High Stakes, Colossal Destruction, but no weight to it.

Rating: 7/10 (22 May 2016)

"X-Men Apocalypse" is the next film after the clean slate we got from Bryan Singer's much acclaimed DOFP. The previous did a great job at hard resetting the franchise in order to puff some fresh and newfangled air for the franchise and remove some of the plot holes that have been bothering the X-Men franchise. But what Apocalypse does is be quite simplistic or average at best, we see a lot of landmarks and infrastructure getting destroyed and a whole new cast and much potential from Oscar Isaac's Apocalypse and yet it ends up being trite and feels flat and lackluster with just a couple of standout scenes.
Before you rip this review like the rest of the reviews out there, there are some aspects to this film that emerge to at least save for the dreary undertones. Like the already much talked about Quicksilver, he gives the film a way to bring in some fun and hilarious moments and his scene in the Xavier house is the most well made and aesthetically stunning in the whole 2h and 24 min run time. Once again the scenes with Fassbender's Magneto are the most emotionally driven ones in the movie. It goes to show that he has one of the most striking character arcs that has ever been explored in the whole X-Men saga. The old characters like Scott Summers, Jean Grey and Nightcrawler reintroduced are spot on and have minimal flaws to say the least. In its core as well, is a film that doesn't take itself that seriously at times and realizes how campy the 80s was. So it's not fair to say that this film wasn't fun or enjoyable, or that it lacks any spirit of exuberance.
For the film's flaws, it really is quite similar to what went wrong in Age of Ultron and if you liked that film then you'll probably like this film too. The film suffers with a villain that is average to really below average. For someone who is called Apocalypse, has lived for a thousand or more years and is really god damn powerful, he doesn't pass as menacing or even evoke a feeling of dread or trepidation at all whenever he becomes present on the screen. He also is literally just evil for the sake of being evil, sure he's maybe a whole lot of a better villain that Ultron (just maybe), but the parallelisms are still there, like the reason why he wants to destroy the world is because they both looked in the media and current and past world events and thought that it was all bull crap and wanted to make a new world. Part of the reason why he felt lackluster was that there was so much thrown in to the film and some even felt like it was just there for the sake of being there without really needing to be relevant to any character arc or subplot at all. You have the introduction of young Scott Summers who we see is not in control of his powers and that's about it so he goes to Xavier's School of Gifted Children, and then he meets Jean Grey in such a clichéd way. We also get to see Nightcrawler once again since X2 and he seems just thrown it there for the sake of being there too. After their introduction, they had to cut back to Magneto, then had to cut back to Apocalypse recruiting the horsemen as well. The reason why Days of Future Past worked was because they only had 1 then eventually 2 narratives to focus on. It was 1. what was happening in the past with Wolverine and the First Class cast. and 2. what was happening in the present as they were protecting Wolverine, and the second narrative wasn't given much focus until the near end of the film. Every subplot and character arc in that film felt relevant, while in this film it just didn't mesh well together. You also have inconsistencies with Apocalypse's powers, one moment you see him taking down a group of people with just a hand move. Then you see him calling out someone instead of just using his powers to kill everyone else in his way or literally rip out a wall to get to him himself. Instead Apocalypse's screen time and everyone else's screen time are wasted in favor of average sequences with no pay off in the final battle except for a show case of their powers, what they can do, and basically defeating the villain and saving the day because we all know that a handful of them survived in the end of Days of Future Past.
Verdict: 7.3/10