Why in Hell is Everyone Bitching About X-Men: Apocalypse?

I have to admit, when we went to see X-M:A yesterday, I was bracing myself for something really lousy. Like Batman vs. Superman lousy. Like Elektra or the Ang Lee Hulk movie or X-Men III lousy.

What I saw instead was a perfectly entertaining X-Men film that once again helped revitalize the series by bringing in new actors to play established characters, bring back some introduced in the previous film, and raise the stakes by introducing a villain who not only wanted to destroy every human being on the face of the Earth, but seemed eminently capable of doing it.

James McAvoy once again leads the cast as a Xavier who seems determined to simply run a school, not train warriors, while Michael Fassbender’s Magneto has a wife and child and is living anonymously in Poland. Naturally it all falls apart when Apocalypse (Oscar Isaacs, unrecognizable beneath several pounds of make-up) returns from thousands of years of imprisonment to wreak havoc upon a world that now knows that mutants exist, but basically seem kind of okay with it. This despite the fact that in at least one case, mutants are forced to battle each other in an electrified steel cage match, which is where we first encounter Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and Angel (Ben Hardy), the latter being pretty much the only mutant we encounter who is never addressed by his real name. Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), who obviously hates the full body make-up because she only appears in it for about thirty seconds of screen time, shows up to rescue them. She’s become something of a heroic legend at this point, particularly to young Storm (Alexandra Shipp) whose Ororo is better than Halle Berry if for no other reason than that she actually has an accent. Throw in a newly empowered Cyclops (Tye Sheridan) and a pre-Phoenix Jean Grey (Sansa Stark…sorry, Sophie Turner) and the triumphant return of Quicksilver (Evan Peters) and you have a well-cast, entertaining film with lots of great moments and an overall full blown villain-wants-to-end-the world comic book story.

So why are people complaining? Mostly I see reviews complaining about “repetition.” That they are evoking mutant concerns that have already been thoroughly explored in previous films. Except that worries about mutants were pervasive in the first movie, and that was set decades after this one, so it would make no sense if mutant kind were universally beloved at this point in the continuity. Besides which, mutant phobia is actually a very minor part of the film. Yes, people are terrified of Magneto, but he destroyed the freaking White House on global television, so that makes sense.

Personally, I thought it was thoroughly engaging and not remotely deserving of the negative reviews I’ve seen. Yes, it wasn’t Days of Future Past, but if nothing else, that had Wolverine throughout and also wiped out X-Men 3, so that would be hard to top. And they even make a wonderful inside reference to how third films in trilogies always are the worst. Apparently the movie makers knew what they were up against in terms of public expectations, but they certainly did their best and I thought they did wonderfully.

PAD