X-Men: Apocalypse isn’t a bad movie, but it just doesn’t compare favorably to the year’s other superhero flicks. But our heroes get the job done, with help from a new generation of mutants.
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Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Apocalypse is filled with inexplicable moments and scenes, and they start right up top, with an opening sequence set in 3600 B.C. that’s so monumentally goofy, latecomers might fear they stumbled into a third-run screening of Gods of Egypt.
What did you think?!
Days Of Future Past was supposed to reset the X-franchise (and erase the lesser efforts like Brett Ratner’s franchise-killing The Last Stand), but director Bryan Singer and his screenwriters are still struggling to refold their origami-like continuity. Now, in X-Men: Apocalypse, our contentious mutant family faces its most massive menace imaginable: a long-dormant ancient brethren, a sort of anti-Klaatu, who plans to rid Earth of nuclear weapons – and then conquer it.
The mall sequence sounds like it was much lighter than what we’ve seen from the promos and TV spots for the movie so far, which would make it less likely to fit in with the doom and gloom of the possible end of the world.
Also figuring prominently in X-Men: Apocalypse is Rose Byrne, as Central Intelligence Agency agent Moira MacTaggert. New, but distinctly familiar, recruits include the teenage versions of Cyclops (Tye Sheridan), Jean Grey (Sophie Turner of “Game of Thrones”), and Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee). “I feel like I looked like ‘Dog the Bounty Hunter, ‘ just because of ’80s hair, not because of who was doing my hair”.
“Everyone was so welcoming, it was good”, said Turner of joining the franchise veterans.
It jumps around in time and place, catching up with Magneto who has settled down in Poland, Raven who is mutant hunting in Berlin and finally checking in at Xavier’s school in upstate NY.
While Sinister featuring as the key villain in Wolverine 3 and Deadpool 2 is perhaps overkill, the common thread of Cable suggests we’re edging ever so closer to The Merc with a Mouth crossing over into the X-verse.
Still, for all its weighty ideas and world-destroying spectacle, Singer says “Apocalypse”, like all of the X-Men films, is ultimately about more intimate concerns.
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It’s hard to remember that 2000’s X-Men was in its way a pioneering movie, pre-dating Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man series, Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy and the now-ubiquitous Marvel Cinematic Universe in establishing that there was an audience hungry for comic-book adventures brought to life.
