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| Directed by Bryan Singer Written by Bryan Singer, Simon Kinberg, Michael Dougherty, and Dan Harris |
Alo Party Peoples.
Once upon a time, there were no superhero movies. That's not entirely true; once in a while you got movies based on larger-than-comics pop icons like Superman or Batman, but for the most part it was rare that any character created after the 1940s would get consideration from Hollywood, and even when they did, it was still up in the air whether you'd get a pretty good The Crow, or an abject failure like Howard The Duck or Steel. So when the first X-Men movie came out, and it wasn't terrible, it felt like a revelation, and alongside Peter Jackson pulling off Lord of the Rings and Sam Rami pulling off Spider-Man it was part of the rise of the modern "geek culture" dominated blockbuster landscape.
Then the second one came out and it was quite a bit better, so it got to be called great, but with hindsight they just aren't that good. Parts of them hold up; it was awesome to get two really classy respected British actors to play Professor X and Magneto, Hugh Jackman was such a perfect fit for Wolverine that people still don't want to see him in any other kind of movie, focusing on the gay youth metaphor was a timely update of the material - the first two X-Men films have a deserved place in pop history, is what I'm saying. But nearly everything else to come out of this series* has been either mediocre or flat-out terrible. The Last Stand managed to be interchangeable even by the standards of a Brett Rattner film, X-Men Origins: Wolverine was so terrible that they pretend it didn't happen, Days of Future Past is a slog that takes a hatchet job to the already fragile semblance of continuity. I get that nostalgia is a powerful thing, I know I've felt an irrational desire to rewind the world and freeze it around 2005 more than once, but I'm not forcing my bubble onto everyone else. I understand why we hold onto this series, but it's time to let go.
But thanks to Deadpool, which not incidentally builds much of its comedy around mocking the anachronistic nature of this franchise, we're going to keep getting more of these and Fox is going to keep jogging in place until Disney offers them a shared custody deal like Sony got with Spider-Man. So it's fitting that Apocalypse is trying to emulate the superficial trappings of a Marvel movie (loads and loads of characters and banter, fanservice-y cameos, jokey references to the comics and other movies, a technicolor palleted CGI apocalyptic finale), but without any of the character work or genuine heart that makes it work. The best example of that is when, in the middle of the inciting incident for Act Two, when all the world's nuclear weapons are being launched, and it looks like the world is ending, they cut to Stan Lee looking up at the rockets. If there's one thing that it should be easy to not screw up, it's putting the funny celebrity cameo in the middle of the end of the world.
Not that the story they came up is that great to begin with. An ancient Mutant named Apocalypse that used to rule Ancient Egypt gets brought back from the dead in 1983 by the time-travel shenanigans in Days of Future Past and decides that he doesn't like what humans have done with the world in his absence. So he decides that he needs to take over the world and the X-Men unite to stop him. That's it. Nobody has an arc, nobody learns anything, the only meaningful change to the status quo of the series is that it provides an explanation of why Professor X went bald early. None of the cast appears to care about anything happening onscreen, Jennifer Lawrence is somehow more disinterested than she was in Days of Future Past, when she started to regret having signed onto this series before she had The Hunger Games clout to bargain with, and she's sadly resigned to being here now that that ship has sailed. Oscar Issac as Apocalypse - good Lord Oscar Issac as Apocalypse; this man is one of the best actors of his generation, and they've put him in six layers of heavy latex makeup and having him stomp around like he got lost on the way to the set of the Power Rangers reboot.
I might have excused that if it could at least be an enjoyable action film, but it's really not. Bryan Singer was never great at large-scale action to begin with, and it's really kind of amazing just how bad all the "big" moments in Apocalypse look. Limp lifeless effects and flat cinematography make the entire production look like a bunch of Abercrombie models in decade-old cosplay screwing around in front of a green-screen. The makeup is atrocious, and the costume design is worse, dressing everyone up like an emo rock album cover might have flown in 2000, but it doesn't fly sixteen years later. You'd think that being a period piece might force it to be somewhat visually interesting, or maybe they'd make narrative use of it being the Eighties, maybe tying the story into the Cold War like First Class did, but they don't do anything with the time period at all besides a needle-drop for retread of the Quicksilver super speed gag from Days of Future Past. One that makes him look so overpowered that I can't help but wonder why they need anyone else to defeat Apocalypse.
X-Men: Apocalypse isn't quite an apocalyptic failure, but that's only because you need to try to come up with a disaster, and it's clear that nobody involved in the production gave a shit about what they were doing beyond "We need to make one of these every few years or Marvel gets the rights back." When I told one of my teachers just how bad this movie was, he told me that it doesn't matter because it's a superhero movie and nobody expects high art from them. Setting aside that the Richard Donner Superman, The Dark Knight, and Spider-Man 2 would beg to differ, I don't buy that argument. Coming from source material of dubious merit is not an excuse to suck, I've seen terrible movies made out of the life of Christ, and I've seen excellent films made out of cheap airport novels and cheap Sixties sci-fi TV and print cartoons about a man that puts on a bat costume every night because he misses his mother. If The Lego Movie can become a postmodern masterpiece, then X-Men has no excuse for not trying.
Have a nice day,
Greg.B
FINAL RATING: 1/5
*First Class is the only one of these that's genuinely awesome, and it's the one that Bryan Singer had nothing to do with. That's not a coincidence.
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