X-Men: Apocalypse Review

X-Men: Apocalypse

In X-Men: Apocalypse, one of the characters cheekily remarks that the third movie in a trilogy is always the worst, which was probably them taking another potshot at The Last Stand, but it ironically reflects my feelings about this movie. To be clear, I didn’t hate it. I really like what these newer X-Men movies are doing with the characters. They look great, their powers are awesome to see in action, and the brief moments where they actually have personality are fun. But there’s the rub. Most of the time, characters are just… there. Were you worried Olivia Munn wouldn’t be a good Psylocke? Well, she does so little in Apocalypse that it’s hard to form an opinion either way.

I’m mostly baffled by Mystique’s inclusion, though. She serves no purpose to the plot and pretty much plays moral support for the other characters. I think they only included her, because they already had Jennifer Lawrence on board to play the character. They’re gonna drag her along as much as they did Hugh Jackman, though to be fair, Wolverine’s cameo here was kind of cool. I also enjoyed Nightcrawler’s and, once again, Quicksilver’s presence. Quicksilver’s going to have a show-stealing scene in every movie now, isn’t he? But it was starting to feel like he was too powerful, and I was gearing up to complain that he could have taken out the bad guy by himself.

Thankfully, they do finally address that, but the Apocalypse character as a whole is dumb. He’s honestly the weakest part of the movie. His origins are silly, he spends most of the movie standing around and monologuing, and the fact that he was able to sum up his thoughts on modern society by touching a TV set and then, in a very Ultron-like way, determine the Earth needed cleansing was a little contrived. But that wasn’t nearly as bad as watching the movie restart Magneto’s fall to the dark side in the most clichéd way possible. It’s like every X-Men movie feels the need to “reboot” something. Granted, X-Men are usually more fun to watch when they’re first coming to terms with their powers and identities, but this franchise is going to stagnate (again) if they can’t start building off of that.

Reviewer

Clark
I love gaming so much, I wrote a book about it.

Published by

Clark

I love gaming so much, I wrote a book about it.