X-Men Apocalypse Review

Coming from Days of Future Past, X-Men Apocalypse continues the recent reboot continuity with this 80s look at the group. The original fighters have now grown into a different set of roles and the first half of the movie basically just goes to great lengths to show what they've been doing. Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) is out rescuing the mutant population and has become somewhat of an icon in the mutant world after the events of the last film.

I was actually quite pleased with the amount of screen time and design of her story line in this one as the promotional materials made it look like she far too big of a deal in this one. Magneto (Michael Fassbender) is now living a happy life with a new family until disaster strikes and this character was definitely the strongest of the pack not only in his initial start, but also performance.

Finally we have the rest of the crew, Charles (James McAvoy) and Beast (Nicholas Hoult) back at Xavier's school teaching the new generation of gifted youngsters. Eventually everyone gets pushed together or into their respective sides once the ancient first mutant Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac) arises and begins to build his Horseman of the Apocalypse. This squad of evil heroes includes Angel; Storm, Psylocke and Magneto which are mostly characters you've probably seen in the other movies.

There's also this wide range of new students bringing in the next generation of X-Men and to go everyone would take far too long. They're mostly being built up as not being able to control their powers and throughout the movie they begin to unleash them while getting some decent practice.

With that we're onto the actual movie itself which was generally boring, it featured a relatively generic plot that we've seen a number of times already. They also attempted to bring the level of destruction to new heights and in this one there just wasn't enough behind the mass leveling of cities for anyone to really care about the impact. It wasn't even apparent to the heroes that the whole world was basically being sucked into the sky which was rather odd.

There was also some rough CGI in this one where some of the scenes despite me trying to believe they were real found them so fake. I thought we were past that at this point in technology and the budget of the film, it was rough. Aside from the story being generic I also felt that the scary bad Apocalypse was a rather simple enemey with little development and him being too powerful in a sense.

For how big of a hype there was for this villain I thought something better would become of it and even the performance behind the character just wasn't that strong. Wolverine also pops in for a few minutes because it isn't X-Men without him and he seems different, but it was nothing more than a convenient plot point with us learning little to nothing about his situation.

The Conclusion

X-Men Apocalypse disappoints after the strong Days of Future Past basically just continuing this group of X-Men along. The Quicksilver (Evan Peters) scenes were really well done with the character getting a much better and well deserved role this time.

Definitely one of the more fun characters in the movie as some of the new young characters fell a bit flat aside from Nightcrawler that was alright in the film. Michael Fassbender stood out in this one with some great character development and you could actually feel bad for what was happening to him. His character like much of the movie started out strong and then it just didn't quite ever go anywhere that wasn't predictable.

Despite it taking jabs at other films they should have thought about how this one just basically recycled the same conflicts of the past titles and just presents a new villain to fight at the end. It was a disappointing film for sure, though I'm still intrigued of where the series will go next as they had an interesting tease at the end of the credits.

X-Men Apocalypse Review at Theater with Ultra AVX D-Box Viewing

Rating Overall: 5.5