Part Twilight, Part Superman 2, Entirely Rubbish

Rating: 1/10 (31 July 2016)

This is my first review ever, I am writing it to warn you that there are no redeeming qualities of any sort in this film. I'm pretty sure those who have reviewed it positively either work for the production company, are of an age included between 6 and 14, or consider cinema an entertainment park rather than a form of art.
I'll start off by saying that I don't particularly like super-hero movies, but as an avid reader of the comics in the 80s and 90s, I feel a strange compulsion to keep watching them. Out of the whole bunch, I honestly felt that the X-Men franchise was one of those going through a period of reasonable health: after leaving the awful X-Men 3 behind, the last two films (first class and days of future past) were far from being masterpieces, but actually rather enjoyable when you felt like mindless American industry entertainment.
This is Brian Singer's fourth x-men film, and by far what stands out the most is his contempt for the source material. It's as if he just wants to get things done as quickly as possible, cash his fat Hollywood check and go back to whatever he was doing before (which, judging by the fact that he was actually accused of sexual harassment by some of the male teenage actors of the first two X-Men films, may well be on the dodgy side). Some of the scenes are directed and edited so hastily you barely even register they have occurred, in a flurry of CGI effects that rather than "visualize the unthinkable" (which should be the purpose of special effects in general), make it absolutely impossible to determine what is going on.
The actors (some cast only to please and attract the general public) stand around with serious or tragic faces in front of a green screen, occasionally exchange dire and banal dialogue of no importance whatsoever, and generally look as lost as the viewer to the sense of the existence of this horror.
The villains (who of course want to destroy the world, what else?) first group up in a series of atrocious and hasty introduction scenes (the creation of Archangel, an epic comic moment if I remember correctly, is dealt with particularly badly. Metallica's Four Horsemen plays in the background, and the result is something that looks like it came from A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 - hair metal horror from the 80s), then proceed to stand around on hillsides in ridiculous suits that recall the super-aliens of Superman 2. Wasn't this the franchise that refused to dress Wolverine in yellow spandex?
A five year-old playing on the floor with his action figures probably would come up with this entire plot within 5 minutes, so the fact that someone actually made money to write the script is shocking. The whole thing is beyond puberty, it's actually infantile.
And ultimately, it's a film with many lessons about our times: 1. If you are Magneto, part of the hero elite, you can flip sides however many times you want, slaughter whole groups of people, threaten the planet, help the big bad foreign (voluntarily Arab-like?) villain, but equally get away with a hand-shake at the end, and a feel-good final laugh scene worthy of a Happy Days end-of-episode-let's make a joke and all laugh-scene. 2. If you have migraine-inducing effects, you don't need a director, a script, a decent cast or, finally, even an idea.