Review 382: X-Men: Apocalypse
X-Men: Apocalypse has got to be the worst or at least the weakest X-Men film to date and a sign that the series is running out of gas.
Since the dawn of civilization, he was worshiped as a god. Apocalypse (Oscar Issac), the first and most powerful mutant from Marvel’s X-Men universe, amassed the powers of many other mutants, becoming immortal and invincible. Upon awakening after thousands of years, he is disillusioned with the world as he finds it and recruits a team of powerful mutants, including a disheartened Magneto (Michael Fassbender), to cleanse mankind and create a new world order, over which he will reign.
As the fate of the Earth hangs in the balance, Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) with the help of Professor X (James McAvoy) must lead a team of young X-Men to stop their greatest nemesis and save mankind from complete destruction.
As the fate of the Earth hangs in the balance, Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) with the help of Professor X (James McAvoy) must lead a team of young X-Men to stop their greatest nemesis and save mankind from complete destruction.
The plot is thin, bland and lacking in the substance and depth that made the previous X-Men films so enjoyable. I'm quite underwhelmed. I feel by this point the series is running on franchise fumes and the people involved are just running out of things to do with these characters.
There is nowhere else for them to go. I can't help but feel that the presence of Apocalypse as well as the films visual overload are meant to compensate for a lack of fresh ideas.
If you peel away the bodywork of this film (Apocalypse and the visuals) and you have an empty shell of a film with no new ideas or story progression.
Another problem with this film is pacing. Now I'm not what you'd call an action junkee, but I do like to have a good time at the movies. And this films pacing is slow. The whole film feels like build up, just constant build up and whole film moves at a snails pace and at the speed of a steamroller.
Even when action is happening on screen (which is not very often) the film moves with so little energy giving X-Men: Apocalypse a very tired feel.
Another problem with this film is it being a period piece. The film is said to be set in 1983 (the only way we are given any indication of that is when Jean Gray, Cyclops, Nightcrawler and another superfluous Mutant Jubilee come out of a theatre after seeing Return of the Jedi. But apart from that, X-Men: Apocaypse doesn't really take much advantage of it's setting. It's sadly downplayed here. And really that lack of period detail makes it almost indistinguishable from the original X-Men Trilogy. It has absolutely ziltch impact on the overall plot. You could literally set it in any time period and had take place in during the same time period as the original trilogy and it would have changed NOTHING!. It takes place in 1983, so flipping what? And in the process it looses a bit of its identity.
Returning director Bryan Singer's direction is messy and lackluster, the special effects are a mixed bag with some being just downright cheesy. For instance all the destruction caused by Apocalypse is competently produced and colourful, but it just that it feels weightless and soulless, mostly because it kind of looks cartoonish. There are also some shots where you can clearly see Oscar Issac, Tye Sheridan, Sophie Turner and Kodi Smit-McPhee are standing in front of a blue screen because their characters/the actors aren't integrated firmly into the foreground. The costumes are uneven and overdone, for instance, the X-Men's outfits look cool but Pcylocke's outfit makes her look like a stripper. The score is hammy and gunk and is not up to composer John Ottman's usual standards.
The action scenes are dull and devoid of any tension mostly because of the overreliance on unconvincing CGI
However the cinematography is stylish and the production design is excellent.
As for the acting, James MacAvoy and Jennifer Lawrence mostly sleepwalk their way through this slog of a movie. While Rose Byrne mostly plays the exposition machine as Moira MacTaggert.
Their acting was perfectly fine I just see any character ark or development. Almost as if their characters have nowhere else to go much like this movie.
Another major problem with this movie in terms of characters and acting is that this film introduces new characters such Apocalypse's four horsemen and students at Xavier's school and does very little with them, in other words, the new characters are underused and underdeveloped to put it plainly.
Firstly, Apocalypse's Four Horsemen are Ororo Munroe/Storm (Alexandra Shipp), Warren Worthington III/Angel (EastEnders's Ben Hardy), Betsy Braddock/Pcylocke (Olivia Munn) and the aforementioned Magneto. When Apocalypse begins recruiting them, we as an audience have bearly gotten to know them and they haven't been onscreen that much and we are given very little insight into what their motivations/reasons are for joining Apocalypse. As a result, they just come across as the stereotypical henchmen a villain needs, uninteresting and for the most part interchangeable which doesn't put their talents to good use if you ask me. Pcylocke, in particular, was
As for the Xavier's students, we're introduced to younger versions of Scott Summer/Cyclops (Tye Sheridan) and Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) who while competent and initially interesting are mostly rendered serviceable and interchangeable in their performances and characterisation and get practically no time to bond or grow.
And at the end of the day, I actually began to wonder if they were only just thrown in as inexcusable fan service.
Oscar Issac is also wasted as En Sabah Nur/Apocalypse, partially because he's buried by a tone of make up effects and maybe by having his voice altered in post which left me wondering what was the point. But mostly it's because he's such a one-dimensional, stereotypical villain. He just wakes up after a thousand years of hibernation and see's the world is not as he envisioned it and all of sudden he goes on a crusade to destroy and rebuild the world as he likes it. He got no real motivations, it's the most cliched excuse you can come up with for a villain and instead of menacing, Issac's performance comes off as serviceable at best and hammy at worst.
Michael Fassbender and Evan Peters end up being the best parts of this film by far playing Erik Lehnsherr/Magneto and Peter Maximoff/Quicksilver respectively. Over the course of these three films, Fassbender has put his mark on the character, he beautifully captures the inner demons of Magneto, the charisma, the tragic loss the character experiences and the friendship and respect for Professor X. His character ark, unfortunatly, feels unbelievably contrived. When we're reintroduced to Magneto, he's settled down in Poland with a wife and daughter (sound familiar) and is living a perfectly normal life. It's practically telagraphed that all of this is set to be taken away from him in a feable and cliched attempt to become an antagonist again because that's the role he's mandated to play in an X-Men movie.
There is nowhere else for them to go. I can't help but feel that the presence of Apocalypse as well as the films visual overload are meant to compensate for a lack of fresh ideas.
If you peel away the bodywork of this film (Apocalypse and the visuals) and you have an empty shell of a film with no new ideas or story progression.
Another problem with this film is pacing. Now I'm not what you'd call an action junkee, but I do like to have a good time at the movies. And this films pacing is slow. The whole film feels like build up, just constant build up and whole film moves at a snails pace and at the speed of a steamroller.
Even when action is happening on screen (which is not very often) the film moves with so little energy giving X-Men: Apocalypse a very tired feel.
Another problem with this film is it being a period piece. The film is said to be set in 1983 (the only way we are given any indication of that is when Jean Gray, Cyclops, Nightcrawler and another superfluous Mutant Jubilee come out of a theatre after seeing Return of the Jedi. But apart from that, X-Men: Apocaypse doesn't really take much advantage of it's setting. It's sadly downplayed here. And really that lack of period detail makes it almost indistinguishable from the original X-Men Trilogy. It has absolutely ziltch impact on the overall plot. You could literally set it in any time period and had take place in during the same time period as the original trilogy and it would have changed NOTHING!. It takes place in 1983, so flipping what? And in the process it looses a bit of its identity.
Returning director Bryan Singer's direction is messy and lackluster, the special effects are a mixed bag with some being just downright cheesy. For instance all the destruction caused by Apocalypse is competently produced and colourful, but it just that it feels weightless and soulless, mostly because it kind of looks cartoonish. There are also some shots where you can clearly see Oscar Issac, Tye Sheridan, Sophie Turner and Kodi Smit-McPhee are standing in front of a blue screen because their characters/the actors aren't integrated firmly into the foreground. The costumes are uneven and overdone, for instance, the X-Men's outfits look cool but Pcylocke's outfit makes her look like a stripper. The score is hammy and gunk and is not up to composer John Ottman's usual standards.
The action scenes are dull and devoid of any tension mostly because of the overreliance on unconvincing CGI
However the cinematography is stylish and the production design is excellent.
As for the acting, James MacAvoy and Jennifer Lawrence mostly sleepwalk their way through this slog of a movie. While Rose Byrne mostly plays the exposition machine as Moira MacTaggert.
Their acting was perfectly fine I just see any character ark or development. Almost as if their characters have nowhere else to go much like this movie.
Another major problem with this movie in terms of characters and acting is that this film introduces new characters such Apocalypse's four horsemen and students at Xavier's school and does very little with them, in other words, the new characters are underused and underdeveloped to put it plainly.
Firstly, Apocalypse's Four Horsemen are Ororo Munroe/Storm (Alexandra Shipp), Warren Worthington III/Angel (EastEnders's Ben Hardy), Betsy Braddock/Pcylocke (Olivia Munn) and the aforementioned Magneto. When Apocalypse begins recruiting them, we as an audience have bearly gotten to know them and they haven't been onscreen that much and we are given very little insight into what their motivations/reasons are for joining Apocalypse. As a result, they just come across as the stereotypical henchmen a villain needs, uninteresting and for the most part interchangeable which doesn't put their talents to good use if you ask me. Pcylocke, in particular, was
As for the Xavier's students, we're introduced to younger versions of Scott Summer/Cyclops (Tye Sheridan) and Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) who while competent and initially interesting are mostly rendered serviceable and interchangeable in their performances and characterisation and get practically no time to bond or grow.
And at the end of the day, I actually began to wonder if they were only just thrown in as inexcusable fan service.
Oscar Issac is also wasted as En Sabah Nur/Apocalypse, partially because he's buried by a tone of make up effects and maybe by having his voice altered in post which left me wondering what was the point. But mostly it's because he's such a one-dimensional, stereotypical villain. He just wakes up after a thousand years of hibernation and see's the world is not as he envisioned it and all of sudden he goes on a crusade to destroy and rebuild the world as he likes it. He got no real motivations, it's the most cliched excuse you can come up with for a villain and instead of menacing, Issac's performance comes off as serviceable at best and hammy at worst.
Michael Fassbender and Evan Peters end up being the best parts of this film by far playing Erik Lehnsherr/Magneto and Peter Maximoff/Quicksilver respectively. Over the course of these three films, Fassbender has put his mark on the character, he beautifully captures the inner demons of Magneto, the charisma, the tragic loss the character experiences and the friendship and respect for Professor X. His character ark, unfortunatly, feels unbelievably contrived. When we're reintroduced to Magneto, he's settled down in Poland with a wife and daughter (sound familiar) and is living a perfectly normal life. It's practically telagraphed that all of this is set to be taken away from him in a feable and cliched attempt to become an antagonist again because that's the role he's mandated to play in an X-Men movie.
The questions must be asked "Why would Magneto ally himself with Apocalypse? He was Charles Xavier's
friend, he knew him, he had a mutual respect for him even though they
went down different paths in their attempts to integrate mutants into
modern day society. This has been firmly established over the course of
the original trilogy and these last two prequels.
What's in it for him if his allies himself with Apocalypse. Obviously, the "tragic" loss of his family is enough to cloud his judgement to the point where he allows himself to be taken advantage of by the worlds first mutant
and him allying himself
with Apocalypse and his motivations for doing so just felt forced and
cliched and given Apocalypse's world end scheme I have to ask.
Evan Peters is back as Peter Maximoff/Quicksilver and he's just as fun here as he was in Days of Future Past and once again get his own slow-mo action scene set to Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) by Eurythmics which was a lot of fun though it did feel drawn out and didn't have the same impact as the first time. Guess you really can't do the same thing twice and lightning never strikes
Kodi Smit-McPhee has a few fun/funny moments as Kurt Wagner/Nightcrawler. Even though they are few and far between, they resonate in this otherwise underwhelming film.
I honestly think with this film, 20th Century Fox tried to bite off more than they could chew.
I also think it's time these characters reverted back to Marvel, 1.5/5.
The Anonymous Critic.
Evan Peters is back as Peter Maximoff/Quicksilver and he's just as fun here as he was in Days of Future Past and once again get his own slow-mo action scene set to Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) by Eurythmics which was a lot of fun though it did feel drawn out and didn't have the same impact as the first time. Guess you really can't do the same thing twice and lightning never strikes
Kodi Smit-McPhee has a few fun/funny moments as Kurt Wagner/Nightcrawler. Even though they are few and far between, they resonate in this otherwise underwhelming film.
I honestly think with this film, 20th Century Fox tried to bite off more than they could chew.
I also think it's time these characters reverted back to Marvel, 1.5/5.
The Anonymous Critic.
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