X men apocalypse movie review

X MEN: APOCALYPSE

Movie Review- Zulfi      

2/5

 

Many times while watching ‘X men Apocalypse’, I had doubts if Bryan Singer directed this. I didn’t see his old way of presentation in this latest offering from the mutant franchise. The movie looks long, overstretched piece of imagination, which audience would easily lose the thread over. Not because of lack of understanding but because of lassitude.

                The movie starts in the times of pharaohs with En Sabah Nur /Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac), the first mutant, hopping from his body into another fresh one, in a ritual of soul transference. But the act is sabotaged by the guards who serve him by implosion of the massive pyramid. Why they do it? Don’t know? The procedure of spirit changing the bodies however wasn’t able to be completed owing to want of some sunlight, but one of the personal guards of Nur or horsemen, makes sure that the physical form is intact behind the shroud of a an undestructible field. There he lies in the depths of the earth with the whole rubble on him. And then times flies to 1983. Xavier’s (James McAvoy) school is running and the students are getting recruited steadily as Alex’s brother Scott summers is brought by him for his uncontrolled visual radiations. Meanwhile in Poland, Magneto (Michael Fassbender)  is living his low-key life with his wife and daughter as a metal factory worker. His family is killed in an unfortunate manner. Moira MacTaggert,(Rose Byrne) FBI operative in ‘First Class’, probes the ruin of the earlier mentioned pyramid and witnesses a mystic group praying to Nur. Nur rises to his form and starts recruiting his four horsemen (storm, angel, Psylocke) with the fourth being the despondent Magneto. Apocalypse despises the modern world and wants to resurrect it from ashes. X men are the only one stopping him.

                The problem with the movie is Bryan Singer’s melodramatic presentation. He tries the operatic manner of introduction of his characters. The slow proceedings make it hard to concentrate. The previous reboots had crisp storyline with set pieces in every corner of the script. But apocalypse lacks in that variety. There aren’t great action scenes. That is a given. There is an attempt to add grandeur to the fights which fails miserably as there is no proper novel idea for the set piece nor was it worked out properly. The climax fight is a gone case with magneto and every other character reacting slowly to what is happening around. Storm watches helplessly not once but a lot of times, which gives us an aspect of improper editing. Popping up of William Stryker was done only for the intro of Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) as it doesn’t add up anywhere with Apocalyse.

The character of Magneto for me was stretched uncertainly in three ways during the rebooting of X men. In first class, he leaves Xavier for his different thinking. So, he does in the two sequels.  This makes a little discomforting for the viewer as we already know what Erik is. Sophie turner plays a very good Jean Grey, but she isn’t given much character depth. How storm comes up with the idea of switching loyalties isn’t properly explained. Apocalypse is a big letdown as a villain. In the heavy, gaudy makeup, he moves like a saint and we don’t know if he wants to glorify the world or was just being plain selfish. His is clearly a half baked character. Quicksilver, who had the best scene in his previous movie, is approached in the same way, but his comic scene comes at a very serious instance. Talk of bad timing. And this overly done previous idea isn’t much convincing. Wolverine would have been a good escape from all these faults, if his role wouldn’t have been a brief one.

The writers were busy trying to tie up the loose ends which occurred in the other movies. At this need of the script, the writing looks more of a chore than for the want of creation. The only piece of redemption comes with the mental connect of Xavier with Apocalypse, when the latter takes the telepath’s strength and perpetrates the nuke handlers’ minds and makes decisions for them. Beast is a straight arrow with Nicholas Hoult making some sense in not so-such sort of a movie. We also get a logical explanation why the professor’s head is in a permanent tonsure. Fassbender might have got tired managing his underwritten role. His Magneto in the previous movies had good lines. The writing of ‘X men: Apocalypse’ is almost non-existent. There is not even a single witty quip in a movie where the character trait of each superhero may spawn hundreds of such puns. Mystique’s (Jennifer Lawrence) end lines as the instructor are almost laughable. Her wanderings since the start are also of mystic nature as we never come to know why she saved Nightcrawler and where she took him. Nor does Bryan Singer as to where he took us.