Get psyched for X-Men: Apocalypse
May 27, 2016, 12:11 PM | Updated: 3:36 pm
Professor Charles Xavier and the X-Men team have the biggest and baddest villain of them all to deal with in X-Men: Apocalypse: G0d. Or something like that.
They take on the world’s first mutant, Apocalypse (played by Oscar Isaac). Whether or not he’s actually G0d is left to the viewer to determine but he’s laid dormant for hundreds of years. Once he wakes up, he wants to destroy the world so that only the strongest mutant survives.
He recruits his version of the “four horsemen of the apocalypse” which includes a teenage Storm (Alexandra Shipp) and, of course, Magneto (Michael Fassbender) who continues this complex character development of trying to be good, but keeps getting pushed to the dark side.
Overall, this is a strong installment of the X-Men series.
I particularly love origin stories and you get to meet the bulk of the X-Men characters as teenagers. Tye Sheridan plays Cyclops, Sophie Turney plays Jean Grey, and Kodi Smith McPhee plays Nightcrawler (he’s my favorite character; you may recall he’s the star of my favorite film of 2015, “Slow West”). You get the return of Evan Peters as Quicksilver and of course, my pretend brunch buddy, Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique.
They manage to fit in every character under the sun and not overwhelm you; in fact, there’s probably room for more X-Men. This isn’t an easy task. These types of ensemble casts can be too much, not giving any individual character enough of the storyline. But they pair up rather effectively and fans of any individual X-Men character will be satisfied.
The action sequences are fantastic. You expect that. But they also manage a good mix of humor with the action (not quite as “knowing” and over-the-top as what you find in “The Avengers”). When dealing with the X-Men characters on camera, the film feels like a logical continuation of the past films which didn’t always have the same directors.
The one thing that I don’t think worked was the Apocalypse character. The opening sequence of the film didn’t seem to fit. It didn’t feel like an X-Men movie and a lot of the sequences with him felt almost like a different movie. The film also takes places in the 1980s. They don’t make much of the time period than they have in the last X-Men.
Still, if you like the X-Men series, you’ll love this one. Is it as good as the last two installments of the series? No. But as Hollywood summer blockbusters goes, it’ll meet your expectations.