Fassbender phoning it in is better than JLaws Oscar winning performances and thats not to denigrate Ms Lawrence’s acting abilities (which are great, but not up to the mark in this film) but Fassbender is in another league to most actors.
I liked Mystique better when she barely spoke.
Also, IIRC, she ages slower than most.
It’s totally up to the writers whether someone is going to be awesome or not. Magneto does awesome things with him magnetic powers yet Polaris was generally a wimp who couldn’t do all that much, with the same powers. In this movie they decided Quicksilver was going to be awesome, but they could have just as easily made him useless. It’s interesting how the MCU had to kill off Quicksilver, and play up how awesome Scarlet Witch is, and in the X-Men franchise Quicksilver is the awesome one, and SW isn’t around. That was probably in the contracts.
Storm could be awesome, but for some reason they make her kind of lame.
The exception that proves the rule has to be Kitty Pryde: in the last movie, they suddenly gave her the ultimate superpower to make the whole save-the-world plot possible – which at the same time sidelined her, making it so she can’t be the one doing what she did in the comic-book story, because she has to stand still while her teammates cinematically run interference for her “Empower Logan” tactic.
Rebecca Romijn set a standard for the character that’s pretty hard to beat.
Halle Berry set a standard that should be pretty easy to beat. I’ll give the new actress another movie to see how she does.
4/10 is absolute garbage? What do you call 3/10, 2/10…?
This is canon, don’t fault the filmmakers. The only thing I didn’t like, continuity-wise, was that the film depicted Apocalypse giving Storm her white hair, when it was genetic.
Why must a strong, dominating female character be a PC Pussy Pusher? Can no female assume a leading role without neanderthal males claiming what you just claimed?
[Hijack]Read other posts of his regarding Imperator Furiosa and Rey (Mad Max and Star Wars), and you can see his perspective.[/hijack]
I don’t understand his ire here, when the character has as mentioned for decades been known to be one of the strongest, if not strongest, mutant with a hard to control ability.
Regarding Mystique, I liked everything about the way the character was portrayed in the first trilogy significantly better than they way the character is portrayed in the second trilogy. And that’s to say nothing about comparing Rebecca Romijn to Jennifer Lawrence in terms of acting ability. It’s that I liked the character much better in the first trilogy.
I don’t know what the character is like in the comic books, but in the second trilogy of the movies she just loses all …mystique. Shouldn’t Mystique have, y’know, some mystique? At the very end of this newest movie, her “Drill Sergeant Speech” speech just about made me vomit. I mean that was really bad, like “We writers don’t know what to do for a final scene” bad. And Lawrence’s drill sergeant delivery was as if it was coming off the top of someone’s head in an amateur improv troupe at a coffee house in Dubuque on a Tuesday night.
I wasn’t impressed with the actress who played Jean Grey- and that’s really not a role that you want filled by a weak link cast member.
I liked how they brought the Summers brothers into continuity with one another (and explain why Alex isn’t around later on).
Throughout the movie, I kept thinking to myself “Gee, that actress who is clearly ten years younger than Olivia Munn sure looks a lot like Olivia Munn.” Well, turns out it was Olivia Munn. I don’t suppose she filmed all of her scenes ten years ago.
Question for comic book readers:
How does the X-Men films version of Quicksilver compare to the comic books / How does the MCU version of Quicksilver compare to the comic books?
The two movie versions of the character are so different from one another.
I don’t. Scott is the older brother, and they have an interesting backstory, but the movies are determined to not have both alive.
Quicksilver was probably the best part of Apocalypse, but I liked the MCU version better. It held true to Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver being orphaned twins raised in Eastern Europe at least, and they gave them an evil father figure first in the form of Baron Strucker and then Ulron, though they didn’t have the rights to Magneto. In the comics, he could move at super speed, but not at deus ex machina speed. I don’t think he could originally have cleared out a mansion full of people while it was exploding. But I think the comics have since ramped up his power since I quit buying.
I went into this expecting the worst from the buzz and I was pleasantly surprised. I liked it. It wasn’t great but it was good.
I did feel the pace was a tad slow. I think it needed one or two more action set pieces. It also seemed to waste, mostly, its 80s setting which was disappointing to me personally because that was when I was a kid. For example, I would have loved a scene that followed the characters to the Mall (maybe there’s one in the deleted scenes).
I also thought the villain was way under developed. Until he ran into Charles and gleaned the idea of stealing his power, I didn’t really get what he wanted to do except bust everything up. He didn’t seem to want a Mutants only world like future Magneto would want. I guess he just wanted worshipers but that’s not enough for a movie villain.
Also be cause he’s so charming and liable, the series is afraid to commit to making Magneto the villain he needs to become. I mean they only have one more decade to show us before the catch up to the original movies (yep the first X-men came out in 2000).
The buzz I saw made the movie sound confused and disjointed. I didn’t get that sense at all.
I saw it this morning. It was not as bad as the reviews had lead me to expect it to be. It certainly wasn’t great, possibly not even good, but it wasn’t terrible. Merely acceptable.
Best part was Quicksilver’s saving everyone from the exploding mansion. I’d watch a movie that was just him running around solving everyone’s problems in super-speed.
The hamfisted introduction of Wolverine was jarring. Why was his cage in the generator room at all, other than to have an excuse to briefly bring his character in. I know it’s there as a tie-in for a future movie, but it was really clumsily dropped in.
The villain was really uninteresting, but the real dynamic in the movie was as usual the Professor X - Magneto dynamic.
I was surprised that Storm had so little presence in the movie. For some reason I had thought she was going to be a major character, but here she’s just another of the villain’s henchmen.
Not a terrible movie, just very meh.
My feelings on it were pretty much “meh.” Nothing bad, nothing good. Worth seeing once, but it won’t stick with you. Very similar to how I felt about First Class, actually (and has a lot of the same problems in that they put a lot of characters in the movie and then completely misuse/waste them).
Off the cuff comments:
- I actually really loved the opening sequence - a great introduction for Apocalypse, and does a good job of introducing the audience to his schtick (ruling everyone, transferring into new bodies). Even his Horsemen there looked cool.
- Sophie Turner wasn’t bad as Jean, but not great. Her accent noticeably came and went.
- There was a decent seed of an idea as to why Scott and Jean might hit it off (both being seen as some of the more ‘dangerous’ students at the school) though it’s weird to see Scott as somewhat rebellious.
- I’m really happy Wolverine got to be in his classic 90s Weapon X outfit (albeit with shorts), even if the cameo felt a bit gratuitous.
- Speaking of gratuitous, Singer really likes people get decapitated or having their throats slashed, eh? And man am I bored of seeing Magneto destroy things by pulling them into streams of little pieces. Especially bridges. Why does Magneto hate bridges so much?
- The Quicksilver scene was still awesome.
- Jubilee was completely wasted. I can see the argument that it’s better than just having a generic nobody, but still feels like a waste.
- Other than Magneto, the other three horsemen don’t really get much to do, which is pretty disappointing. Hopefully they bring Psylocke back (likely as a villain given her skulking away at the end) and give her more than four lines next time. And a better outfit… they somehow managed to make her 90s outfit worse. According to EvilMonkeyPope’s post, Psylocke was a last minute addition, which makes a lot of sense.
- The ‘Apocalypse gathers henchmen’ scenes felt a bit silly. Storm willingly joining him didn’t make much sense; at least Psylocke and Angel are shown to not really be good guys in this universe and so I can see why they’d join up. But both of those latter two characters have a rich history (hell, Angel’s whole history is pretty much tied to Apocalypse) so it’s a shame that they join so easily.
- In general, Apocalypse was better than I feared, but still wasn’t that great. Never seemed quite that menacing despite the fact he could turn people into dust whenever he wanted.
All in all, this felt a lot like a DC movie to me - stuff happens but it’s a bit too grim and joyless to really bring me. I don’t really care about any of the characters (or even worse, find them outright annoying, like Lawrence’s Mystique). Magneto is the closest thing this movie has to being the emotional center, but it deviates too far from that by spending time on the Scott/Jean/Kurt crew.
Really interested to see where they go from here, given that the First Class actors’ contracts are up. I’ll be happy to see Lawrence gone, and Hoult; don’t mind McAvoy one way or another, but I will miss Fassbender… too bad they didn’t have him stay as an X-Man, since he’s been doing that in the comics for going on seven years now. I suppose they can just go forward with the Cyclops/Phoenix/Nightcrawler/Quicksilver/Storm group from here on out.
Very much agreed. I loved the opening sequence, but then the movie slows down massively while Apocalypse gathers his troops and the movie introduces all the new students. There’s also just time wasted with bad direction in general with too much time wasted on people staring at each other or trying to look like a movie poster.
In regards to the second complaint, I think part of what gave Days of Future Past its charm was that it actually felt very much like it was set in the 70s. Here, this movie feels like it was set in current day, except that the president on the wall is Reagan not Obama, and the TVs were a bit bulkier and fuzzier.
Alternatively, you could make a decent argument that it was her fault, since it almost sorta looked like the light coming in (from the entrance she opened) was what activated Apoccy!
Wow, really think you’re reading waaaayyy too much into things there.
My takeaway from that scene was that it was an inverse Captain Planet deal… with all their powers combined (and the Power of Friendship), they kill (rather than summon) the blue-skinned superpowered dude.
Someone has female genitalia on their mind, methinks, but it’s not the filmmaker. That ‘conflagrant clitoris’ was supposed to be an image of a phoenix. 'Cause, you know, she’s Jean Grey.
Stryker captures him in the end of the last movie.
I thought that was Mystique disguised as Stryker. There was a yellow eye flash that usually indicates that. Or maybe they dropped that whole idea?
I was glad for the Wolverine scene. The last movie left questions- the active messing with the timeline meant that Stryker didn’t get him (Terminus Est is correct, AK84, we get a glimpse of Mystique in the character’s eye) which leaves the question will he have his bone claws forever now (and, c’mon, we knew he wouldn’t have his bone claws forever). So, sometime in the intervening ten years Stryker ended up getting him- I’m fine with not seeing the story of how that happened.
Then, in this movie, if Stryker’s going to scoop up some more mutants it makes sense that he’d bring them to his facility in Alkali Lake (does Canada have no sense of border security?). I liked that Jean ended up being the reason why he had those few sketchy memories restored that set him on the path of seeking answers to his own identity. And the bonding moment with Jean sets up his love at first sight experience for when they meet next.
I also liked that it was just a cameo. I thought he was too central a character in the first trilogy and wasn’t trilled to see him as the lead again in the last film (and hated his solo films). I think Jackman has done a great job in the role but I don’t like the character as a central character in the X-Men movies- except for the first one which worked because he was an outsider and therefore worked as a stand-in for the audience who needed explanations for everything.
I also agree that Moira’s presence set off the awakening (specifically, as magnusblitz points out, by leaving the tarp open allowing the sunlight into the tomb).
[QUOTE=Quimby]
the series is afraid to commit to making Magneto the villain he needs to become. I mean they only have one more decade to show us before the catch up to the original movies (yep the first X-men came out in 2000)
[/QUOTE]
17 years from the events of this film to the year 2000, but remember that the 2000 film wasn’t set in 2000, it was set in the “not too distant future”, which I had always interpreted as more than 5 years but less than 10 years. Days of Future Past opens in the year 2023 -that’s nine years from when the film was released in 2014.
So, in the new timeline I’d say they have 20 to 25 years to catch up to the opening of the original trilogy. I have to imagine they’re frustrated at having painted themselves into the corner of all the new films now being period pieces. Jumping 10 years per film is already getting ridiculous. Having the same actors for First Class and Days of Future Past, set 10 years apart, was fine but this new film is now 20 years from First Class and McAvoy and Fassbender are not aging on pace to become Stewart and McKellen. It’s o.k. for Mystique to age slowly but the idea that Moira MacTaggert was 20 years older than she was in First Class- that was ridiculous enough that Xavier even had to comment upon it.
I don’t know what the future plans are for the series, but I think they’d do best to make a big jump in time for a whole new trilogy. Set it in the same timeline and not contradict the previous films but basically be the start of a third trilogy with a whole new cast with older actors for Xavier and Magneto. Tell a story that may make a nod to the earlier films for the benefit of longtime fans but pretty much start in on a new story that does not require any knowledge of the previous films.
It was Mystique who presumably would take control of Wolverine’s unconscious body at the end of Days of Future Past.
I haven’t seen X-Men: Apocalypse, but I hated the Quicksilver scenes in Days of Future Past because the physics of his scenes made no sense and I’m not very good at turning my brain off (see also: Ant-Man).