X-Men Apocalypse super-sizes the magnetic appeal
In his fourth stint in the director’s chair, Bryan Singer does a masterful job with X-Men Apocalypse, weaving new material with past storylines and great imagery.
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X-Man Apocalypse (M, 144 minutes)
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Director: Bryan Singer
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, James McAvoy, Rose Byrne
Verdict: Super-sized sequel
X-MEN’S mutant family tree is almost as complex as the one in the Book of Genesis. But at least Apocalypse sticks to the one time zone, unlike its predecessor The Days of Future Past.
In his fourth stint in the director’s chair, Bryan Singer does a masterful job weaving new material with past storylines and great imagery.
There’s a rewarding (and now regulation) appearance by Hugh Jackman, for example, as the early, primitive Wolverine, neatly seguing back to the original X-Men film, on which Singer and Jackman first collaborated more than 15 years ago.
X-Men newbie Sophie Turner gets her chance to shine as the young Jean Grey. The Game of Thrones star is mistress of the slow-burn, as she exhibited to great effect in the role of Sansa Stark.
Kodi Smit-McPhee relishes the chance to get under the blue skin of an Emo, adolescent Nightcrawler and Evan Peters, reprising the character of Quicksilver, adds a welcome note of levity to proceedings.
Superhero movies are robust enough to shoulder difficult and weighty themes — Batman v Superman: The Dawn of Justice, for instance, raised the very topical subject of collateral damage, especially when the “good guys” are responsible.
The X-Men films have focused on prejudice and discrimination from the outset.
Here, there’s a pointed conversation about how the message of tolerance preached so successfully by Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) has simply encouraged people to hide their ugly xenophobic emotions behind a polite PC façade. Ancient supervillain Apocalypse (Oscar Isaacs) is planning a radical solution to man and mutant-kind’s significant flaws and failings — a cataclysmic “cleansing” after which only an elite few will survive.
The first step is to fire every nuclear warhead in the planet’s arsenal.
The dark charisma of Isaac’s performance is nicely complemented by Michael Fassbender’s tortured, virile Magneto. Alongside this strapping pair of alpha male adversaries, McAvoy’s cerebral, empathetic Xavier comes across as relatively small and ineffectual — a fragile vessel in which to carry our combined hopes and dreams.
But, as the man himself points out, he’s not acting alone.
Originally published as X-Men Apocalypse super-sizes the magnetic appeal
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