20th
Century Fox’s X-Men series has a been one of the longest running and most volatile
of Hollywood’s plentiful superhero franchises. When director Bryan Singer
helmed the first two entries around the turn of the century his objective was
to naturalize the pulp materials his movies were based on and to internalize
the comic book’s over-the-top sci-fi premise into a relatable political allegory
about governmental oppression and systemic bigotry. Since then, the X-Films
have been passed along to many directors and many writers and the sincerity of
its themes have been gradually muddied by competing aesthetic choices, bad screenplays
and a timeline that’s tangled itself into more knots than a pocketed pair of
earbuds.
When
Singer returned to the property for 2014’s “X-Men: Days of Future Past” he had
of lot of narrative housecleaning to get back to his original vision, but was still
able to carefully land his albatross of a time-travel plot with all toes
touching the ground. The promise of “Days
of Future Past” was that the slate was now clean and the films going forward no
longer had to answer for the mistakes of the past, that’s why the latest entry,
“X-Men: Apocalypse,” is all the more disappointing, as it relapses into many of
the same inconsistencies found within its weaker predecessors.
Moving ten
years forward from the events of the last film, this installment sees our
heroes faced by an ancient mutant named Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac) brought back
from the dead from the depths of the pyramids of Egypt. Once this god-like
entity is restored he is put on a path to destroy the earth of human dominion by
recruiting four powerful soldiers who are sympathetic to his cause. After
Magneto (Michael Fassbender) is ripped away from his newly established
anonymous life in eastern Europe he joins Apocalypse alongside a young Storm (Alexandra
Shipp), Angel (Ben Hardy), and Psylocke (Olivia Munn). When Professor Xavier (James McAvoy) catches
wind of this new force he assembles a new team to keep his school safe, as well
as the future of the world as we know it.
This film
somehow manages to suffer simultaneous from being too much and not enough.
There are too many characters and too many subplots to keep track of and yet
none of them are really explored with enough depth or purpose to justify their
inclusion. The heroes such as Beast (Nicholas Hoult), Cyclops (Tye Sheridan), Quicksilver
(Evan Peters) and Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) are explore to some capacity and
have some stakes in the plot but the script lacks a sense of focus and drive by
its constant shifting of the story’s center of consciousness. Is this supposed
to about Mystique trying to save the soul of her mentor and friend Magneto? Is
it about Cyclops’ journey to find belonging and responsibility within the group
as a new student? Is it a political allegory about the arms race of the 80s? None
of these plot ideas are fully flushed out and much of the film feels like a poorly paced build up to a non-climax.
Secondly this
movie suffers from a style that is far campier than we’ve been treated to from
this series thus far, with flashier set-pieces, hokier dialogue—courtesy of hack
screenwriter Simon Kinberg—and ridiculous costuming. The film’s 3D minded cinematography heightens every
battle scene into cartoony weightlessness. Because of this, the action
sequences are less vital and less tactile and the visuals appear flattened and
cheap when projected in two dimensions.
Still,
McAvoy and Fassbender are great actors and there are moments of candy-coated
pop filmmaking to be found in this mess, along with the DNA of the comic book’s
higher minded ideas as well as Singers’ passion for minority social justice. “X-Men:
Apocalypse” isn’t the worst film in the franchise—“X-Men Origins: Wolverine” still
has that distinction—but this material has clearly become tired and strained
from being worked and reworked over the last 15 years and as a result th movie
never settles into a comfortable mode of its own.
Grade: C-
Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/May-2016
Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "X-Men: Apocalypse."
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