X-Men: Age of Apocalypse.

Rating: 7/10 (1 July 2016)

After finding Captain America: Civil War to be far better than expected,I was happy to discover that a new X-Men title was also coming out.With having somehow missed seeing the last few X-Men flicks,I decided that it was time to catch up with the gang.
The plot:
Betrayed by his worshippers,the first ever mutant En Sabah Nur is entombed alive.
1983:
Finally breaking out of the tomb (only took a few 100 years!) Nur finds a world which has lost its way,due to the "weak" ruling it.Deciding to remake the world to his dream design,Nur starts gathering up fellow mutants to work with him.On the other side of the world, Alex Summers learns that his brother Scott is getting mutant abilities,which leads to Alex taking Scott to Professor Charles Xavier's school,so that Scott can get a grip on his abilities.AS Scott begins his training, Xavier and his fellow mutants soon discover that the "first ever" mutant has come back from the dead.
View on the film:
Mutating over a 2 and a half hour running time,returning co- writer/(along with Simon Kinberg/ Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris) director Bryan Singer & cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel largely take an underhanded manner to placing the X-Men in the 80's,with Reagan photos,fading Cola billboards and Metallica tracks scattered in the background. Exploding the action over a large canvas,Singer skilfully uses slo-mo to make the special skill of each X-Men stand out,as Nur's chaos pours down like a halo of bullets.
Continuing on themes from the very first X-Men movie,the screenplay by Singer/Kinberg/Dougherty and Harris deliver a sincere message about being proud of your true self,which helps to give the action an underlying purpose.Going back to the very beginnings of the X- Men,the writers cleverly find spaces to pull threads from the past films,which along with tying up the loose ends nicely, also reveals how dangerous Nur is.Filling every corner with X-Men action,the writers appear unsure over how to carry the legacy of the past 8 films over,due to the huge baddie and large number of X-Men leading to any pauses to help each mutant stand out largely being skipped,as the X-Men face the apocalypse.