X-Men: Apocalypse is a very disappointing follow-up to X-Men: Days of Future Past. It undoes most of what that film did right to set the franchise on course. In Apocalypse, it introduces one of the blandest antagonists in the entire series. It also makes several other baffling narrative choices, for reasons I find questionable and obtuse. This film looks pretty, but that’s not enough.

Repeating Past Mistakes

X-Men: Apocalypse makes one of the same mistakes that X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men: First Class made. It introduces entirely too many famous mutant characters for no good reason. X-Men: Days of Future Past wisely restricted most of its new mutant characters to the secondary future timeline while winnowing the cast down in the past. X-Men: Apocalypse undoes that good work by introducing a host of new characters, many of them thinly written duplicates of characters we’ve already met.

That wouldn’t necessarily be a dealbreaker if the film didn’t have AWFUL pacing. The start of the film is incredibly slow, dragging on forever. The entire Weapon X interlude is entirely superfluous and bogs down the middle of the film terribly with a twenty minute sequence that serves no purpose beyond allowing a Wolverine cameo. The finale is intensely rushed. It’s bad across the board.

Normally, this would be the part where I’d tell you any potential problems are smoothed over by some solid character work. I really, really wish I could tell you that, honestly, but I can’t.

Master of Magnetism

Magneto is simultaneously the best and worst thing about this film. I’m in love with Michael Fassbender’s performance, but I abhor the plot handed to him. Between films, Erik Lehnsherr hung up his helmet and settled down with a (human) wife and (mutant) child. X-Men: Apocalypse therefore has to come up with a reason for him to get back in the mutant liberation saddle, which it accomplishes via a time-honored tradition: violently killing off female characters.

But WHY would he need that motivation? Think about it. The last we saw of Magneto, he tried to murder the President. He’s been an infamous, internationally known fugitive. He’s been determined to wage war against humanity on behalf of mutant-kind since 1962. If X-Men: Apocalypse had not specifically decided to have him retire off-screen (a turn which frankly feels a little out of character in the first place), he would not need a motivation to come out of retirement. It’s tempting to let it pass, because it’s been so long between films. But Erik’s daughter appears old enough that he had to have settled down very quickly after X-Men: Days of Future Past.

So what we’re left with is yet another example of a narrative poorly contriving circumstances to justify the death of women to motivate a man.

Bad Romance

Rose Byrne also returns as Moira MacTaggert, having sat out the last film. She isn’t treated particularly well. Early in the film, Xavier relays to another character that he wiped Moira’s mind without her consent at the end of X-Men: First Class. The two characters then actively consider whether said action was unfair to Xavier, because it meant he lost a potential romantic prospect.

Xavier doesn’t fare much better. Other than a stint as a MacGuffin towards the climax of the film, his character arc is also tied up in this toxic nonsense of a romance. At least the two actors have good chemistry, or this entire aspect of the film would be a complete loss.

La Femme Mystique

Look, I actually like Jennifer Lawrence. Well, I don’t actively dislike her, anyway. But she could not be any more obvious about not wanting to be in this film franchise if she tried. The only reason her performance is not outright awful is because she’s kind’ve supposed to play the disaffected loner for much of the runtime. But anytime a scene calls for actual emotion, she phones it in hard.

New(ish) X-Men

X-Men: Apocalypse is the first film since X2 to come even remotely close to doing right by Jean Grey. Sophie Turner takes over from Famke Janssen. Her performance is…fine? I mean, she does a good job, but nothing really stands out. She doesn’t get a lot to do as far as emotional performance, but she’s perfectly adequate. At least she gets a big dramatic moment in the climax.

X-Men: Apocalypse chooses to begin re-casting and reutilizing the rest of the original X-Men as well. The results aren’t great, though mostly because the film is too busy to spend adequate time with these old-become-new characters. Storm gets it the worst, being written to be complicit in a plot for global extinction. I also don’t love the revelation that her full level of power was a gift from Apocalypse instead of her innate mutant ability. The new Cyclops is slightly more developed than the old one. However, any adaptation that centers Cyclops as the rebellious teen archetype of the X-Men has missed the point of Cyclops entirely. Angel/Archangel is even further off, as he gets reimagined as a cage fighter and metal head so as to transition more easily to forgettable lackey status. And Nightcrawler gets even less attention than those three.

Visual Effects

If there’s one unmitigated high point of the film, it’s Quicksilver’s high speed evacuation of the X-Mansion. Much as with the prior film, X-Men: Apocalypse intuitively grasps how to make super speed look good on film.

In general, the powers are depicted very well. From a Cyclops and his eye beams to Nightcrawler’s bamfing, everything is rendered really well. This is one of the few recent films that goes hard on CGI compared to practical effects and still looks really good.

Costuming

I don’t like the period costuming in this film. It’s not due to any lack of quality. This era of ‘80s fashion just looks dumb, don’t @ me. The one exception is Mystique’s leather pants look. It’s hitting a lot of the same notes as Carol Danvers’ grunge look in Captain Marvel, and I am into it. The super suits are better, but not great. The X-Men suits are bland, while the Apocalypse and Horsemen suits are over designed.

The one exception is the new suit designs that appear for about a minute at the end of the film. They’re fantastic. The perfect mix of functionality with classic design. For instance, Mystique’s is a practical flight suit with colored highlights reminiscent of her classic white dress. They’re truly stunning, and I’m legitimately mad that Dark Phoenix appears to be eschewing them in favor of matching uniforms.

Music

The score is respectable, but not memorable. It works, but I couldn’t hum a bar of it back to you after I was done.

Wasting A Decade

One of the greatest things about the soft reboot of the X-Men franchise is that it allowed the characters to explore different decades in our past. First Class oozes ‘60s style and plays up the contemporary fears of nuclear war. Days of Future Past emphasizes ‘70s paranoia and the Vietnam War. X-Men: Apocalypse doesn’t do anything of the sort.

It’s especially egregious considering how rich the soil of the ‘80s is for social commentary, especially considering the initial allegory of mutants as representatives of the LGBTQ community. In particular, there’s one concept from the X-Men comics that would have made for a far more timely and appropriate ‘80s X-adventure. The Legacy Virus, an allegorical representation for HIV, is an established narrative device in the comics, and would have made a far more compelling story than Apocalypse. Or they could have used the concept of Mutant Growth Hormone to comment on the War on Drugs. They were handed one of the richest eras for the exact kind of social critique that put these films on the map, and they did NOTHING with it. They didn’t even try.

Instead of trying to directly compete with the MCU via bombastic CGI slugfests, the X-franchise should have committed to more intimate, historically-rooted explorations. That’s precisely what made the best X-films work.

Conclusion

X-Men: Apocalypse is a disappointment. There’s no getting around it. It utterly wasted the goodwill Days of Future Past built up. The production design is great, but the writing is atrocious. This film is not really worth revisiting if you’re rewatching the franchise.

That said, it’s not nearly as awful and artless as some of the other films I’ve ranked. Therefore, it’s going towards the bottom of the X-Men Rankings, but not quite at the very end.

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