Alex Vs Simon: 12 Steps To Decide If X-Men Apocalypse Actually Sucks

4. Direction

Alex: Its with no hint of hyperbole I call Bryan Singer a great director and how he started and developed the X-Men franchise is exemplary. Yes, theres blemishes in his filmography, but you dont get those success without some level of genius. So why does his handling of Apocalypse feel so amateurish?

Its quite a showy film, with some really nice framing at points - the camera swooping across the lake and inside Cerebro is a genuinely nice touch but theres never really much of a point to any of it. Everything feels done for the sake of it; look at the blocking, especially of scenes with the horsemen, who stand around in obviously perfect Vs.

Theres also has an odd recurrent tick of showing characters walking short-ish distances in real time Magneto and his wife amble for a good minute before finding their captured daughter. I assume its meant to ground the film, adding a sense of realism, but feels like the editing traits of someone in the middle of the class as film school.

Simon: The best thing I can say about Singer's directing style - and with Zack Snyder firmly in mind here - is that you can't feel his grip around the film's neck. He's not one of those auteurs who puts themselves into the film's make-up, and that matters in comic book movies.

But this certainly isn't quite as strong as Days Of Future Past, or the first two X-Men films he directed. It's almost like he knows he's not long for this universe and between the ideas he obviously loved, he wasn't really all that bothered with the details. Things could have been cut, or sped up without losing coherence, and at times sequences can feel a little flabby.