X-Men: Apocalypse (2016)
May 28, 2016 8:42 PM - Subscribe

After thousands of years asleep, Apocalypse, the first mutant, awakens and gathers his Four Horsemen intent on conquering the world. The only thing between him and victory are Xavier and the students of the Xavier's School for Gifted Children.

Apocalypse continues the X-Men franchise relaunched with First Class, bringing the X-Men into the 1980s.
posted by Atreides (46 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
This was better than I thought it would be given the uniformly crushing reviews. This is not to say it was good, it was in fact average but perfectly serviceable I thought, on a par with the previous singer x men, and better than the execrable Last Stand.

I must be the only person on earth who liked Isaac as apocalypse.
posted by smoke at 10:52 PM on May 28, 2016


Ps Olivia Munn as psylocke was terrible, her acting was even worse than usual - which is saying something - the whitewashing of the role a constant irritant, and the costume representative of the worst aspects of nineties comics, it demanded to be changed.
posted by smoke at 10:54 PM on May 28, 2016


I thought this was OK, weakest of the three but better than Last Stand (or BvS, but what isn't?). Having much less wolverine was welcome. Wasn't convinced by the casting on the new Cyclops or Jean Grey. The Moira memory editing thing was a bit icky. I thought Oscar Isaac was fine as Apocalypse except i forgot who is was and spent 2 hours trying to recognise him under the make-up .

#1 item on 'to don't' list: teleport to Auschwitz while wearing leather effect spanx.
posted by biffa at 11:01 PM on May 28, 2016


the whitewashing of the role a constant irritant

Can you explain what you mean here? The character is described on wikipedia as British. And Olivia Munn is half Chinese.
posted by crossoverman at 3:49 AM on May 29, 2016


Ah this is pretty complicated comic lore - Psylocke was actually two people at various times, kind of: a Brit - Betsy Braddock, and then a japanese ninja (or at least a japanese ninja's body. It's complicated and it was the nineties). Munn is clearly meant to be hearking back to the Japanese Psylocke - which was the longest-lasting "version", and though Munn is half-asian, she is half viet, and doesn't look at all Japanese.
posted by smoke at 4:11 AM on May 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


Oh, how about that, in the age of apocalypse comics she's also meant to be asian. I had long stopped reading by time that came out so wasn't aware.
posted by smoke at 4:13 AM on May 29, 2016


I'm on the fence about seeing it, but I thought this call for a reboot was interesting. It does seem so much more "stuck" in its plots and main characters when compared to the expansiveness of the MCU...
posted by TwoStride at 5:18 AM on May 29, 2016


Did the movie do anything with the character of Storm?
And did the Horsemen wind up rebelling and then joining the X-Men?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:07 AM on May 29, 2016


Pretty much. The horsemen suffer for not really been introduced very well in terms of their powers. There's a bit of characterisation prior to and during their selection (but only a bit) but after that they're a bit meh.

Also new nightcrawler's German accent was terrible, it sounded Welsh at one point.
posted by biffa at 7:12 AM on May 29, 2016


Storm doesn't do a lot other than walk around with her white mohawk. She's discovered in Cairo leading a street gang (this is not what I would call spoiler material) and there's no reference to her living anywhere else in Africa. It's definitely not intended to be in anyway an origin story for her, just to place her in a setting for Apocalypse to meet her. She maybe utters a few lines in the beginning and then never says another word. There's a little characterization at the end, but I'll not go into that.

The Four Horsemen could have been better developed. Since Magneto was featured as one, he gets the majority of the focus, and it would have been cool if all four had been given more of a chance to flex their muscles as Apocalypse's Horsemen.

I went into the film not knowing if I was going to like, hate it, or just be meh. I came out thinking I got my money's worth, but it was by no means the greatest X-Men movie of all time. I think there were probably two really good movies in this movie which never properly emerged. If you're an X-Men fan, I would go see it. If you love Quicksilver from Days of Future Past go see it. Quicksilver continues to steal the show and has yet another fantastic show piece of his abilities and personality (showing why Whedon's Quicksilver in Age of Ultron never had a chance by comparison). Michael Fassbender drops a really strong performance as Magneto, heart aching at times.

I agree that Olivia Munn's Psylocke was kind of eh. She simply wasn't giving much to do or emote to be honest, and I don't blame her own abilities. Like Storm, she's given a couple lines when Apocalypse meets her, but otherwise is left to standing in the background when there's no actual fighting going on. Perhaps the Horsemen I was most disappointed with, and this was a production decision, was Archangel. Angel's conversion into a Horsemen and the legacy that follows is one of the greatest, as Archangel becomes an angel of death in contrast to the person he was - and that conversion really didn't come through. His skin didn't even turn blue. The general conversions into Horsemen didn't really come across as anything more than simple power ups, so that's really my biggest beef.

Jennifer Lawrence's Mystique is just kind of there. She has a semi-big role, but it doesn't feel motivated or inspired when compared to her performance in First Class or even Days of Future Past. McAvoy does fine and Oscar Isaac, likewise, is fine. For a character like Apocalypse, there isn't a lot of range to act within and with what he has, Isaac is all right.

So if you don't care a lot about superhero movies, the one to see is still Captain America: Civil War, but if you like the X-Men, then it's probably worth the ticket fare.
posted by Atreides at 7:50 AM on May 29, 2016 [2 favorites]


Oh, I'm a big fan, back from the early Claremont era. This film looks like a big meh, with little character development beyond Charles and Magneto.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 10:00 AM on May 29, 2016


Not really even Charles I would say. Both CA:CW and BvS got criticised for too many characters but I didn't feel that was a problem on either, on this I did.
posted by biffa at 12:36 PM on May 29, 2016


It's worth it for the CGI eye candy, which is good because there are so many characters there's not much room for character development if you don't already know them. The zooming history passing montage that takes us from the teaser betrayal of Apocalypse to the modern era and opening credits was particularly cool.

Civil War was actually a character story about superheroes. This was just a superhero duke-out but a very well done one.
posted by Bringer Tom at 2:25 PM on May 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


I saw this with my kids a couple of weeks ago when it premiered here. Was wondering when America would catch up and this thread would appear! We all thought it was a lot of fun, we absolutely loved Quicksilver, and my youngest was also chuffed to bits that the strongest mutant who finally destroyed the bad guy was a girl. (That's actually my main reason for prefering X-men to Avengers and what have you: more women, and they're cooler.)

I have to say I personally didn't expect all the negative reviews. I mean, it's a superhero movie, and precisely what it says on the tin. They're always a bit silly and very melodramatic, some female characters wear fugly, impractical bodysuits (side-eyeing Psylocke here), and then stuff explodes or implodes or does something even weirder and more interesting... Well OK, destroying Auschwitz was in bad taste, though.

I was also a little weirded out to see everyone being totally cool with Magneto again in the end, after he had murdered countless people before having a last minute change of heart. Bygones! Drop by any time to tell the students about mutant supremacy!

The most charming thing about Quicksilver, btw, is that among all the agonized, moping mutants, he's the only one having fun with his abilities. I get that the whole superhero genre is a manifestation of the American collective subconsccious grappling with the moral quandaries and failures of being a superheropower, hence the obligatory moodiness. But it can still get a bit old, so it's good to have a counterweight to all that.
posted by sively at 5:22 PM on May 29, 2016 [2 favorites]


The action, costuming, and production design were garbage, as usual with Singer's X-Men, but the characterization and relationship of Charles and Erik (as always) was top notch. Loved seeing Jean tapping into the Phoenix Force. A terrifying beauty, just as it was portrayed in the comics. Singer gets Chuck and Magneto, but he doesn't seem to understand or like any other aspect of the X-men.

Hipster Caliban was kinda fun, though.
posted by entropicamericana at 5:24 PM on May 29, 2016


Watching this movie was the low point of my birthday which I guess isn't really saying anything because the rest of my birthday was awesome. Still, both my girlfriend and I are typically happy to watch a superhero movie without any illusion that it's going to be grand cinema, and we both came out utterly disappointed. If I never see another movie that just has random telephoto shots of entire major cities being destroyed it'll be too soon. I can't escape the idea that Magneto was destroying the earth's population and afterward was like, "So long, Charles. I got shit to do, like ... I don't know. But it sure doesn't involve discussing the tens of thousands of people I just murdered."
posted by komara at 8:07 PM on May 29, 2016


The most charming thing about Quicksilver, btw, is that among all the agonized, moping mutants, he's the only one having fun with his abilities. I get that the whole superhero genre is a manifestation of the American collective subconsccious grappling with the moral quandaries and failures of being a superheropower, hence the obligatory moodiness. But it can still get a bit old, so it's good to have a counterweight to all that.

One of the benefits of traveling in Britain a couple weeks ago was seeing a Skye Fibre ad based around Quicksilver doing his thing.
posted by Atreides at 8:24 AM on May 30, 2016 [2 favorites]


I must be the only person on earth who liked Isaac as apocalypse.

Oh, he was fine; Apocalypse was never that great of a villain IMO--ill-defined powers and motivations (I was never really sure whether he wanted to rule the earth or pave it over, although the movie clearly has him more interested in the latter), and in general coming off as lesser talents trying to make their own version of a Kirbyesque megavillain and falling short, yet again. (Few people seem to get that one of the best things about Darkseid was that Kirby wasn't afraid to show that he liked being Darkseid. Jim Starlin got it; one of the most chilling things about his own Darkseid knockoff, Thanos, is his smile.) Isaac is reining it in, and his main emotion seems to be a you-gotta-be-shitting-me disgusted glare when he comes across yet another bogus aspect of modern life. Early on, when the guy in the Rolls honks at him, I was expecting Pocco to turn the car into a pretzel, but he's like, whatever, loser, I'll get to you and the rest of your planet soon enough. Isaac's not trying to be a Large Ham, and his recent work in another huge franchise suggests that he's better off as the hero than the villain, anyway.

As for the rest of it, it was enjoyable enough, although far from flawless. I appreciate that they lampshaded the fact that many of the characters--Moira, directly, and by implication the rest of the returnees from First Class--hadn't really aged in the twenty years since the events of that film. If I were still the sort of obsessive nerd that I was at about the time of the film (as opposed to the sort of obsessive nerd that I am today--see the comments I make on DS9 elsewhere on FF), I wouldn't be able to shut up about it, but now I'm just like, eh, OK. It's also kind of amusing to see how unbalanced Pocco's Horsemen are; there's the guy who, oh, is messing with the entire earth's magnetic field, and the lady who seems to be ramping up to her several-tornadoes-at-once power level, and then there's the guy who throws knives from his wings, and the lady who seems to have vaguely Green-Lantern-esque psychic constructs, but only for melee range. Oh, and she's got a real sword too, can't forget that. I was a little bummed that they didn't give Psylocke a bit more background, or really any at all, but maybe they're still trying to figure out if they can use Brian Braddock as well if they decide to make her Betsy, or if they're going to redo her origin. I would much prefer the latter, as they could do something a lot more interesting by, say, working with Olivia Munn's biracial heritage and having Psylocke's origins in postcolonial Southeast Asia, than trying to accommodate the comic character's origin, which is the sort of convoluted mess that only Chris Claremont could truly love. It wasn't clear to me that Angel/Archangel was dead, although some of the things that I've read have suggested that that was so; that would be a pity if it were the case. (Falcon in Captain America: Civil War has shown some of the things that a flight-based character can really do.) Quicksilver really was excellent--I wasn't sure how they'd beat the sequence in the Pentagon kitchen from DOFP, but this was great--and I actually like the idea that Xavier had decided (for a little while, at least) that the school was going to be a school and not Mutant Superhero Academy, and that it is still that, for most of the students. Etc., etc., Nightcrawler was cute, &c.

One thing that I didn't like? Fridging Magneto's wife and daughter. I wanted the daughter to at least make a getaway and become the druidess of the Polish woods or something. It sure would be nice to have at least one movie in which you see the former man of violence tucking his child in at night without that sinking feeling.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:24 AM on May 30, 2016 [3 favorites]


though Munn is half-asian, she is half viet, and doesn't look at all Japanese.

That's not whitewashing.
posted by Krom Tatman at 12:17 PM on May 30, 2016 [3 favorites]


Also, apropos of nothing except 80sness mashups: The Mutant Club.
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:24 PM on May 30, 2016


If Apocalypse was seeking out the most powerful mutants, I think it would have made for a better story and climax to have him seek out and turn Jean Grey. She could have become a Horseman, and still have the psychic battle on the astral plane, and still win via tapping into the Phoenix Force.

Also, the architecture of Apocalypse's pyramid left a lot to be desired if it could be felled by as few saboteurs as it appeared, destroying some very tenuous columns.
posted by Big Chief Little Pants at 4:26 PM on May 30, 2016


That's not whitewashing.

Eh, it is to me. Character is Japanese, Munn is not Japanese in any way, and in an environment where Asian characters are regularly replaced by caucasian characters and actors, I feel like yes, it is white washing.
posted by smoke at 5:55 PM on May 30, 2016


seek out and turn Jean Grey
Just as Apocalypse didn't know Xavier existed until he used his powers in a way Apocalypse could notice, aPocky just didn't know Jean Grey even existed or that such powers were possible. To me this is part of what made aPocky such a deserving downfall character; he was willing to destroy a world about which he was really almost entirely ignorant. He had no idea what was out there and no interest in finding out. And of course Jean is one of those things he was wililng to burn down without even knowing she was out there.
posted by Bringer Tom at 6:26 PM on May 30, 2016 [3 favorites]


Eh, it is to me. Character is Japanese, Munn is not Japanese in any way, and in an environment where Asian characters are regularly replaced by caucasian characters and actors, I feel like yes, it is white washing.

But she is Asian. I'm not clear on what standard is being applied here.
posted by Sebmojo at 8:23 PM on May 30, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'm not like het up about it or anything, but if Saldana can cop shit for portraying Nina Simone, I think you can see the similarities here. The character is Japanese. Is the actor portraying them Japanese? No. Is the character portraying them more caucasian-looking than a Japanese person? Yes. Seems pretty clear cut to me.

Additionally, I would urge some circumspection around lumping Asian people all together. It's a super western thing to do.
posted by smoke at 9:05 PM on May 30, 2016


I thought The Wolverine did a great job here. Movie full of Japanese characters, nearly every single one of them was Japanese.
posted by smoke at 9:07 PM on May 30, 2016


Anyone have any opinions on Jubilee? She was a fave of mine back in the cartoon, and I loved the fake 80s ad they put out. I'm on the fence about this one, as I didn't like much about Days of Future Past. But Jubilee and Mohawk Storm are pulling me back in, kinda like the promise of Bishop in DoFP.

(Good reviews though, I always prefer the conversation on Mefi to comments on AV Club.)
posted by kittensofthenight at 11:43 PM on May 30, 2016


Jubilee is barely in it, but she's pretty perfect IMHO.
posted by smoke at 11:47 PM on May 30, 2016


Please do not imply that a biracial woman is not sufficiently or authentically "Asian". There are ways to criticize how Hollywood favors white beauty standards even when casting POC actors without erasing or discounting the existence of mixed race people.

Also, insisting that someone doesn't "look" Japanese is kind of weird, because Japanese people look a lot of different waysK=. Including Japanese and Japanese-American people with some caucasian heritage.

Additionally, while I see your point about how cross-casting can be problematic re: erasing differences between different Asian cultures, that's a complicated question.
posted by Krom Tatman at 11:52 PM on May 30, 2016 [2 favorites]


Apologies, I'm not implying that she's not "Asian" enough. I'm implying that she's not Japanese enough in a Japanese role.

I acknowledge that reasonable people can disagree, and I expected my take might be disagreed with when I wrote it. But, for me, in an insitutionally racist environment, when a choice is made that minimises race, I'm going to look at institutionally racist reasons first, whilst acknowledging that decision making is probably multi-factorial.

Sandra Oh has a valid point, no doubt. It's also valid to note that white people portraying different western nationalities are all coming at it from a position of privilege and one that positions them as, de facto, apart. "Caucasian" is not treated the way "Asian" is.

I feel like I'm kinda derailing a movie thread now so I'll shut up, but it made me uncomfortable, you know?
posted by smoke at 12:10 AM on May 31, 2016 [1 favorite]


kinda weird to be so fixated on the authentic "Japaneseness" of a character who is a white lady forcibly bodyswapped by stereotypical evil ninjas into an Asian body who was mostly used pure cheesecake fuel, but you do you, dude. It makes me really uncomfortable as a biracial Asian woman to be told that this is whitewashing and that it's "replacing an Asian character with a caucasian actor" because Olivia Munn is "more caucasian-looking" or whatever, but that is just my cross to bear, I guess.
posted by Krom Tatman at 12:20 AM on May 31, 2016 [7 favorites]


Anyone have any opinions on Jubilee?

She had me at The Empire Strikes Back.

I thought cinematic Jubilee looked great, but obviously, we have to wait until the 90's iteration to see her powers. It's been an eyeopener for me, someone who watched the cartoon and read the comics in the time period where she came into existence and kind of became Wolverine's sidekick at times, to see how many people look back at the character fondly. I was never a fan of Jubilee, especially as a teen boy at the time, how ridiculously useless her powers generally were. But gosh, since this movie came out, I'm starting to realize that I'm definitely in the minority on this position.

Seeing Mohawk Storm makes me think of the Morlocks (sp?) and I wonder if there's ever any consideration to draw them out into the cinematic universe.
posted by Atreides at 7:43 AM on May 31, 2016


I think that the Morlocks are likely to appear in the next film, as the post-credits stinger scene points to a particular villain (spoilers in the link) with a Morlock connection.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:12 AM on May 31, 2016 [2 favorites]


I REALLY liked this, despite being generally meh on the last X-Men movie. I tolerated Age of Ultron, but somehow the X-Men feel like they're going to be able to pull off completely batshit insane comic stuff better than the Avengers, and I'm okay with that, which is a surprise (Caveat: I haven't seen Civil War yet.). Usually I tune out when things get too epic, but this felt right: a crowd of mutants duking it out in their own special way.
posted by redsparkler at 3:04 PM on May 31, 2016 [1 favorite]


Another Claremont-era fan here. I wanted to like the movie, and I mostly did. I quite liked what they did with Storm; it more or less fits with her canon biography. I enjoyed McAvoy's and Fassbender's work, and the fact that their relationship is pivotal at the end. And I loved Sophie Turner as Jean.

I'd rather have had fun swashbuckling Nightcrawler than angsty religion-obsessed Nightcrawler, but given that they're still treating the earlier movies as vaguely canon, I guess they struck the best balance they could. I'd still have preferred him, in his first fight, to move like the circus-trained acrobat he is.

Angel got no characterisation at all, though visually I liked the transformation to Archangel. I did enjoy Caliban's snark. My only comment on Psylocke is that, whatever body she's in, she's a British character and the actress ought to at least try for RP. Her combat was good, though.

I hope we get the Dark Phoenix Saga next. Or just an '80s style mutant high school hijinks movie; that would be awesome.
posted by Pallas Athena at 9:11 AM on June 1, 2016 [1 favorite]




Magneto should not be in ‘X-Men Apocalypse’

I agree with the author's statement that writing a character whose parents were killed in Auschwitz to turn and follow a genocidal god-like figure who speaks of “cleansing” and “purifying” the world is extremely poor taste.

the disregard for Jean’s development throughout leaves the viewer wanting.
Admittedly, it did feel like everybody else (Scott, Quicksilver, Storm, Nightcrawler) got a scene of their own at home/school/fighting ring, and Jean only had her scenes at the school. However, as someone who didn't know what was going to happen, it was pretty awesome when Jean stepped up and just went nuts with the Phoenix stuff, and I liked that it didn't feel completely telegraphed.
posted by redsparkler at 12:03 PM on June 1, 2016


I haven't seen the Wolverine movies and was confused by his brief interaction here with Jean Gray. Weren't they sort of involved at one point? It seemed to me they were relatively close in age when Famke Janssen was playing Jean but then in Apocalypse he's noticeably older while she's of course her younger 1980s self. Has that part of their past been retconned or are we just supposed to ignore that Hugh Jackman is now older than most of the cast?
posted by fuse theorem at 7:17 PM on June 1, 2016


Logan is supposed to be around 100 years old already so his age relative to the rest of the them is sort of moot. After seeing Deadpool I really feel like Morena Baccarin should have been younger Jean. She's looks like she could be Janssen's daughter.
posted by M Edward at 10:04 PM on June 1, 2016


I haven't seen the Wolverine movies and was confused by his brief interaction here with Jean Gray. Weren't they sort of involved at one point? It seemed to me they were relatively close in age when Famke Janssen was playing Jean but then in Apocalypse he's noticeably older while she's of course her younger 1980s self. Has that part of their past been retconned or are we just supposed to ignore that Hugh Jackman is now older than most of the cast?

As best as I understand it, from a cinematic perspective, just appreciate that Wolverine is the same age as always...except in the upcoming film which will be drawing upon the Old Man Logan storyline (somehow) which kicks Wolverine up the age ladder some.

Logan and Jean Grey are kind of a complicated pairing. Traditionally, it's almost always been Scott and Jean in the comics with a couple of rare exceptions. However, in the cinematic universe, Bryan Singer opted to really draw upon Logan's attraction to 'Red' which culminated in X-3 (in Ratner's hands) with the tension of Logan being required to kill Jean/Dark Phoenix. So, uh, I guess in the movies, the romantic interest is a bit more turned up, but it isn't based on nothing at all.

As for what happened in this film, arguably, Singer included the scene to kind of leave an imprint in Wolverine to help explain his attraction to Jean in the old timeline when she's older...erm. I guess? This will probably be the last time the two characters meet on the silver screen for some time, if I had to guess. Likewise, with Logan aging slower, he can wait for Jean to become older to have a more 'appropriate' relationship with her.
posted by Atreides at 7:30 AM on June 2, 2016


I thought this was pretty good for an X-Men movie, which is bland praise for a bland series of films. It suffered from some of the same problems as the earlier films in the franchise, most notably a surfeit of characters that didn't have very much to do, and the problem of how to portray telepathy and other mental powers beyond grimacing and waving hands dramatically or putting a finger up to one's forehead. I've never found Mystique interesting, and her costume design (ie a gallon of blue makeup and some pasties) is terrible. Psylocke's costume was also horrible, but it was the only memorable thing about the character. Most of the actors could have been replaced with mannequins without much effect on their performance.

All that said, the plot seemed reasonably coherent and it moved along briskly to a fairly satisfying conclusion. I don't ask for much from superhero blockbusters, and this hit its marks well enough.
posted by sevenyearlurk at 6:49 AM on June 6, 2016


Such wonderful characters and heroes to work with and all wasted. Storm and Jubilee? Why were they even in the film, as far as I could tell, so that they could just stand by passively in costume and look shocked.

It wasn't a terrible film but it was pretty rote and it felt like it went through the motions. Much of that has to do with how flat Apocalypse was. A boring villain that only wants power. I guess, that's motivation. I do think that it's time for this series to be given to someone else. I'm tired of Singer, I think he's too predictable.
posted by Fizz at 11:14 AM on June 7, 2016


Has that part of their past been retconned or are we just supposed to ignore that Hugh Jackman is now older than most of the cast?

Well, there is the somewhat inconvenient fact that, unlike Wolverine, Hugh Jackman is actually not nigh-immortal.

(Also, magic xylophone.)
posted by entropicamericana at 9:36 AM on June 13, 2016


Finally got around to watching this, and was generally not impressed, the whole thing felt shallow and by-the-numbers. An interesting starting point - Charles is running the school but has abandoned any idea of a mutant hero team & is simply teaching mutants how to hide & survive in the normal world or sheltering them if they can't; Magneto is trying to live a "normal" life but an instinctive good deed results in him losing everything again; Mystique is a conductor on the mutant Underground Railroad - that never really went anywhere. Magneto just hooks up with Apocalypse for a power boost, Charles & Erik have a desultory version of their same old argument, Mystique again ping-pongs between Charles & Erik and their worldviews. There's some attempt at "origin stories" for Storm & Psylocke & Nightcrawler, some attempt at showing Scott Summers becoming Cyclops (controlling his powers & learning to lead a team) & falling in love with Jean Grey, some attempt at showing Scott's relationship with his brother influencing the man he would become, but it's all given so little screen time and emotional weight that it comes across as more checking-the-boxes of "matching comic lore" than anything else. And more of the same with the Wolverine cameo and Charles losing all his hair at the end. Very little character development overall, even for the major characters - the end with Erik cheerfully using his powers to rebuild the Xavier mansion seemed entirely too chirpy.

More a place-holder than anything else, hopefully the next (last? - if they continue the pattern of "one movie per decade" then there's one more set in the 90's before we've circled back around to the first film) will be better.
posted by soundguy99 at 9:38 AM on August 23, 2016


Finally saw this; it felt very shallow, not thought through, and depended far too much on the viewers having watched previous installments. Wanted more of the underground railroad with Mystique and Caliban; wanted more depth for Magneto and a better exploration of why a survivor of Auschwitz would follow along with a genocidal maniac (or, in the end, reject him); wanted more Quicksilver; basically, I wanted more depth around everything going on. Biggest problems/questions:

-So, Magneto is ripping up every bit of metal in the earth and creating an incredibly intense magnetic field that is reaching the earth's core...but there's no problem flying a jet into Cairo and then there are plenty of cars/buses, etc to fling around during the fight. Alrighty then.
-There seems to be an expectation of continuity between these films and the X-men/X2/X-men Last Stand trilogy - at least, they keep setting things up in that regard. If that's the case, why is it that when Nightcrawler shows up in X2 does it seem that Jean Grey and Storm have no clue who he is?
posted by nubs at 8:05 AM on March 3, 2017


nubs I think the implication is that this is a different timeline, re-directed Flash style by the events of DoFP. I don't really understand how this works but that's the gist of it. Oh and Jean is what, 17 years older in X1 which explains Famke J. So presumably if there's a different history.

I agree that this movie would be much better just furthering the story and abandoning the Apocalypse storyline: More of the background world building, more grounded fighting. The ending was just so unwatchable. (I watched it last night with my partner who is a HUGE Wolverine fan, and as such this was her least favorite of all the X-Franchise. Like below origins and X3.)
posted by kittensofthenight at 1:56 PM on March 26, 2017


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