An Honest Review

Rating: 2/10 (20 November 2016)

It's about time to hand things over to the MCU. Cut the cord. It died after The Last Stand and, despite all probability, they were able to pull it out of the ashes with a Reboot that left even consonant reboot haters like me with little to complain about.
The pulled the X-Men out of the trash heap with First Class and in an act that was deft and as smart and stylistic as anyone could hope. They even exceeded expectation for the rebooted franchise when they brought Singer back for Days of Future Past.
But then, Days of Future Past was hard to top, Chris Claremont's best and a legend for most comic nerds like me.
But lightening rarely strikes twice and never thrice.
Apocalypse just hurt.
There is a part of the population, or at least a small segment at my local comic book store that assumed that they were just doing comic book arcs. The same segment that heard it was originally going to be titled Age of Apocalypse and assumed it would be, well, the epic late 90s Age of Apocalypse arc.
Why not? They did the same with Days of Future Past. It was certainly a safe bet and really one of the best X-Men arcs that didn't have Claremont's involvement. If not that than X-Cutioners song had heavy Apocalypse involvement, or even the earlier X-Factor arc when Angel turned into Archangel.
But the latter was a stretch, I mean, they already introduced Angel in The Last Stand.
However, that is EXACTLY what they did, and with it they sort of destroyed the brilliant way the rebooted the franchise and left the audience with that "uh" feeling.
All the hard work they took to establish a dual continuity between the past and future parts of the franchise was flushed down the toilet.
It was rewritten. Angel, Nightcrawler, and Stryker, they were all back and totally out of continuity. And then, on the other side, Jubilee, Psylocke, and Caliban were introduced completely out of character.
For the people that were paying attention to the franchise we felt robbed a reboot within a reboot and this time done exactly wrong. For the people the read the comics, again, robbed.
1983 in a world that didn't feel like 1983 after the franchise did so well getting the feel of the 60s and 70s in the former installments. this 83 felt like any given sci-fi action movie setting.
And then the Big Bad, Apocalypse who was so brilliantly Ayn Rand style nasty in the comics felt like an ant to the established and worn down villain Magneto. It was almost like they didn't know how to write him, couldn't be bothered to read more than the cliff notes and fell back on what they already knew.
In the end, what killed Apocalypse and the entire franchise wasn't the indecisiveness that killed it in The Last Stand, this time the death came with plain lazy writing. Laziness killed Apocalypse.
But hey, at least you get to see more Quicksilver...not the one from the comics, the depiction in Altron was a bit closer to Marvel's character, but still, possibly more entertaining of a character. The singular redeeming factor.