Apocalyptic Levels of Entertaining Nonsense

Rating: 6/10 (10 June 2017)

X-Men: Apocalypse is a movie about an ancient Egyptian mutant Pharaoh with blue skin and godlike powers who transfers his soul between bodies via magic golden goo using his solar powered pyramid who gets buried underground for thousands of years by his servants who didn't like him then wakes up in 1983 and decides to destroy/take over the world. Naturally, this results in many scenes featuring explosions, lasers, people punching each other, exposition about destroying or saving the world, some brief emotional interludes, and of course, more explosions and punching.
Silliness aside, X-Men: Apocalypse is filled with lots and lots of, well, stuff. People, places, things, ideas, and everything else. Anytime one person, place, thing, or idea starts to get developed, all of a sudden something else is happening. We go from serious dramatic sequence, to superfluous semi-comedic fluff, to introducing this character, then that character, to giant CGI action scene, then introducing another unnecessary character, to lofty dialogue about the nature of good and evil, to a scene played for laughs set to pop music, to a psychic battle set inside a character's mind, and so on and so on. It's all over the place. Needless to say, movies like this have their place, particularly in the comic book genre; however, this certainly isn't the best the genre has to offer. A smaller cast of characters, a more consistent tone, and a shorter run time all would've helped this have more staying power.
The movie does certainly have some genuinely great scenes scattered throughout. Unfortunately, many of them feel incredibly out of place in this glorious mess of a movie. That being said, for what this movie is, it works well enough to be tolerable and fairly entertaining throughout. However, it should be noted that if you have no familiarity with the X-Men comics and/or previous movies, it will make very little sense. But if every once and a while you like to see an over-the-top big budget movie that has 173 characters and subplots with giant computer generated battles and supervillains scheming to destroy/take over the world, you'll probably like this. The spectacle of it is impressive at the very least.