My favorite science-fiction movie

Rating: 10/10 (2 November 2016)

This is a good one, an "X-Men" movie. For those unfamiliar, this is the series that spawned Hugh Jackman's popular "Wolverine" franchise. This is very telling... it means that we are in for a quality action film. While other franchises... like "Spider-Man", Jason Statham's "the Transporter" films, or "Harry Potter", suffer from tonal dysplasia throughout their installments, some wanting to be just for kids, while some almost trying to be too grown-up on the verge of pornography... "X-Men" remains firmly adult, and titillating. This is a franchise for heavy teens.
One of the main reasons why it was hard for me to watch this is because the director, Bryan Singer, has been accused of ephebophilia... and, more importantly, homosexuality. Not only that, but he has made the movie "the Usual Suspects", which is one of the worst movies of all-time. Fox executives thankfully keep Singer's strange sexual tendencies in check, and most of the cleavage here is of the of-age female variety... with only minor incidents involving children (this is being saved for the far more adult "Logan", the next installment of the parent "Wolverine" franchise). And the twist-ending here is more of an easter-egg, as it turns out that Professor Xavier has been building an army of purple robots to help take over the world in future sequels, not the crazy psychological postulation of "the Usual Suspects", or the even worse "Fight Club", the debut of fellow X-Men director Christopher Nolan.
The action in this movie is all hard sci-fi... ancient alien technology, flying, traveling to other countries, CIA intelligence. The main characters are a secret race of meta-humans called the "X-Men", who work in tandem with the CIA to investigate cult activity in Egypt. They uncover an ancient wizard, "Apocalypse", who has awakened at this specific time to bring about the end of the world. All the X-Men, working with the US government, team up to save humanity, and stop the "Apocalypse" (no pun intended). An interesting thing is that "Apocalypse" is a blue man, which in the Beatle's "Yellow Submarine" represented the police state and martial law. Other ties are made between "Apocalypse" and the Illuminati, including many biblical references to things like "Yaweh", and "Kanyeh", pyramids and other ancient alien technologies used for the alchemical transfiguration. People who have spent time in intelligence communities will definitely appreciate these little bits of wisdom.
I took my daughter to go see this movie... and I noticed multiple times that she was getting very excited. Maybe this will be useful to those of you who have dates or other interests. I also thought it was a very compelling movie, but my daughter was actually exhibiting physical symptoms of heat during some of the more dicey bits. This was a very violent movie, and sexually-charged. A cameo by the Wolverine, whose films spawned this franchise, really verges on NC-17 territory, and features him fully nude and done up in bondage.
The thing I loved most about this movie is that it showed a plausible scenario acted through within the bounds of reality, allowing for a fully-effective escapism... where other films in the superhero genre show a guy running fast and it doesn't look real, here the action is actually slowed down, so it looks like everything is happening in slow-motion, and so if you want you can just pretend that one of the villains has a "Clockstoppers" watch and is making time slow down for real. It's little touches like this that add some ambiguity and textural depth to a genre which is normally just awful.
While other spin-offs like "Deadpool" choose to go for the plainly pornographic, enticing viewers in with nudity and cheap thrills, it's good to see some spin-offs embrace their smaller nature and just be content to be philosophical and low-key. While the next "Logan" film will definitely allow for all the explosions and child exploitation we are used to with this multi-tiered franchise, the "X-Men" films continue to provide a satisfactory branch for the more niche lovers of hard sci-fi.