X-Men: Apocalypse Review - An Upsetting Failure That Sets The Franchise Back Ten Years

With such a basic, coincidence-motivated plot and no likeable ins, everything else crumbles. Much of this blame should fall on the script, which is of course what underserves the characters in the first place and boasts some of the most crass expositional dialogue imaginable. There's no effort to link together all the sub-plots, leading to that confused A to B narrative, and it hampers the few moments of good action by not trying to establish them at all.

Quicksilvers moment is the most irritating example, where a moment of deft filmmaking is squandered by placement, but all of the action is just there, with uninspired choreography against a backdrop so dense George Lucas would want to tone it down. Partially because of the powers involved, the destruction is animated on an overly-detailed, particle level, which unfortunately only serves to highlight the movie-wide terrible CGI and remind you of all the humans caught up in the destruction.

Oh yeah - as seen in the trailers, En Sabah Nur causes more collateral damage than the DC Extended Universe Superman could ever dream of, an oversight that means the movie's constantly Instagramming director hasn't paid attention to internet discussion in the past five years. And that may be where Apocalypse really falls down; it feels like Bryan Singer is playing at the kid's table while Marvel and DC try to maturely do the comics justice (emphasis on the try with the latter).

While those series have some sort of plan, X-Men: Apocalypse doesn't seem to know where it fits in the franchise. It's at once relishing in the new timeline it's constructed while also believing the original movies are still in the future: characters come and go; dangling plot threads from the previous film are dropped; at one point it actually forgets its prequel status and that we know the state of many characters care of Days Of Future Pasts epilogue, robbing pivotal scenes of any tension.

In lieu of addressing those elements, theres also an attempt to redo themes and remake moments from both The Last Stand and Origins, which were written out of the timeline in the last film. However, rather than "doing them right", they're repetitive and unenlightening, and in some cases embarrassingly feel there by accident; we get Scott discovers his powers at school and hints at something super powerful inside Jean, yet there's also another simplified origin for Wolverine and a villain assembly sequence that feels very Ratner.

I dont know where the franchise can go from here. Singer did masterful work resetting the playbox in Days Of Future Past, yet only one movie later has put us right back to where we were before he started, a world of iffy films plagued by plot holes. J-Laws apathy means shes unlikely to come back and Magnetos lost all intrigue. Aside from all the spin-offs (Wolverine, Deadpool, New Mutants), the main series' future feels rather flat; the requisite post-credits scene is vague as hell, so all we know is that future movies are going to follow this so-so new class.

Or should that be first class, because for the third movie in a row were still talking about forming the X-Men. Theres a clear obsession with going back to the start in this franchise, and while its always nice seeing young versions of fan favourites, it smacks of a fear of cross-movie development. Not every franchise needs to be an intricate shared universe, especially not the X-Men - the ensemble is intrinsic to the idea, so they can just keep rolling and be doing Avengers-level outings but you cant remain stagnant on the same old ideas like this.

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