GRATUITOUS SPOILER WARNING: Plot points for X-Men: Apocalypse are discussed below.
At a certain point in X-Men: Apocalypse, the titular villain hijacks the brain of renowned telepath Professor X (James McAvoy) and uses it to control every nuclear missile operator on the planet. En Sabah Nur (Oscar Isaac) wants to destroy the world—or, rather, to cleanse it of the meddlesome humans who have dirtied and defiled it—and, to that end, has the military men fire their nukes into the sky.
But the missiles don’t come down. They just sort of hang in the sky. Instead of using the world’s nuclear arsenal to kill off all the useless humans, Apocalypse amplifies Magneto’s power (Michael Fassbender) so he can control the world’s electromagnetic waves and use them to, I dunno, destabilize cities or something? It seems like an awful waste of effort, given, well, the nukes, and also the fact that Apocalypse himself seems to be able to rearrange matter, performing evil miracles small (turning men into ash) and large (reducing cities to dust and using said dust to build a giant pyramid).
Apocalypse’s powers are something of a mystery. We learn in the film’s opening sequence that he is thousands of years old and has absorbed the powers of numerous mutants, who also, apparently, have been around for thousands of years. The point being, Apocalypse has a lot of power. For instance, we see Apocalypse, with little more than a Bewitched-esque twitch of the nose, turn a man into part of a wall. But then, when he fights the X-Men, he … just doesn’t use that power. Because it wouldn’t be sporting, one supposes?
I hate to keep harping on En Sabah Nur like this, but I feel it is my duty to impress upon you that the character makes virtually no sense at all. He’s an insanely overpowered villain and like all such insanely overpowered villains his insane powers sometimes just kinda sorta disappear when they bump up against the filmmaker’s need to ratchet up the tension and give the protagonists a chance at victory.
Insanely overpowered villains are boring. So are the movies in which they demonstrate their villainy. How are we supposed to care about Magneto’s struggle to obtain normalcy or Mystique’s (Jennifer Lawrence) underground railroad for mutants or Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) and Scott Summers’s (Tye Sheridan) effort to control their powers when billions of lives are on the line?
Whereas First Class and Days of Future Past, the most recent iterations in this series, deftly combined stakes big and small and provided an outcome that altered the way in which the cinematic X-Men universe functioned, Apocalypse lacks stakes that inspire tension, and leaves the series in more or less the same place it was before the film’s release.
My one takeaway from this film is that Bryan Singer really, really wants to direct a Dark Phoenix movie. This is the second time he’s helmed an X-Men film that concludes with Jean Grey unleashing the (flame-winged) beast and hinting that there is a darker edge to her power. It is too bad, then, that Singer doesn’t quite seem to know how to garner a winning performance out of Sophie Turner, best known as Sansa Stark from Game of Thrones. She seems blank-eyed and dull throughout, a bit of a surprise, given her quality performances on HBO’s prestige drama.