X-Men: Apocalypse

Seduced by visions of billion-dollar sales, the people at Fox applied a Marvel-esque concept, and the result is a director's genocide of his own children. It consists of rejuvenating detailed heroes with interchangeable faces and letting them fly thoughtlessly among digital backdrops. Yet Singer forgets about his main asset - strong characters - meaning that there is a complete lack of attachments, motivations, and, heaven forbid, tension. The viewer is thus left with a producer film that perfectly hits its target audience for a hundred and fifty minutes (it's not boring for even a second), but one that also sells its own soul (key moments are alternated from the past) and leaves the broken hearts of fans of what has laboriously redefined the comic book genre for sixteen years to die in agony. (05/18/2016)

The last instalment, which was about alternative pasts, realities, futures and future pasts including the past future, annoyed me so much that I didn’t even feel like watching the next instalment called Apocalypse. I was discouraged by the fact that the whole universe around the X-Men is awfully asymmetrical and has no logic in it. In addition, the two-and-a-half-hour footage is also not easy to swallow. Especially since when hearing the word X-Men, I currently think of a number of swear words. Nevertheless, I gave Apocalypse a chance and I must admit that I was very pleasantly surprised. While the director does not bother with the logic of the story and feeds the audience with one nonsense after another, it does no harm to the relatively simple premise, and at least it allows the individual characters to develop, which is nice. There is a significant number of them. I consider the scene where Quicksilver saves the whole academy in slow motion to be the highlight of the movie. It was truly flawless, and it was then that I realize that this instalment is not actually bad at all. Until then, I was quite undecided, because this film definitely doesn’t interest you with the story. And that’s the whole point. In the end, I realized that I was not into the story at all, but rather into the individual characters, which really surprised me and pleased me at the same time. Finally something from the comic book world that I care about. Let’s just hope that they won’t disappoint the next time, as my feelings after X-Men: First Class were pretty similar… (04/07/2017)

I have a soft spot for the X-Men, after all, they showed how to confidently make comic book adaptations, managing to make them smart and ambitious, stripping them of the label of children's entertainment. They've always been smarter, had better fleshed out characters, and didn’t care about black and white. That is, until recently, because X-Men: Apocalypse is a step backwards in everything I listed above. And a hell of a big one. The sixth X-Men movie feels like something that was made in the late 90s, a time when it wasn't the norm to have characters dealing with a crisis of faith (like Nightcrawler in X-Men 2), drawing on the political situation of the 70s (Days of Future Past), or wondering if mutation was a disease or evolution (more or less the entire original trilogy). Now we have a blue idiot who wants to destroy the world for his ego, and that's it. Bryan Singer and his team seem to have ditched what has always been their strength and made a generic blockbuster for a lot of money. Unfortunately, the director's action sequences never work as well as the character work, he doesn't quite master the digital effects either, and he's got a bunch of characters that are either underused or completely unnecessary. In the end, it turned out to be a mediocre quarter-billion dollar movie. Personally, I'm used to more from this franchise. A lot more. (05/15/2017)

I didn’t lose any hair from it, but if I could erase this film from my memory, I'd do it immediately. It's nice that Singer doesn't use the joke about a threesome in a film where nothing really works. But compared to this mess, it looks like the work of a demigod. I experience the greatest moments of regret and helplessness in the character of Eric, for whom Singer and the rest prepared one of the worst rebirth scenes ever seen in comics (The Birds meets Polish Robin Hood). The casting of the new faces had to take place under the slogan "find the actor with the least amount of charisma". The crown is set by the "red jewel" of the film, the new Jean Gray, who resembles the bullied Mana from high school. One can't even feel bad for Oscar Isaac, because his mask allows him only one grimace (an angry overbite). What next? A bloated runtime that reflects the problem of many other blockbusters - they are awkwardly looking for an alibi for the final battle, in which the characters behave according to mysterious mechanics. Not that you can't justify the twists in retrospect, but the thin manure beforehand doesn't justify it. I'm glad Wolverine got his forest jogging - I wanted to run with him and leave the stuffed dogs far behind me. If only the film rewarded me with a spoiled visual, but almost everything here feels artificial. Remember how the other X-Men built a world that mattered? Characters who carried stories and weren't just hangers for super-abilities? Here, there is only effective enchanting - a fart transforms into an even bigger purple fart. I firmly hope that Bryan has finished building his shapeless pyramid for good. (01/07/2017)

A gift for Bryan Singer. After contributing to the series with origin, key work, and crossover, the situation finally arises where he can rampage carelessly, break free from the chain, and simply shoot a pure team comic book. I knew from the announcement of the storyline that it wouldn't be routine, but that it would be one of the highlights of the entire universe, and I'm still breathless a day after seeing it. It's not just a clash with an unbeatable enemy, but also the way the heroes themselves are incorporated into it. There's no need to develop them because we've spent six movies with some of them and know what to expect from them. Magneto's next attempt to exit the scene, Raven's inability to cope with herself and with mutants as such, or the newly developing juniors portrayed by Scott and Jean are still storylines that complete the already perfect cocktail of characters and motifs. And when you add Quicksilver, the visit to Lake Alkali, or the astral confrontation of the strongest wills, X-Men: Apocalypse becomes the strongest superhero film at least of this year. (05/29/2016)

Let's face it: this movie isn't very good, but then again, I wasn't bored. Granted it had scenes where I'm not sitting in the cinema but at the PC, so I'm stomping them because their bullshit was unlistenable; on the other hand, it had a scene I'd like to see again, which of course is the one with the great music and the "express train". There's not much to say about the acting, the actors didn't really stand out, the story was kind of rubbish, but the music managed to draw you in. It's a heavy middling film that surprisingly didn't bore me too much; I only had to roll my eyes about three times. :-D Get over how illogical it was that a bunch of Polish workers could speak English (since we're on location and speaking a foreign language, let's play it to the hilt!), or that one randomly shot ordinary arrow (which wouldn't have a metal tip!) kills two birds with one stone, and it's a nice movie for an evening when you come home from work and just want to be entertained. 55%. (05/19/2016)

Still good, the catastrophe announced by the first reviews does not occur. Or rather, it occurs, but in a good sense...if you get my drift. :) The blue clown doesn’t command much respect and his super powers aren’t clearly defined (which is a shame) so he uses whatever power he wants when he wants. But any dramatic scene with Fassbender or McAvoy is always by far the best. Apocalypse is a picture about destruction and again about the strength of unity. I’m not sure what direction the creators want to move with this concept because in this movie they largely repeat themselves. I’m beginning to feel my age. I have a feeling that I saw some parts of the subplots somewhere long ago... I was very pleased with the Weapon X program, identical to the comic book. We’re already looking forward to good old Wolvie. (05/21/2016)

Days of Future Past was already a harbinger of future total shit and incomprehensible creative decline, and, unfortunately, Age of Apocalypse is full of that. All the things we loved about the X-Men – the characters, the relationships, the connection to reality – are missing here and have been replaced by the classic comic-book elements of Marvel: a CGI mess and a constant change of locations that is supposed to evoke a sort of build-up of the plot. There are only a few really good scenes that will resonate though – primarily almost everything with Fassbender and a minute of Wolverine, unless you count Jennifer Lawrence in a sexy purple costume, or a few nice visual effects that just copy what we've seen better/more sparingly used in previous episodes. The gamble on youth didn't pay off and neither did the super villain, who, surprisingly, wants to destroy the world – something we haven’t seen yet. (09/11/2016)

I didn't expect that. So many good moments and actors drowned in such a bland story... And also directed by Bryan Singer. If only he'd made a standalone movie with the (totally awesome) Weapon X instead of this hastily cobbled together sequel that shouldn't even be compared to the first two or Days of Future Past..... Oh dear. The villain sucks, the plot has almost no overlap and the relationships between the characters are hardly interesting (yet that's what I've always enjoyed most about X-Men) and the whole thing is mostly a parade of gimmicks interspersed with something worth mentioning here and there. I was downright bored by the multi-destructive ending, and I'm actually disappointed to the point of being angry at how they managed to dilute the already diluted X-Men cinematic universe even more. (05/19/2016)

A film without charisma. It doesn't bore or annoy, but everything that takes place in it is, in keeping with the more intimate psychological feel of its predecessors, simply a screw-up. Nobody expected such a big story cliché and an absolute inclination towards the digitally overstuffed Snyder manuscript from Singer, and the exhausted plot extensions in the form of introducing "new" recruits are not only detrimental to the dubiously tuned script, which completely lacks any attempt at emotionality or creating strong bonds between the characters, but also to the stars themselves, who don't get much space and, more importantly, don't get much to play with – yes, even Fassbender, whose performance is traditionally precise, of course, but the ambivalence of his character, until recently the main driving force of the saga, also feels like a thematic encore with a minimum shelf-life date of Future Past. And I'm afraid the whole series has been given the same label. It's nice to look at, the music is great, Jennifer Lawrence gets prettier with each film, and there's a pleasing room for humour represented once again by the delectable Quiksilver, but these just aren't the X-Men we like. (05/19/2016)

The latest installment in the Young X-Men franchise falls slightly short of its predecessors (First Class, Days of Future Past), mostly due to a less complex plot and a somewhat large cast of characters who aren't given enough space for the viewer to form any kind of relationship with. As far as the characters are concerned, Magneto and partly Jean got the best portrayal, otherwise it was a rather shallow performance or a retread. The film is full of action wrapped in a nice audiovisual package, but in the last quarter they were stretching things a bit (SPOILER: e.g. the Jean vs. Apocalypse scene). The best scene was the “Sweet Dreams” sequence with Quicksilver, which was already in the previous movie, but here it was taken up another level. All in all, still a well-made blockbuster that, while not quite reaching the quality of the previous films, still stays pretty firmly above the gray average. (06/02/2016)

I can't help but get the feeling that more than directing, Singer enjoys putting the actors in those homo costumes so he can then arrange them around the set in various static poses and throw in one-liners. It works pretty well at first when you switch to guilty-pleasure mode (Polish workers leaving the factory, patting each other on the back and saying goodnight) thanks to the constant barrage of characters and locations, but when it’s time to break bread, it basically won't break. The problem is the overall static quality, which stands out especially in the dramatic climax. Ironically, most of the main superpowers have no action-dramatic potential, because the abilities of all the important characters fall into the telekinesis-telepathy category, so in the final scene we're left with characters staring at each other, gritting their teeth, and something CGI flashing and flying around them. At the last minute someone must have come up with this revelation on set, and so we get a sort of physical rendition of a mental duel in which Xavier fist-fights Apocalypse, but if you close your eyes properly you can quite clearly see Singer's apologetic smile behind it. (09/13/2016)

The X-Men franchise clearly beats the Avengers and its associated productions, even though Apocalypse practically lacks suspense. We all know who is to survive as they appear in the original three films. But the story does work, and despite its more than two-hour-long runtime I wasn’t bored and enjoyed the many great effects. I loved Michael Fassbender as Magneto. As for Mystique, Jennifer Lawrence isn’t and never will be Rebecca Romijn. (10/08/2016)

I admit that I was mainly looking forward to Olivia Munn in the movie. I don't know what it is, but that woman is simply stunning - that's probably the reason itself. Of course, her role was awful and it was all about her standing on high heels most of the time, or performing digital action scenes, but she was still nice to look at. The rest of the movie is just a typical spectacle that doesn't care about the story and only plays for the effect, which in the end is not that strong. It is saved by the familiar characters you want to see, but it is sunk by the completely wrong casting of Jean Grey. Sophie Turner will not be my favorite actress, rather the opposite. (05/21/2016)