Apocalypse Meh… the latest X-Men movie is far from a Biblical epic. Its flash is willing but the spirit is weak… John Mosby reviews the latest chapter for Marvel’s mutants…
It’s nearly twenty years after the events of the ‘Cuban Missile Crisis’ that framed the events we saw in First Class and nearly a decade after the events in Washington DC that brought mutants into the American mainstream – for better or for worse – in Days of Future Past. In some ways life has improved for mutants… Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) is expanding out his school with the idea that it will a welcoming place for humans and mutants alike. Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender) has changed his identity and now lives in rural Russia with his new family, far away from his past life. But in an underground chamber under the dusty, urban Egyptian landscape a terrible secret is stirring. Millennia ago, one of the first mutants to ever walk the Earth and conquer all before him was betrayed and buried. Legends and cults formed through the centuries and finally the creature known as ‘Apocalypse’ (Oscar Isaac) has returned…
Quickly realising how much time has passed and how the world has moved on, he seeks out strong mutants to be his ‘Horsemen’ and gets ready to take back the planet from what he regards as the feeble geographic ‘super-powers’. But others have sensed his awakening. Charles Xavier, teaching a teenage Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) about the responsibilities that come with her own rising levels of abilities become aware of the shift in power that could dwarf both Jean’s and his own potential. Magneto quickly becomes an acolyte to Apocalypse after tragedy once again touches his life. Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) rushes to Xavier to warn him of the impending force that will threaten their friends and humanity as a whole…
There’s a meta-textual, throwaway line in X-Men: Apocalypse about the third movie in any franchise not being very good. Given that the X-Men‘s third cinematic outing, The Last Stand, is generally considered the moment that the mutant franchise went awry, that’s either a clever bit of navel-gazing from director Bryan Singer, a zinger across the boughs of X3‘s Brett Ratner or a whispered hope that this latest movie is at least is better than that. It is… but that’s a fairweather benchmark… The Last Stand was something of an over-packed mess, one that gathered many standalone landmarks from the comic and source material and mashed them together in a way that was visually-exciting but somehow squandered some of the potential and nuance that we’d had to date. It was a film about spectacle rather than consequence and, sadly, Apocalypse seems to fall into similar traps.
Once again, Singer brings back reliable go-to character Magneto and Mystique – but really doesn’t give them anything to do that we haven’t seen before. We’ve seen Magneto/Erik’s face the horrors of Auschwitz and Mystique/Raven’s pro-active ways to save her own and Apcoalypse doesn’t so much evolve their characters as power up the pixels and replays their greatest hits.
It might be picky to look at a franchise about flying men and women, psychic spears and Egyptian gods and bemoan and quibble the fact that in over twenty years of stories, the returning actors and characters seem to have barely aged a day, but with the contracts with McAvoy, Fassbender, Lawrence and Nicholas Hoult all concluded with this movie, ANY new X-Men film must examine what it wants to say and who it wants to sell that message. McAvoy (and Sir Patrick Stewart, who will appear in next year’s Wolverine movie) and Fassbender (and the original’s Sir Ian McKellen) are all strong, in-demand actors who must be aware that the X-Men movies are a nice pay-cheque but have had less and less to ‘say’ about evolutionary morals and more and more to do with special-effect budgets.
The incoming Sophie Turner (of Game of Thrones fame) as Jean, Tye Sheridan (as Scott) and Kodi Smit-McPhee (as Nightcrawlin’ Kurt Wagner) are all fine though none of them really have the screen presence of their predecessors here. Turner’s accent wavers throughout and Sheridan and McPhee simply don’t have enough to do except stand around waiting for the special-effects to make them interesting. Apocalypse himself, essayed by The Force Awakens / Ex Machina‘s Oscar Isaac is a bad-guy whose megalomaniacal agenda is old-hat and one-note before the end of the first act and whose design looks more suited to cosplay-shopper than chaos-bringer. He stalks around, gathering mutants to his side and then shouts and postures a lot about how Biblical-level bad he really is. The trouble is you’ve seen worse on the SyFy channel movie-of-the-week, though admittedly, not with the same budget.
By the time the credits roll and you head out of the darkened cinema, many of the key moments of the previous ninety minutes will be flimsily evaporating into the daylight. While First Class attempted to reboot the franchise and Days of Future Past sought to align the various strands together – both doing pretty well at those remits – Apocalypse wants to be epic and sprawling and also bring the stories full circle… ultimately leaving us with a line-up that perhaps more closely reflects the 80s/90s heyday of Marvel‘s misfits. But excepting that change in line-up it doesn’t: the wholesale destruction seen in cities across the world (take that, Superman franchise, bring it on ID4: Resurgence!) feels like an editing note from the studio for something that hasn’t been truly exceptional since Independence Day and something that seems tacked on as mere punctuation..
The problem with the film is not that it’s awful – in truth, it’s a completely passable hour and a half of by-the-numbers crash and burn – it’s simply that even with a now obligatory Wolverine cameo and Quicksilver providing a re-run of his best bits – the Extraordinary X-Men are no longer extraordinary at all. Far from being a smart, savvy analogy for the outcasts and outliers to identify with, they’re now the establishment… a conveyor-belt of the been-there, seen-that, blew-that-up twisted continuity. Where Singer undeniably once helped revolutionise comic adaptations, this is now a world where Marvel‘s own studio is setting the pace – somewhat ironically… as the printed-page section of Marvel‘s empire sometimes seems determined to distance themselves from that X-legacy as much as possible.
With the film’s references to the multitude of characters who skin-colour is a cyan’d-shade of pigment, this is a movie that wants to sing the blues but instead finds itself humming a greatest-hits album of soft-rock. Here they go again on their own, going down the only road they’ve ever known…
Even beyond the nostalgia-setting, used mainly for punchlines rather than meaningful context, these literally are your grandparents’ X-Men.
7/10
X-Men: Apcoalypse is released by Twentieth Century Fox and out now in both the UK and US.
