No shit, Sansa Stark. The third in this rebooted franchise is just as bad X-Men: The Last Stand, if not THE worst of the bunch.
Basically much of the movie was just plain boring, especially the first half. I was so disinterested in the presentation of Apocalypse's origin and setup, along with that of the younger X-Men that I stopped paying attention to it and left to do something else.
One reason Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin was heavily panned is because the movie completely ditches the source material and gives characters like Bane and Poison Ivy an entirely different origin and character. Not only did these depictions alienate those who are familiar with them from the comics, but they aren't appealing to the general audience either.
That was the case with the characters of X-Men Apocalypse. In particular the way they write the character of Apocalypse (or by his ancient name "En Sabah Nur") and the Four Horsemen. To keep it short, NONE of these characters are anything like their comic book counterparts other than by name.
I am well aware that Apocalypse has a very complicated history and that there is little room for Fox to fill it in the movie, so they rewrite the character so that he is established quickly to the general audience. But the end result is Apocalypse being "just another villain" with nothing in his character or in his abilities that makes him a really threatening character on a global scale.
Seriously, the animated series from the 90's and the 2000's have done a much better job of making Apocalypse as intimidating and cool as his comic book counterpart. The people who worked on this movie just does a very bad job at this!
What I hate most about this movie's version of Apocalypse is that he has to follow the trope in that the villain, spoiler alert, gets killed off. For a character like Apocalypse, that's not supposed to happen because of his character! This simply undermines any future stories of this movie franchise (if Fox is gonna continue at all) because the villain that comes after Apocalypse must be bigger. And as someone familiar with the comics, with the end credits pretty much hinting at who next villain is, it's underwhelming.
As for the Four Horsemen, they are another disappointment as the movie makes them nothing more but just mere lackeys. It's even more disappointing that among the Four Horsemen is Storm, one of the most well liked characters in the X-Men comics and a huge player in the X-Men's history reduced to a being a minor character. It's sad that throughout the movies, the character of Storm has always been this way.
As much as I love Olivia Munn from her days as a co-host on Attack on The Show, after all that promotion she's been doing prior to this release, it turns out, she didn't do very much. It's as though her only purpose in the movie is just for sex appeal because, quite frankly, Psylocke was hot in the comics. I'm surprised the SJW community isn't giving two cents on Psylocke and instead is focused on raining their complaints on a billboard of all things.
Speaking of which, the movie places Jennifer Lawrence's character of Mystique as the main protagonist. While she was a great protagonist in The Hunger Games, the same cannot be said in this one. In fact, we barely even see her use her mutant powers effectively in this movie and just moves around saying things with very little action. And because she is Jennifer Lawrence, there are calls to to do a solo movie of Mystique. People seem to forget that Mystique is a super-villain. And if you want to do a solo Mystique movie with this kind of performance by Lawrence, I will tell you right now it'll just end up like that dreadful Catwoman movie, if not worse.
I get that Hugh Jackman can't play Wolverine forever and Fox is trying to find an X-Men character who can really carry the franchise. Whether Fox likes it or not, James Howlett, aka Logan, aka Wolverine, is what really carried the X-Men franchise to what we know today. There is no one within the X-Men roster that is even close to Logan in terms of his placement in Marvel history. Although Laura Kinney is the current Wolverine in the comics, she is definitely not THE Wolverine.
If there is anything good about X-Men Apocalypse at all, it's the story arc involving Magneto. He's basically the only interesting character throughout the movie as we see his rise and fall and back again. If anything I would rather see a solo Magneto movie and how he progresses into becoming a recurring villain for the X-Men and founding his own faction than a solo Mystique movie.
I'm sorry, but other than Michael Fassbender as Magneto and Evan Peters as Quicksilver, who is far more interesting than Marvel's version of the character, I simply have little care for everyone else because they are simply not interesting enough for me.
To get right down to it, Fox's X-Men movie franchise is having the same issues with Sony's Spider-Man movies in that there isn't much content in terms of characters and stories to make a good movie. Often the most interesting stories of the X-Men involve them crossing over with other Marvel characters. The situation is even worse when the movies tend to kill off key villains like Apocalypse, essentially destroying any key stories that involve the character, thus further limiting the amount of content that they can use.
This is why Sony is making a deal with Disney so that the Marvel characters can cross over to the Spider-Man movies and vice versa. I would pay to see a Maximum Carnage movie where Spider-Man and Venom along with the Avengers try to stop Carnage and his team of misfits. Fox should follow Sony's example and re-negotiate with Marvel. If they can do that, then that means tons and tons of great stories they can use for their movies. They redo the Dark Phoenix Saga, or do House of M, or Onslaught, or even Avengers vs X-Men.
But if Fox prefer to go solo, then they better make the next line of X-Men movies really damn good because Deadpool and Captain America: Civil War have set the bar. My advice to Fox is this - STOP making X-Men as a superhero genre of movies and start making the X-Men movies based on what made them well-known in the first place.
The X-Men serve as metaphors for social issues that relates to everyone who has ever read their stories. Instead of seeing the X-Men struggle because of a supervillain on the loose, why not see them struggle because of the fact they ARE mutants and are faced with huge discrimination against them by the general public? I remember a short X-Men story where Wolverine and Jubillee discuss the greatest foes they ever faced and Wolverine showed the young Jubillee that the X-Men greatest foe are the ones they simply can never fight back against - regular people.
There's a reason why X-Men Apocalypse is given a low rating - it's boring, the characters not interesting or relatable, the action is unsatisfactory, and Apocalypse is just too generic of a villain. I'd say even Batman v Superman is a much better movie than this. I just can't find anything positive to defend this movie even for die-hard X-Men fans. On a scale of 1 to 5, I give X-Men: Apocalypse, a 1 out of 5.
No comments:
Post a Comment