X-Men: Apocalypse

X-Men: Apocalypse was very fun, but got quite messy at parts. X-Men fans will like this just like I did. it is a huge step down from Days of Future Past and has a pretty clichéd villain. I forgave the clichéd villain because of how cool and how frightening he was. Oscar Isaac did so good as Apocalypse. The characters are well developed, but some of them do not get enough screen time and some get to much. Angel, Psyloche and Storm have no motivation, there is no reason why they agreed to help Apocalypse destroy the world. What would they gain? Overall I thought the movie was good, I had a blast watching it and will be watching it again.

This is not going to be a long review, i want to summarize my thoughts on the film, now after i just saw it in the cinema.

The movie is absolutely spectacular. The effects, the settings, the pacing, the acting, the music, the direction. It is all very well done, and if the story itself had kept up with the rest, this would be close to one of the best, if not the best, superhero film to date.

But the story is a bit weak, it's hard to take in a few of the twists and turns in this film, but still everything else is so brilliantly crafted, the movie pulls it off anyways, and that makes me feel i got my moneys worth. This is very important to me when i go the cinema. I need to walk out feeling i was entertained.

I'm usually the guy that puts story and script first when it comes to films. Way to often when the story is bad, the script and the acting and all the rest that follows almost always seem half done. This is not the case here.

This movie is like when you bake a cake, and you end up putting in a small amount of salt instead of sugar. You notice you did, but you don't have time to fix your mistake, so you bake the cake to the best of your abilities anyways. At the end it's one hell of a spectacular looking cake you made, but people notice the taste is a bit off, but somehow the added salt contributed to the flavor in a good way, and the cake was very much edible.

This is how i feel after seeing this film. It is really well crafted, and i do recommend people seeing it.

X-Men: Apocalypse is the sequel to Days of Future Past and takes place about a decade later in the '80s. This movie entertained me from start to finish and I can't say I was ever bored. But there are a lot of things I was not satisfied with while watching. Starting off with the good, Magneto and Professor X continue to be the best parts of these movies. Michael Fassbender as Magneto is amazing and he has a really emotional scene towards the beginning which got me locked into the film. James McAvoy is also great as Xavier. The internal battles inside Xavier's head were riveting. I really liked the new cast of the younger X-Men, like Jean Grey, Storm, Nightcrawler, and Cyclops. Quicksilver has another awesome scene just like the previous movie. The action is handled very well for the most part. The first half of the movie is terrific, but the second half brings it down. Apocalypse as the villain was OK for me. Some scenes worked well and others didn't. I was always skeptical of Oscar Isaac as Apocalypse and I still don't think he was the best choice. He is just like Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor for me. Apocalypse is also a small mutant compared to the others for some reason and he's just another villain who is obsessed with destroying the world, and his motivations are thin. Jennifer Lawrence was a boring Mystique. She just seems uninspired throughout the run-time and becomes tedious since she uses the personality over and over again to play the character. Some mutants were completely wasted here with Psylocke and Angel. There's an entire sequence in a secret lab and it seemed there for only one reason: the cameo of a specific person. While it was fun to watch, it didn't do much of anything for the story in the long run. The entire thing could have been removed and the movie would have been the same. The final battle felt underwhelming with the whole global extinction. The problem is they don't show any civilians dying; it's just buildings coming apart, making it hard to care about the situation. Overall, X-Men: Apocalypse is a disappointing sequel to First Class and Days of Future Past. But it is not at all a bad movie. Magneto and Professor X are once again great, Apocalypse is a mixed bag, the pacing for the movie is all over the place, and the dull second half just brings the film down from the really good first half. X-Men: Apocalypse gets a B-.

As you can probably gather I thought this was another very good addition to the X-Men franchise. Whilst it doesn't hit the heady heights of Days of Future Past it still is a really good watch and I fail to see why it has had a mixed press.

Firstly I found it to have a perfectly serviceable story, with Apocalypse and his followers recruiting the very vulnerable and angry Magneto as part of his plan to destroy civilisation and rebuild it in his image. Fassbender turns in another solid performance and you really feel his pain and confusion for the Erik/Magneto character. I also thought all the supporting cast were absolutely fine in their roles, and to me Evan Peters as Quicksilver really stole the scenes he was in and makes a fine addition to the cast. The same also goes to Tye Sheridan as Scott/Cyclops, whose back story is filled in better and with more depth than it was in the Wolverine origins film.

I see the critics have been moaning about having too many characters in the film, yet I actually think it was handled better than it was in the Captain America: Civil War film. In Apocalypse the large cast do actually have something to do and contribute to the story, whereas the Captain America film felt like some were shoe horned in, which I felt made that film feel bloated and repetitive whereas this one at least get the storyline moving. I felt that Civil War felt way too long because of all the story padding yet Apocalypse, whilst also a long film, kept my interest to the end (and yes there is a post credits scene that I suspect is setting up Wolverine 3). I should also add that Apocalypse, despite it's bleak story, does have some moments of humour and wit that went down well with the audience.

I also felt the surprise appearance of Wolverine fitted in nicely with the back story that we already know, particularly the one told in X Men 2 and the Origins film, nicely closing that particular characters story arc and fitting in perfectly with the circumstances surrounding his appearance in the very first X-Men film of 16 years ago. If this is to be Wolverines final appearance with the X-men then they have given him a lovely send off.

I did find some minor flaws with the film though, particularly with the visual appearance of some of the characters and how their ages don't compute when the first X-men film of 2000 is taken into account. However, asides from that I thoroughly enjoyed X-Men Apocalypse and thought it was a solid & worthy addition to the other X-Men films. The films had spectacle, action, laughs and carried on with the journeys of the characters we have got to know and love over the past sixteen years.

Suffering from bizarre narrative choices and weak character development, X-Men: Apocalypse is an otherwise passable and occasionally great installment of the franchise, mainly due to the continued strong performances and glorious action set pieces.