That is to say, the recycled beats work just fine themselves, it's the combining them that doesn't. Apocalypse is like taking a trip to a buffet where all of the food is legitimately quite good, but then you just start dumping it on the plate, so you have two slices of pepperoni pizza draped languidly over mashed potatoes with gravy that's starting to ooze onto the kung pao shrimp, and to finish it up you've topped it all with two - nah, make it three - scoops of peach ice cream. None of it tastes right together, and when you're done eating, mostly you just wish there had been less of it. Apocalypse is only 12 minutes longer than the last film in the series, 2014's revitalising, continuity-flattening X-Men: Days of Future Past, and 12 minutes ain't nothing, but it feels closer to an hour while you're watching. Days of Future Past, after all, had basically one narrative thrust, while Apocalypse feels like three distinct movies, each of which could have been a worthy sequel in its own right.
I will go through them in the order I liked them, from most to least: we have, yet again, the story of how Charles "Professor X" Xavier (James McAvoy), paraplegic psychic mutant, and Erik "Magneto" Lensherr (Michael Fassbender), Holocaust-surviving mutant who can manipulate metal, would like above all things to be friends, but whose views on how the world works cannot be reconciled. This time around, ten years after becoming an internationally wanted fugitive in the 1973 events of Days of Future Past, Erik has gone into hiding in Poland, with a wife (Carolina Bartczak) who knows his secret, and a darling daughter (T.J. McGibbon), to whom he promises that he'll never be taken away from her in the kind of grave, sincere register that makes it very clear that he will very much be taken away from her. He also has a job at a metalwork facility (a silent and thus appealing irony), and when he saves a coworker's life using his power, he's outed and reported to the police. One dreadful series of accidents later, there's a dead wife and daughter, a lot of dead cops, and an Erik who is stripped of the last vestiges of sentiment, looking only to see the world bleed.
Nicely working alongside this plotline, we find find shapeshifting mutant Raven, AKA "Mystique" (Jennifer Lawrence, awake again after cruising through Days of Future Past on autopilot), who has dedicated the last ten years to saving the lives of mutants throughout the world, and who finds herself flung together with her old colleagues at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters when she proves to have the best insight into a current crisis facing them all. We'll get back to that crisis, but together, the Raven and Erik plots speak to the desire for absolution, and the difficulty of obtaining it; and while we've had literally six films now of either McAvoy & Fassbender's Charles and Erik sadly calling each other "old friend" as they debate moral philosophy, or Patrick Stewart & Ian McKellen's versions of the same characters doing the same thing, it's still enjoyable to watch given the high level of acting talent involved (and Fassbender, in particular, is on fire in this movie).
Movie two is the attempt to bridge the trilogy defined by this film, Days of Future Past, and X-Men: First Class with the original trilogy of X-Men, X2, and X-Men: The Last Stand, or that is to say, whatever stories will take their place now that they've been wiped from the timeline. It is the film in which we meet a new generation of mutant teenagers: Jean "Jean Grey" Grey (Sophie Turner), a highly sensitive psychic with a dark secret; Scott "Cyclops" Summers (Tye Sheridan), emotionally high-strung but a natural leader, if he can gain confidence, and control the death rays that shoot out of his eyes; Kurt "Nightcrawler" Wagner (Kodi Smit-McPhee, by an outstanding margin the best of the newbies), a deeply religious German mutant with the body of a devil and the ability to teleport; and Jubilation "Jubilee" Lee (Lana Condor), who sucks less as a character her than she usually does, mostly by virtue of barely being in the movie. Also, for the first time in any medium where I've encountered her, the ethnically Asian Jubilee can actually be determined to be Asian visually. These wide-eyed innocents are Xavier's last hope for a peaceful future for mutants, but despite his best efforts, he and his right-hand man, Hank "Beast" McCoy (Nicholas Hoult) are drifting back towards the dormant idea that the best, brightest, and strongest of his students should be trained to be the X-Men, heroes to defend the world. The resurfaced Raven finds herself awkwardly placed into the role of icon and figurehead for these nascent fighters.
Movie three is a big blue dude trying to blow shit up and take over the world.
Here's the thing: the first two movies can be accused of overreach and overstuffing themselves with material - there is simply not enough time left over for all of the new mutants to get anything remotely like a proper introduction, which is a cardinalsin for a movie this long to commit - but they have been lumped together by director Bryan Singer (his fourth trip to the franchise, and alas! his worst) and screenwriter Simon Kinberg (Michael Dougherty & Dan Harris also receive story credit alongside the first two men) in a way that has an appealingly overblown comic-booky attitude. It's the destruction porn leg of the triangle that just does not cohere - over here's a scene of Magneto screaming in pain as he cradles his dead child, now let's cut over to some garish CGI laser swords! - and which feels the most boring and over-familiar. The villain is En Sabah Nur (Oscar Isaac, wasted under latex and digitally-augmented dialogue), an ancient mutant who was worshiped as a god before being buried under a pyramid in 3600 BCE, in what's become downtown Cairo by 1983. He has generically Hitlerian intentions for turning the world into his private power fantasy, and to do it he needs to recruit his mutant Four Horsemen: a sullen young man with wings, Angel (Ben Hardy), a psychic energy-wielding mutant named Psylocke (Olivia Munn), an African woman who can control weather (Alexandra Shipp), who is neither called Ororo Munroe nor Storm anywhere during the course of the movie, but it still counts, and based on her limited screentime, I think Shipp has the goods to make more of the character than has so far been made. Last of the horsemen is Magneto, in a decision that really doesn't work, like at all. It turns his entire arc into "morally grey character turns pure evil until he stops at the point where the heroes would lose if he continued", which is a tremendous waste of Fassbender's work in constructing the character over three movies.
Apocalypse has a lot of material that works really magnificently well, but the material around the actual Apocalypse (which, in the comics, is also En Sabah Nur's nom de guerre, never specified as such here) is almost uniformly dumb, big noisy crap, continuing the grand tradition of comic book movies in recent years of having the absolute worst, most bland villains. Replace Isaac's slate-blue villain here with Lee Pace's teal-blue villain from Guardians of the Galaxy, and I can't see that it would matter, or that anybody would notice. It's needless bed-shitting maneuver that makes the film feel worse than I think it actually is, since almost everything else at least has the seeds of something interesting: though we don't get to know the new characters other than Scott all that well (it resembles the first X-Men in how transparently it's putting all the pieces on the chessboard for a game to be played later), they're all fairly interesting, and McAvoy and Fassbender continue to be effortlessly wonderful - Fassbender in his rage, McAvoy in his clumsy, inept behavior around former flame Moira Mactaggert (Rose Byrne). There are some fairly good action sequences: the climactic battle with En Sabah Nur and his lackeys is filmed from close-enough angles that it feels like it involves people instead of objects, but not so close that it's hard to follow, and there's a new sequence involving the fast-moving Peter "Quicksilver" Maximoff (Evan Peters) that plays a lot like the Quicksilver scene from Days of Future Past done bigger and flashier. It lacks the impact of novelty, and it starts to strain credulity, but it's also delightful to watch, and turns a slow-motion explosion into the most beautiful kind of saturated-color popcorn movie imagery.
When the film works, it mixes this kind of ultra-glossy comic book entertainment (it's easily the most cheerful-looking of Singer's X-Men films) with the hard-edged PG-13 seriousness that has long defined the X-Men ethos amongst the major comic book franchises (compared to the slightly sanitary Marvel Studios films, or the angry nihilism of the later DC films). When it doesn't work, it's mind-rotting tosh, or unnecessary puffery, like a violent cameo from fan favorite Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) that plainly exists for the primary, indeed solitary reason that Wolverine is, after all, a fan favorite. It's a movie groaning at the seams and inelegant as all hell. I frankly can't imagine whether I should say that on balance, it's "good" or "bad" - I think anybody who enjoyed either or both of First Class and Days of Future Past will at least not hate this, and I certainly didn't regret the two and a half hours watching actors I love playing characters I like while John Ottman's terrific score dances its dance with Beethoven's 7th Symphony. But honesty forces me to admit that no, this doesn't really "work".
6/10
Reviews in this series
X-Men: The Last Stand (Ratner, 2006)
X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Hood, 2009)
X-Men: First Class (Vaughn, 2011)
The Wolverine (Mangold, 2013)
X-Men: Days of Future Past (Singer, 2014)
Deadpool (Miller, 2016)
X-Men: Apocalypse (Singer, 2016)
Other films in this series, yet to be reviewed
X-Men (Singer, 2000)
X2 (Singer, 2003)
Hey man, big blue dude wants to blow up the world is comprehensible. I still have no idea what the hell Lex Luthor thought he was doing.
ReplyDeleteOh, I think Apocalypse is perfectly comprehensible. It's just boring.
ReplyDeleteI feel like my reaction to the X-Men series is both more and less generous than most other people's. Firstly--aside from Last Stand, which obviously sucks--I think all the other movies in the series are perfectly okay, including the oft-reviled Wolverine movies. On the other hand, I've never really felt that any of them--even the praised-to-the-skies X2--are really much MORE than "perfectly okay." I always enjoy them well enough, but after I watch them, they don't tend to stay with me very much.
ReplyDeleteTHAT SAID, within that narrow spectrum, I thought this movie was one of the better ones. I can't really disagree with any of your criticisms; if anything, I think you understated how totally useless Apocalypse is as a villain, and while the secondary characters here aren't quite as useless as the ones in First Class, they're damned close Oh, and the less said about that Wolverine cameo the better. It was quite shameless of them to play it up as this big reveal in the preview). But I dunno, maybe I'm just used to overlooking the useless shit in these movies, or maybe it's just that I have really low expectations, but I still thought that on the whole, it was--say it with me--perfectly okay. And man, (unimaginative song choice notwithstanding) that Quicksilver scene may have been desperately trying to top the one in DoFP, but damned if it didn't pretty well succeed--it was just HELLA cool.
I also want to say, I kind of admire--admire?--the way they've sort of quasi-reset the timeline so that you can still sort of think of all these movies as being in the same continuity even though they're really not, particularly, and the fact that they did it in such a way that you raise your hand and say "but wait, that doesn't quite..." and then you trail off and shrug and just accept it. That feels kind of adroit, though I'm not wholly clear on how intentional it was.
Welp, I may be setting myself up as an outlier here, but I actually fucking hated this one - not only am I comfortable calling it the worst superhero film this year, but possibly the worst of all the X-Men films (and this is speaking as someone who enjoys and admires all three of Singer's previous goes at the franchise, so I'm not sure what caused him to shit the bed with this one).
ReplyDeleteIt's not that there aren't constituent elements that work - Fassbender and McAvoy are doing fine work with some cringeworthy material, and Evan Peters is once again delightful - but they don't coalesce into anything I would recognise as a story. The main thrust of the plot is "a bad guy wants to blow up the world, the heroes stop him," and all of the character stuff floating around that is just so much place setting and throat clearing and time wasting. Everything involving the young X-students feels redundant and obligatory (surely I can't be the only one who feels that after nine movies and sixteen years, I've completely run out of patience for more embellishment of how the X-Men got started when the half-hour of setup at the beginning of the first film was perfectly satisfactory), and the scenes of the Four Horsemen being recruited were just death. The only person who gets what might be called an "arc" in this film is Magneto, and even that's contingent on his having a wife and daughter conjured ex nihilo between films only for them to die to motivate him here.
It feels like Singer wanted to make the sort of half-hour, Transformers-esque, rampant, city-levelling, destruction-porn finale that we've seen in countless blockbusters in the last ten years, so he did, and then slapped a perfunctory movie on the front of it to pad it out to the obligatory two and a half hour running time. I'm reminded of nothing so much as the old non-canon filler Dragonball Z films, the ones where the heroes are bumming around doing nothing much of consequence when a bad guy shows up, announces he wants to blow up the world, then they fight for a bit and the bad guy loses. Resume bumming around. Except at least those filler movies had the courtesy of not usually lasting any longer than 45 minutes and made it clear up front that they had no bearing on the future events of the series - here the bumming around lasts almost two hours! And the real tragedy of it is, the big blow-out action finale that motivates all of that laborious setup isn't even a very good version of the thing that it wants to be. Is there anything in that Cairo set piece that hasn't been done bigger and bolder in The Avengers, or Man of Steel, or (God help me) Transfomers: Dark of the Moon?
Considering how all of the older X-Men films had conflicts that felt like they grew organically out of emotions and themes and characterisation, it's a travesty seeing the venerable series reduced to this sort of paint-by-numbers bombast. There are certainly worse-made superhero films, and less coherent superhero films, but this one forges into bold new territory when it comes to being aggressively, potently pointless.
I liked this one better than Batman v Dullman and Civil Bore, but yeah, the villan Apocalypse really sucked and I hated how they wasted Oscar Isaac. And the final battle has probably more CGI garbage thrown at you than that PlayStation 100 cutscene in Boreman v Superman.
ReplyDeleteIs one of those three movies titled Psylocke Goes to Auschwitz?
ReplyDeleteBecause, man, even accepting that fundamental narrative beat as tasteful and wise, that is some atonal, blithe shit right there. (Obviously, to really make it right, the scene needed to be in black-and-white, with only Psylocke's purple swimsuit in color.)
Anyway, the Quicksilver part was even better than the first one, though, once you adjust for novelty. It's the only part of the movie I really like, but I love it so much, that a 6/10 seems exactly right. Bryan Singer and Evan Peters need to make a Wally West Flash movie.
Honestly, I'm basically 100% Thrash 'Til Death on this one: it's a cut above "Dawn of Justice" if only by virtue of being less viscerally unpleasant, but man is it one junker of a mess even so, and I too say that as someone who still maintains that Singer's original "X" films (and "First Class" and DoFP to a lesser extent) are damned good movies. This one, though...well, again, it's not as awful as DoJ, but it DOES share, to my mind, one of DoJ's biggest weaknesses, which is that its first, like, hour and change feels like it's spent entirely chasing its own tail; Apocalypse gathering up his Horsemen feels unbearably tedious, for example (indeed, the fact that all but Magneto wind up being complete non-entities in this movie renders it all the more so), and I find myself positively baffled at how much time and energy the movie wastes on sequences that, really, could be cut from the movie to zero effect. The ENTIRE trip to Weapon X is pointless to the extreme, especially, but I also can't help but feel giving Magneto a NEW family to tragically kill off is more than slightly absurd (it starts from a bit of a leap, that Magneto has retired for some unknown reason since last we saw him at the end of DoFP, and winds up taking us back to more or less exactly the same place he was when we last left off ANYWAY). NO ONE's story really goes anywhere, in fact; the ones that DO-Scott choosing engagement over apathy, Mystique bracing against her role as Mutant Icon, Jean's fear of her powers-are all so thinly sketched and limply executed (Lawrence has never more plainly cared so little for even trying to engage with the material than she does here) as to fail to register anyway.
ReplyDeleteI WANT to like this one, is the thing; the broad strokes of its concept-in particular, Apocalypse the Living Symbol of Regressivism (and a dark Father Figure to his lost-souls Horsemen) VS. a team of young people struggling to come to terms with their own identity (with benevolent Father Figure Charles Xavier to guide them) feels like it can, and ought to, work. But the movie is instead content to just slather on the fan-service (often in VERY cloying fashion) and CGI (the quality of which is EMBARRASSING, by the way, and the practical effects fare only slightly better), and so it all comes out so hollow and bland.
--Sssonic
Oh yeah, also, the Auschwitz scene, though plainly well-intended, is one of the most singularly tasteless things I've seen in a mainstream movie in AGES.
ReplyDeleteI agree that Apocalypse is a really lame villain on paper, but, I dunno. Something about Isaac's performance worked for me. I can't really explain it, but it just "clicked."
ReplyDeleteI definitely think the Weapon X thing was conpletely pointless, and not only played into the Wolverine love, but also X2 nostalgia. The soldiers are even wearing the same damn costumes. And it just comes out of nowhere, too! All of a sudden, Stryker just shows up at the mansion. Why was he there? How did he get there so quickly? In the context of the film, the mansion just exploded like 30 seconds ago! What makes it even worse is that it could have actually accomplished something: introduce a new actor for Wolverine. If (one sixteenth of) the movie is trying to establish a new cast of X-Men, why not do the same for Wolverine? We all know they're gonna recast eventually, and doing it here would make it less awkward when the neWolverine does come in.
Oh yeah, also, I'm trying to figure out what three more superhero movies there are in 2016, 'cuz the only one left I can think of is "Dr. Strange" in November. Are we counting "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows" too? But that's still only two, then...what's #3?
ReplyDelete^ Suicide Squad, dude.
ReplyDeleteTHERE we go. Don't know how I forgot that one, either; I'm genuinely excited for it, AND it comes out near my birthday. XD
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you mentioned TMNT 2, because I wouldn't have guessed that's what Tim meant (even though it is, on a technicality, a seventh movie inspired by a quasi-superheroic comic book).
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't be that excited for Suicide Squad (written and directed by David Ayer! yay?)--but it reteams Will Smith and Margot Robbie. And those two are dynamite.
Yep, TMNT:OOTS was the other one I had in mind. Based on the opening weekend box-office returns, "major" may have been generous.
ReplyDeleteThis film was just kind of dorky bad. Every time Apocalypse walked on screen it got really silly, fast. It didn't help that I had heard several critics compare him to Ivan Ooze beforehand, which somehow proved to be both apt and an insult to the great Paul Freeman. What was with the multiple unflattering close-ups of Isaac's appalling make-up job? I swear I could see the seams between his skin and the latex under the slathering of blue grease paint.
ReplyDelete"I think anybody who enjoyed either or both of First Class and Days of Future Past will at least not hate this" - my sentiment exactly, and what I said to my friend right after we saw the movie. We were prepared for the worst, since reviews have been particularly harsh, and to our surprise we basically enjoyed ourselves.
ReplyDeleteI do agree with those who thought having sexy Psylocke in Auschwitz was tasteless at best.
Lets try make another chain: X-men films ranking!
ReplyDeleteX2: X-Men United
Days of Future Past
First Class
X-Men
Deadpool
The Wolverine
The Last Stand
Apocalypse
Origins: Wolverine
Mine is very similar:
ReplyDeleteX2
First Class
Deadpool
Days of Future Past
X-Men
The Wolverine
The Last Stand
Apocalypse/Origins: Wolverine (I'm honestly undecided)
Can we talk about how there is NO WAY any of these characters are 20 years older than they were in X-Men: First Class? I mean, Mystique can be whatever age she wants, so she gets a pass, I guess, but are we really supposed to believe that Havok/Alex Summers is really upwards of 35? (Meaning also that his little brother wasn't born for another 4-5 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis?) Or are we supposed to totally ignore it? And it must be tough for poor Michael Fassbender to realize he's going to look like Ian McKellan in a mere 17 years. Age creeps up on you, man.
ReplyDeleteOtherwise, I mostly agree with the review. Surprisingly solid work with the characters, it just went on for-ev-er. My brother had the best fake tagline when he saw the trailer, though: "X-Men: Apocalypse: The Stakes Have Always Been This High."