Looking back, the year 2000 was pretty weird. Y2K paranoia aside, in 2000, Shaq and Kobe were friends, computers shrieked when you were connecting to the internet, and superhero movies were a joke – campy novelties with a thing for rubber nipples.
Then Bryan Singer’s X-Men came along. Depth, wit, realism, Ian McKellen–this movie had everything. Its success gave birth to the modern superhero movie and almost singlehandedly turned a previously maligned subculture into the billion-dollar money-making machine we know today.
Fast forward to 2016 and we have X-Men: Apocalypse, the 8th movie in the series that (for the second time) looks to reboot the franchise with a younger yet familiar cast of characters. Unfortunately, like the eponymous Professor X, the X-Movies seem to be on its last legs.
The story picks up ten years after the events of X-Men: Days of Future Past with the awakening of Apocalypse, the world’s first ever mutant. As omnipotent, thousand-year-old beings are wont to do, Apocalypse decides to cleanse the earth with the help of his Four Horsemen – Storm, Psylocke, Angel, and a reformed-no-wait-he’s-homicidal-again Magneto. Mankind’s only hope lies in Professor X and his young, inexperienced students. And Mystique, for some inexplicable reason.
Like every other superhero movie that’s come out this summer, X-men: Apocalypse buckles under the weight of all its characters and their respective subplots. And with all the backstories the movie labors to establish, it takes a full hour of the film’s 144-minute running time to finally introduce all of the story’s main players.
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James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender reprise their roles as Professor X and Magneto, and, unsurprisingly, deliver the solid performances we’ve come to take for granted. Oscar Isaac plays Apocalypse, who shifts from all-powerful-force-of-nature to creepy-uncle-who-likes-to-network more times than I could count. And while Ivan Ooze’s older brother is the latest addition to the list of generic, unremarkable baddies, the true villain of this movie is Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique, a mutant whose true superpower is simply to attract teenage girls of a certain demographic. Not even Lawrence’s Academy Award-winning acting chops could hide her disinterest in a character so blatantly and unnecessarily shoehorned into the plot.
With all the attention spent on Mystique, audiences were deprived of the movie’s main draws: Cyclops (Tye Sheridan), Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), and Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee). This young trio, along with the recurring Quicksilver (Evan Peters), are far and away the freshest and most intriguing characters of the movie, yet each of them is a fumbled opportunity to add depth to these heroes.
The great thing about the X-Men is that the nature of each mutant’s abilities shape each person’s personality. Cyclops for instance, is perennially portrayed in the comics and on film as a stiff, controlling boy scout. Except you learn to appreciate the value of control to a person that can obliterate literally everything he lays his eyes on. But instead of depicting how Cyclops copes with the destructive capacity of his eyeballs or how it forces him to change from a smug, brash teenager into a selfless, responsible leader, the movie reduces Cyclops to the guy with Wayfarers and laser beams. This goes for the rest of the mutants, and it’s a shame none of them get ample time to shine. But hey, that’s what sequels are for, I guess.
Which brings us to the fundamental problem with X-Men Apocalypse and the franchise going forward. After sixteen years, it feels like the X-Movies have finally exhausted their bag of tricks. Practically everything in X-Men Apocalypse has been done in one way or another in the previous seven movies; Quicksilver in slow-motion, Magneto going berserk, and completely forgetting about Jubilee are just some of the time-honored traditions you may find familiar. This isn’t to say that the movie isn’t fun. The zip and charm you’ve come to expect from Singer still make for an entertaining viewing, that is, if you don’t mind the creeping feeling that you’ve seen it all before, and will see it all again in the not too distant future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jer8XjMrUB4
