{"id":87290,"date":"2016-05-17T15:02:33","date_gmt":"2016-05-17T14:02:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/?p=87290"},"modified":"2016-05-17T15:03:50","modified_gmt":"2016-05-17T14:03:50","slug":"x-men-apocalypse-film-review-the-end-of-x-men-as-we-know-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/reviews\/x-men-apocalypse-film-review-the-end-of-x-men-as-we-know-it\/","title":{"rendered":"X-Men: Apocalypse film review: the end of the world as we know it?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The X-Men<\/em><\/strong> movies have got form when it comes to pulling off the improbable, with Days Of Future Past<\/em><\/strong> dispelling pre-release grumbles about over-complexity and over-stuffing by being nimble, intelligent and highly entertaining. So it\u2019s a shame that Apocalypse<\/em><\/strong>, the third of the First Class<\/em><\/strong> trilogy, falls victim to the kind of problems we thought the franchise had grown out of.<\/p>\n

Which isn\u2019t to say that it\u2019s a disaster. On the contrary, there\u2019s plenty here that really works, and more than enough to get us excited about the prospect of another X-Men<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0with the new team that Bryan Singer and Simon Kinberg have set up. What this film is, sadly, is disappointing.<\/p>\n

Ancient all-powerful mutant En Sabah Nur is trapped in stasis when a pyramid collapses on top of him shortly after he transfers into the body of Oscar Isaac. He\u2019s finally awakened in the 1980s and he\u2019s not best pleased by what humanity\u2019s been up to.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Professor Xavier (James McAvoy) has made his school a bright and bustling safe haven, Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender) is trying to put Magneto behind him with a blue collar job in a Polish steel mill and a new family in an impossibly idyllic Polish forest, and Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) has become a mutant rights icon, introduced while rescuing Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee) from an East Berlin fight club.<\/p>\n

When Apocalypse decides that it\u2019s high time to set about cleansing the Earth, Charles and his students must stop the most powerful being the world has ever seen.<\/p>\n

Apocalypse<\/em><\/strong> has a hefty running time of 144 minutes and it\u2019s stuffed to the gills, character-wise. Short-changing the big names, specifically Lawrence and Fassbender, was obviously deemed to be unacceptable, and McAvoy\u2019s role is integral. Meanwhile, Rose Byrne\u2019s memory-wiped CIA agent Moira McTaggart returns to info-dump (and be the target\u00a0of\u00a0McAvoy’s dodgy comedy flirting), the younger versions of Cyclops (Tye Sheridan), Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), Storm (Alexandra Shipp) and Nightcrawler need to be established, and Evan Peters\u2019 Quicksilver is back with more screen time and the same goofy charm. Oh, and there\u2019s a big cameo\u00a0that the trailers have already ruined.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s no wonder Psylocke (Olivia Munn) and Angel (Ben Hardy) feel hard done by, with the bulk of their duties\u00a0limited to standing behind the villain in occasionally evolving outfits.<\/p>\n

That villain may get the title, but the younger X-Men are the best things about the film. They\u2019re perfectly cast, they bring heart and humour to a frequently gloomy plot (it\u2019s the end of the world, to be fair), and the film excels when exploring their fears and struggles. Turner\u2019s Jean Grey is a loner whose nightmares shake the walls, Sheridan\u2019s Scott Summers is a moody younger brother who\u2019s having a hard time adjusting to his gift, Shipp\u2019s Ororo Munro is a scrappy kid who idolises Mystique but is looking to make an impact of her own, and Smit-McPhee\u2019s Kurt Wagner is\u2026well, he\u2019s Nightcrawler, and he\u2019s great. When we\u2019re with them, Apocalypse<\/em><\/strong> feels like an X-Men<\/em><\/strong> movie.<\/p>\n

\"X-Men\"<\/a><\/p>\n

But when we\u2019re with Isaac\u2019s blue big bad, it feels like a different, and not very interesting, comic book film. It doesn\u2019t help that Isaac essentially has to deliver endless variations on the same monologue while buried in hugely distracting prosthetics (which makes it difficult to gauge whether it\u2019s his performance that\u2019s bad or if it\u2019s the film working against him), but his brand of evil never really\u00a0impresses.<\/p>\n

The CGI spectacle is well done, but it generally comes at the expense of the emotional connection, and there\u2019s a surprising amount of brutal violence which feels like it goes a little far. The build-up to the third act is frequently frustrating, with the script over-eager to over-explain and the character situation becoming something of a pile-up, despite the actors\u2019 best efforts (it\u2019s worth noting that McAvoy and Turner are excellent in the final thirty minutes). It finally explodes into an intermittently effective but overly familiar massive smack-down.<\/p>\n

So for everything that works, like Fassbender\u2019s superb work in Magneto\u2019s genuinely moving first act story (those deer, though), there\u2019s something that falls flat, like the inevitability of Fassbender\u2019s Magneto floating expressionless through the finale as CGI chaos flies around him. For every dull Apocalypse scene, there\u2019s a brilliant Quicksilver sequence. For every clunking line of exposition, there\u2019s a charming Nightcrawler moment.<\/p>\n

It was clearly a conscious choice to confront these characters with an\u00a0all-powerful super villain who wants to burn the world, but it\u2019s one that frequently threatens to rob this film of what makes\u00a0X-Men<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0so likeable. When it works, X-Men: Apocalypse<\/em><\/strong> is great fun. When it doesn\u2019t, it\u2019s dull and messy. The pros do outweigh the cons, but only just. Still, it\u2019s left in a good place for whatever comes next and hopefully lessons will have been learned.
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