Considering that Apocalypse has been underground for the past five-and-a-half millennia, you may wonder which earlier disasters he could have been responsible for, and how MacTaggert could possibly know about them, but perhaps she is an expert in Neolithic history as well as a crack CIA agent. The point is that he is up and about again, and he has decided, on a whim, to rid the planet of everything that was built while he was out of action.

Before that, however, he has to gather his latest quartet of mutant sidekicks, although why he doesn’t opt for a different number is never explained. Co-incidentally, he meets his first candidate almost as soon as he surfaces: Storm (Alexandra Shipp), the weather controller played by Halle Berry in the original X-Men trilogy. In her younger 1980s incarnation, Storm is a teenaged urchin who can nonetheless discuss sociology in three languages. “You can’t go around killing people,” she warns Apocalypse, shortly before agreeing to work for him, anyway. “There are systems in place for that kind of thing.” (Amazingly, those aren’t the worst lines of dialogue in the film.)

Next, there is Psylocke (Olivia Munn), whose superpower is to stand around in a leotard and thigh boots while the men do the talking. Horseman number three is the winged Angel (Ben Hardy), who has even less to contribute. And number four is Magneto, who has been living incognito in Poland since the events of Days of Future Past, and has now settled down with a wife and daughter. You can probably guess what happens to them.

Like rabbits

Apocalypse’s globe-trotting recruitment drive takes an inordinate amount of time, but he isn’t the only character in the film who is intent on meeting new people. Mystique rescues the teleporting Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee) from a Berlin cage-fighting club. Scott Summers (Tye Sheridan), aka Cyclops, enrolls in Xavier’s school, where he bumps into the psychic Jean Grey (Sophie Turner). And so it goes on. A recurring weakness of recent superhero films is that the plots keep being interrupted so that yet more characters can be introduced. X-Men: Apocalypse takes things a step further. For much of its running time, there is no plot to interrupt: all it has to offer are introductions to more and more characters, which is why so few of them make any impression. Cutting between Cairo, Berlin and Xavier’s school, most of the film feels like a prologue – a “previously-on-the-X-Men” recap that you have to sit through before you get to the story.