Overall mediocre superhero rumble

Rating: Null/10 (25 October 2016)

What I do like about the X-Men universe Fox is building with this new trilogy and presumably the Wolverine and Deadpool universes, is that they're not too concerned with continuities and keeping everything absolutely straight and aligned. That's more Marvel's thing, and while it works very well for them, it wouldn't for Fox because they had to restart their whole story with First Class while still keeping people like Hugh Jackman with the franchise. Which led to Days of Future Past, which retconned a lot of the more obvious plot holes while providing an overall blanket explanation for all the differences that would follow.
Which leads us to this film, where we once again meet Jean Grey, Scott Summers and all the rest we already know from the original trilogy. This time they're younger, not all of them are present and quite a lot of them have slightly different backstories and they interact with each other differently because of this. Yet there are a lot of nods towards the original trilogy, like it might still happen in this film's future... Kind of.
So, yes, all neat and tidy in its own purposefully messy way. And the returning actors are still great, with James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender absolutely slaughtering their roles as Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr, respectively. And some of the new actors are pretty good as well, with special mention going to Sophie Turner, most famous for playing Sansa Stark. Hopefully this movie is building towards her return as the Phoenix.
But then the downside. And there's really only one really big one. The story is boring. We've seen this kind of "the ultimate, all-powerful bad guy wants to tear down creation itself and make it anew in his own image" a million times before and it's really hard to do correctly. And this movie is no exception. Nothing against Oscar Isaac, he's a talented performer, but it's hard to take his make-up/costume seriously, even less so his dialogue, which is riddled with clichés and ominous whisperings about power, glory and destruction. And the story is pretty much the X-Men struggling to stop him, not much else. There are some really good character moments, especially with Fassbender's Magneto, but it's not enough to save the film.
If you've liked the previous X-Men films, this is worth a watch. It's amongst my least favourites so far, but it still has the production values and acting pool to make it worth your while.