X-Men: Apocalypse ★★★
IT’S EASY to get lost in the Marvel X-Men film world.
As I understand it, if you count the Wolverine and Deadpool spin-offs, 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse was the 10th in the series since 2000.
That’s a pretty good output and, apart from one or two, the majority have been well received by audiences and critics.
Apocalypse is one of the less well received but it’s still a visual effects extravaganza worthy of watching, whether you’re a series completist or not.
The best thing this series did was to take the narrative back to the 1960s a few films ago in order to tell the origins story with the threat of nuclear war via the Cuban missile crisis as an interesting and relevant backdrop.
One of the Wolverine spin-offs also took this approach and we then had another X-Men set in the 1970s. Apologies if I haven’t got the lore or timelines quite right, but Apocalypse moves the origins story to the 1980s.
It focusses on the main mutants who have scattered to different ends of the earth coming together to battle the “world’s first mutant, world-destroyer Apocalypse” after his re-emergence from an ancient Egyptian crypt.
The opening sequence is quite extraordinary. Set in ancient Egypt, an elaborate ceremony to create eternal life for Apocalypse is disturbed by dissidents who fear him and his followers as unholy Gods. They fail to eliminate him but he is trapped underground only to be resurrected thousands of years later.
Apocalypse (played by an almost unrecognisable Oscar Isaacs) proceeds to recruit a band of disaffected and misguided mutants in his attempt to re-set the world through nuclear destruction and is pitted against Professor X (James McAvoy), Magneto (Michael Fassbender), Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) and a group of young mutants like Jean Grey who will go on to play critical roles in later years, i.e the earlier movies.
Bryan Singer is again at the helm of this one but it really does feel like the stars of the movie are the visual and special effects artists. The film is set in a range of locations around the world but in reality was entirely filmed on a sound stage in Quebec and there is barely a scene that does not have green screen involved.
There’s no doubt the effects are laboured at times, but this wizardry is also the main reason to marvel at this type of film.