only real impact this story has on anything is that Professor X is bald now. Awesome.
Honestly guys I’m sitting here trying to think of any more positives and already my memory on this movie is going fuzzy. Suffice it to say X-men: Apocalypse isn’t a Batman v Superman level disaster, but it’s still pretty bad. I guess most die-hard X-men fans might get a kick out of this, and judging from the box-office numbers most other people might too, but I personally can’t recommend it. Guess super-hero fatigue’s finally getting to me…
The Media Fire gives this movie 4.2/10
