‘X-Men: Apocalypse’ Is Everything Wrong With Comic Book Movies In One Convenient Place (FILM REVIEW)

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X-Men: Apocalypse marks a return to form for the X-Men franchise. Consider: this is a franchise that got so off the rails in the mid-aughts that a continuity reboot was necessary. This in universe wipe of established history, achieved through the wonders of time travel, effectively erased the storyline of the first three X-Men movies and laid the groundwork for the tremendously successful—and amazing—first two installments of the latest trilogy, First Class and Days of Future Past. Those two entries into the ongoing saga of Professor Charles Xavier (James McAvoy, in a role established by Patrick Stewart) provided a bright ray of hope that X-Men would be saved from the abyss it had fallen into after the first three movies. As it currently stands, however, that bright spot was not the new norm, it was an aberration.

The form that it has returned to, then, is bad. The X-Men movies, specifically first three, have always been more about style than substance. Plots were haphazardly thrown together with characters that were ill-formed, unplanned, and flat. People stood around looking cool and doing mildly badass things without ever really achieving much aside from reaching a conclusion that was forgone before the movie even started. And so it is with Apocalypse, a movie that replaces the heartfelt intensity of its two immediate predecessors with all of the sound, fury, and nothing of its turn of the century forebears.

The film introduces a brand new antagonist in the form of Oscar Isaac’s En Sabah Nur, a.k.a. Apocalypse, the world’s first mutant who’s lived thousands of years thanks to his ability to transfer his consciousness into other beings. After being seemingly defeated in Ancient Egyptian times and buried beneath the rubble of a massive pyramid, the mutant is accidentally awoken in the 1980’s, whereupon he continues his mission of total world domination by recruiting his four horsemen (get it?!) in the form of a young Storm (Alexandra Shipp, in a role established by Halle Barry), Angel (Ben Hardy, in a role originated by…oh, screw it, no one cares anymore), fan-favorite Psylocke (Olivia Munn), and your old friend Magneto (Michael Fassbender). This puts him at odds with Professor Xavier’s philosophy and teachings, leading to a showdown between Apocalypse and his four horsemen and the new X-Men team.

Punches are thrown, buildings are collapsed, the world is imperiled. Basically anything you might expect to happen can, and does, happen in Apocalypse. The formulaic script by series producer Simon Kinberg does little to deepen the mythos in any meaningful way, choosing instead to spin its wheels at the starting line without ever taking off. The result kind of looks cool, I guess, in the way that watching a racecar spin its wheels and produce clouds of noxious smoke looks cool, but the film never goes anywhere over the course of its two and a half hour run time.

Instead we have what amounts to largely a retread of previous character introductions. Being that this is the culmination of both a reboot and a prequel it makes sense that we would see younger versions of the heroes established in the original trilogy of films, but there’s a considerable lack of anything remarkable about the way it’s handled. The characters play victim to the plot rather than advancing it, and mostly we see a bunch of hapless teenagers mope around without any sense of narrative importance. Even the normally wonderful Jennifer Lawrence walks around with the same dead-eyed expression of a customer service call center employee trying desperately to remember that the paycheck she receives makes the hell of her job somewhat more bearable.

The potential of its amazing cast of both actors and characters is squandered thanks to its overstuffed, meandering script that never seems to know quite how to handle a narrative as large as Apocalypse suggests. At no point is this more apparent than in the characters of Storm and Psylocke. While the advertising leans heavily on their appearances, their roles amount to little more than, well, appearances. Combined, the two fan-favorite characters hold about ten total minutes of screen time, most of which is spent standing around trying to look badass without actually every doing anything substantial. In that way, they serve as an apt metaphor for the film as a whole.

X-Men: Apocalypse is a brightly colored spectacle that looks kind of badass, and that’s about it. You can tell they wanted to toy with larger themes regarding humanity and existence, but they never quite break through that barrier. It almost seems as though the film expects that their audience is capable neither of understanding nor appreciating nuance and talks down to them, flying in the face of audience reactions to the film’s immediate predecessors. Why studios outside of Marvel (who doesn’t own the rights to this franchise) have a hard time accepting that comic books and superheroes serve as excellent jumping off points to explore complex thematic elements is beyond me, and yet here we are.

Not since X-Men 3: The Last Stand has the franchise plodded so confidently and brazenly into the quagmire of mediocrity. The sheer depth of Apocalypse’s mediocrity is almost amazing in itself. The film plays out almost as a how to guide for giving a project the least amount of effort in the most necessary places. Spectacle is meaningless without a script to support it, and therein lies the difference between Marvel’s MCU and the rest of the comic book movie fold. Narrative and story are the heart of movies, and a movie that shortchanges these elements can never be anything more than a waste of time.

And that’s exactly what X-Men Apocalypse is. A waste. Of time. Of effort. Of money. Of potential. Of a perfectly decent franchise. Under a new guiding hand, with a new director and new producer, it’s possible for someone to take the characters established here and bring the series back to resembling something of merit. I’m not holding my breath, however. No, it seems that X-Men is cursed to wallow in shallow waters, and I doubt anyone exists who can make this a series worth a damn. And that’s honestly too damn bad.

X-Men: Apocalypse opens everywhere on May 27.