Friday, May 27, 2016

X-Men: Apocalypse Review

As the clouds loomed overhead, Erik Lensherr, A.K.A. Magneto (Michael Fassbender), took in the sights of his surroundings, an area he had not inhabited for so very long. This was Auschwitz, where he and his parents had been separated four decades ago. All of the memories of the pain come flooding into his body, the emotional turmoil that had eliminated any remaining affections he had carried for the human race. Standing amongst the ruins of where his entire life had been shattered by forces far more evil than any comic book supervillain, a weary Erik took in every sight, every sound of this domain. Standing directly behind him in this emotional moment are (among others) Olivia Munn in basically a purple swimsuit and Oscar Isaac splattered in blue paint.

A better movie could have handled the dichotomy between the darker elements like Erik returning to a spot that would alter his world for the worst and such visually stylized foes (X-Men: First Class certainly knew how to handle such a balance), but X-Men: Apocalypse is not a better movie, rather, it's a mess of a motion picture. It doesn't sink anywhere near to the levels of Batman v. Superman: Dawn Of Justice mind you, or even the X-Men movies absolute nadir of quality, X-Men Origins: Wolverine. But good Lord is this thing a tremendous step-down in every regard from First Class and Days Of Future Past.

The year is now 1983 and Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) is running his school for gifted youngsters as proficiently as you could imagine. He's got some promising new students like Scott Summers A.K.A. Cyclops (Tye Sheridan) and Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) and all seems well in the world. But then an ancient powerful mutant named Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac) rises again and is hellbent on cleansing the world of "the weak". With worldwide destruction imminent, Xavier and other mutants, including Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), Quicksilver (Evan Peters) and Nightcrawler (Kodi-Smit McPhee), must band together to stop the forthcoming threat that intends to wipe out everyone, mutant and human alike.

That's the basic premise of the movie, but it's a touch more complicated in its execution in the first few scene of the film because of the massive amount of introductory sequences the film has to do for its myriad of new characters. We get a prologue set in Ancient Egypt detailing the origins of Apocalypse, a cage-fight between Angel (Ben Hardy) and Nightcrawler, Magneto's life in hiding is depicted, Moira McTaggart (Rose Byrne) is searching for Apocalypse, all these individual plot threads get introduced without a ton of connective tissue between them and it became difficult for even me, a comic book aficionado, to keep track of everything on-screen. Hell, there's a point mid-way through the movie where Cyclops, Jean Grey and Nightcrawler go to hang out at a mall (we don't get to see much of their adventures there sadly) and vanish for so long in the movie I honestly forgot Cyclops and Jean Grey were even in this feature film.

Honestly, the reason for the duo's very existence slipping my mind during their on-screen absence is abundantly clear; despite Simon Kinberg's screenplay stuffing every frame with as many mutants as you can name, very little in the way of concrete establishment of character personalities occurs during the excruciatingly prolonged two-and-a-half-hour runtime. That may be the thing about X-Men: Apocalypse that aggravates me the most, the fact that it doesn't even try to give the barest personalities to the myriad of new mutants that pop up here. For instance, Storm (Alexandra Shipp) gets even less to do here than she did in the original trilogy of X-Men movies. I'd be willing to bet my hat she gets maybe eight total lines of dialogue, while fellow newcomers Psylocke (Olivia Munn) gets even less to speak of both in terms of amount of dialogue and discernable personality.

As for the new good guys, Jean Grey is basically around just to set-up a film adaptation of the comic book storyline The Dark Phoenix Saga for a future movie and to offer Sophie Turner the chance to turn in one helluva bad performance. Seriously, her line readings in this movie are just God awful, flat as flat can be. At least Nightcrawler gets to be the comic relief of the movie and he does get a number of humorous moments, rendering him easily the most memorable new creation of the entire movie. And then there's the titular bad guy, Apocalypse. I'm not gonna mince words here, this is an incredible uninvolving villain. His power set ranges form being kinda dumb (he can merge people into brick walls or floors) to just generic and he doesn't have anywhere near enough in the way of bombastic dialogue or entertainingly over-the-top tendencies to compensate for his lack of an interesting motivation. All things considered, this is easily the biggest waste of an Oscar since Sam Smith won Best Original Song for his terrible Spectre tune.

Now, with all that being said, there are good elements to be found amongst the rubble of X-Men: Apocalypse. James McAvoy? Still great as Professor Xavier and I like how his speech patterns seem to be getting closer and closer to Patrick Stewarts. Jennifer Lawrence is basically just playing herself here (she's even become a figure young people look up to), but since I like her media personality quite a bit that's not a problem for me even if I wish she was a bit more blue (ba da dee da ba) in her physical appearance. However, Magneto is easily the best character in the movie, I love the more peaceful life he's cultivated for himself since the events of the last X-Men feature. His journey in the movie is seeped in tragedy and its super well-handled, by far the best character related stuff here. Some of the action is pretty good, though both a Quicksilver-centric scene and a brief action-packed cameo from Canada's First Superhero feel too derivative of past X-Men films.

One other negative thing I do have to address though before closing before this review; someone get these films a new costume department cause their outfits are terrible. I don't know if it's other factors like the lighting or framing that make the outfits look so bad, but good Lord, some of the costumes seen here (like Angel's garb or the scantily clad outfits Storm and especially Psylocke wear) are laugh-inducing. That's just one of many aspects of X-Men: Apocalypse that's gone super awry. The few characters (like Magneto and Xavier) and sequences that do fully work are exceptional. But the rest? Not so much. To put it simply, this isn't an "apocalyptically" bad movie, but it isn't far off and it sure isn't a First Class experience, that's for sure.

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