A small part of me really wishes that Bryan Singer was not the most consistent director of the X-Men movies. X-Men, the summer blockbuster from 2000, came out at a time when comic book movies were at an all-time low and basically kick-started a lot of the comic book movies we look up to today. So, no X-Men, no Captain America: Civil War. With that in mind, though, it really doesn't hold up all that well today; the production looks cheap, the actors, despite a great cast, deliver underwhelming performances, and its plot line is pretty simplistic. Singer's not what I would call a bad director, but he is pretty uninspired. Even his slightly superior sequel doesn't exactly rank up as one of my all-time favorites. (That title belongs to Matthew Vaughn's prequel, X-Men: First Class, an amazing adaptation that relies on his energetic and crisp style, along with a powerhouse screenplay, to look past an admittedly rushed production to deliver one of the gems of comic book movies.) What I do realize after seeing X-Men Apocalypse, however, is that Singer knows the film franchise from front to back and is willing to utilize that knowledge to his advantage, and that's precisely what he did with this film, delivering one of the more well-paced and well-developed entries into the franchise, even if it's not the most well-constructed.
This time around, the team, still in their young First Class incarnation, has to fight against the world's first mutant known as En Sabah Nur, otherwise known as Apocalypse, who's brought back to life after thousands of years and seeks to destroy the world and start life anew. He gathers up a series of followers to assist him in his havoc, including Magneto and a woman named Ororo Munroe (known to fans as Storm).
.... I can't really talk about any more plot without diving into spoilers.
I feel like the biggest reason why critics were split on this movie is because it's not very traditional storytelling, at least not for comic book movies. Most of the time, a comic book movie is able to go from point A to point B, much like the recent Deadpool. However, this film is more like jumping back and forth between points A, B, and C, with all of them eventually pointing to D. This is the kind of "in-cohesive" complaint that comes across blockbusters like Spider-Man 3 or the third Pirates of the Caribbean. However, I didn't mind this as much for two reasons: One, it did all have a point, and it was at least all about the X-Men; they didn't cut away from the main plot to focus on some snobby teen job hunting (LOOKING AT YOU, TRANSFORMERS 3); and two, every plot line had time to develop and breathe as it needed to, most likely the reason why this turned out to be the longest of the X-Men movies, which gave it a rather epic feel to it that made it one of the most emotionally powerful of them all.
That's not to say the film doesn't have a few problems either. For one, Apocalypse is kind of a bland villain; he's mostly there to spew out this "EPIC" dialogue, as if he thinks he's quoting the Bible or something, and his costume and make-up look like a Power Rangers getup. Alongside that, though, Bryan Singer's bland, smooth style really makes me wanna beg Vaughn to come back.
On the whole, though, I do appreciate how well they handled the emotional side of the story. I almost feel like this was the powerhouse epic that the franchise was building up to, and I suppose it did take a director that was there for most of the movies to assemble it consistently and properly. I'd say check it out!
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