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The Batman Review

“It’s certainly a Batman but is it *the* Batman?”

Hey, Everybody! Welcome to another review from Flickmuncher.com where we entertain food for thought. My name is Ben and I’m the Flickmuncher. It’s been a couple of years since my last review and in that time a lot has happened the world over. For my part I’ve switched jobs, gained 20 pounds, and finished writing a full draft of a four hundred and fifty page book. But as one who is sentimental about old things I thought it was time I returned to my roots and started putting together some new reviews for you guys. So lets get into it!

Not having gone to the movie theaters much in the last two years, either due to the cumbersome restrictions or just sheer disinterest in what was being shown I’ve finally started to visit some of the newer material being produced by Hollywood lately. The most recent example of this is Matt Reeves’ The Batman. The Caped Crusader is a well known—if not the most well known—crime fighter in popular culture and has had many different iterations throughout the years. Some were phenomenal, such as Batman ’89 and The Dark Knight. Others like Batman vs. Superman and Batman and Robin, well…the less said about those the better.

Recently though a new contender has stepped into the ring in the form of The Batman, because for some reason Warner Bros. has gotten into their heads that putting “The” in front of a title automatically makes it new and ‘hip’ again (e.g. Suicide Squad vs ‘THE’ Suicide Squad). Directed by Matt Reeves, creator of titles such as Cloverfield (2008) and the recent Planet of the Apes movies, this film was intended as a reset of the Dark Knight after his previous incarnation as Ben Affleck supposedly flopped with audiences in the horribly botched Snyderverse Justice League films. So Warner Execs, with absolutely no spine among them, immediately hit the panic button and ordered an entirely new version of the character that would have nothing whatsoever to do with the Justice League—until of course, they change their minds again and put him in with a black Superman and the Rock as Black Adam, but I digress.

So how does this new film measure up? Robert Pattinson plays a young, decidedly not-sparkling Batman that has been working his new career as a vigilante crime fighter for two years now. Using his virtually infinite resources as Bruce Wayne and the help of his loyal butler Alfred (played by Andy Serkis) he has set fear into the hearts of criminals all across Gotham when they see the symbol of the bat shined into the sky at night. He’s even earned the trust of some of the police force including up and coming Lieutenant James Gordon (Jeffrey Wright). Yet on the eve of a major election, the incumbent mayor is found murdered due to the actions of a mysterious maniac that the police refer to as ‘The Riddler’. Enlisting the help of Gordon and amateur thief Selina Kyle (Zoe Kravitz), Batman’s investigation soon finds him caught up in a conspiracy that reaches into Gotham’s very roots, and possibly Batman’s as well.

Before that though I’d like to do my best Captain Kidd impression when I say: ARRGHH, HERE THERE BE SPOILERS – GREENHORNS, YE BE WARNED.

Sorry, had to get that out of my system. On to the review.

Let’s talk about the good stuff first. In my opinion this is the best looking Batman films since Batman (1989). While Nolan’s Dark Knight movies tried to bring Batman into the real world, this movie builds a real world around him, which I think it does brilliantly. My personal image of Gotham is a mixture of today’s minimalist designs built atop layers of more intricate gothic spires, and this is what I imagined. Every frame of the film within Gotham evokes a city that tries to maintain a clean and civilized façade while its jagged, corrupt, and sinister core is poking out through every seam it can find. The place is literally dripping with atmosphere—seriously, it rains so much you’d think Gotham was built right next to Seattle—and is exactly the kind of place I would imagine finding a character like Batman silently patrolling the streets. The only place in the film that didn’t do that was ironically Wayne Manor which didn’t seem nearly grand or stately enough. Rather it seemed like a set from the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Universal Studios. It wasn’t a huge thing as very little of film takes place there but it was still a rather disappointing display for the home of The Batman.

“Who put the big pole up in front of the Kool-Aid Man sign?”

In addition, this movie plays with a part of Batman’s character we don’t see very often in the movies: the World’s Greatest Detective. Sure we’ve seen a couple occasions when he would use his knowledge to help locate a criminal or solve their dastardly scheme but with the exception of Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (a movie I highly recommend by the way) I don’t know we’ve had a Batman movie dedicate a solid half of the movie to him solving a crime using classic techniques such as using informants, conducting surveillance, and noting down relevant information to help in solving the crime and finding the perpetrator. It’s just a shame that the movie seems to abandon this approach after the first third, but I’ll get to that. It’s really refreshing to see Batman treated as the World’s Greatest Detective instead of a simple brawler/super ninja with a bat-themed costume.

The other big thing I appreciated was the strength of the supporting cast. If there’s one thing I learned from watching the Harry Potter films it’s that a strong supporting cast can do a lot to uplift an otherwise mediocre film, and this film is no exception to that rule. Headlined by Andy Serkis as Alfred, John Turturro as Crime Boss Falcone, Jeffrey Wright as Lieutenant Gordon, and Colin Farrell as the Penguin, this is a top tier supporting cast that does a lot through their performances to lend gravity and authenticity to the story in a way that helps pull you as an audience member into the story on the screen. Such an effect cannot be understated when you consider what the film would be like without it. Also, I have to give props to the team that did the makeup for Colin Farrell as the Penguin. I genuinely didn’t know it was him until the end credits.

Unfortunately this brings me to the main cast and the less positive part of this review. So if you like this movie and just wanted to hear me speak in glowing terms about how amazing this movie is then I’m glad you’ve enjoyed yourself and suggest you exit now and have a wonderful day, because this is where things get dark.

The main cast of The Batman is sadly rather lackluster. It’d be unfair to say that Robert Pattinson and Zoe Kravitz as Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle respectively are out-and-out bad in this movie but their performances are one of the weakest elements. I can remember a number of moments from the supporting cast I mentioned earlier, throughout this film. I can remember John Turturro as Falcone, exuding warm charisma while still being menacing every time he was on screen. I remember Colin Farrell’s Penguin, barely hiding his resentment at being a stooge to Falcone, a man he has no respect for. I remember Andy Serkis as Alfred almost breaking down in tears while confessing to Bruce that the Waynes might not always have been as noble as they wanted people to believe. I can’t remember a single scene with Pattinson or Kravitz that stuck with me that way.

The lackluster main cast is only weighed down further by what is in my opinion a very weak villain in the form of the Riddler. Besides never actually calling himself that (the police are the ones who give him the name), Riddler struggles to find a true identity in this film. Part of this is because he is hidden for the first half of the movie as the subject of the detective story so we don’t get to know him that well. Putting aside the insultingly trite approach of making him a wannabe youtuber, his crimes are given a rather milquetoast motivation to support them. He wants to expose the corruption of Gotham for everyone to see. Okay, that would be fine but we never see how that corruption affected him personally. Why does he care so much about exposing Gotham’s corruption? Yeah, he’s a forensic accountant but that’s an occupation, not a motive. On top of that his means of getting his message out kind of convoluted and cryptic; What radical revolutionary promotes their cause by committing crimes and then giving their reason in riddles that only one person in the city can solve? If A Tale of Two Cities had worked that way it would have been Charles Dickens’ shortest novel. In previous versions of the Batman mythos, the Riddler worked as a character because he was so egotistical and narcissistic that he would commit crimes just to prove how smart he was. Then when Batman outsmarted him he would commit another crime with a different riddle to do the same thing. That is a textbook definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. That’s what makes him crazy. This Riddler can’t decide what he is. Is he a murderer with a perverted sense of justice? Is he a genius criminal who gets kicks out of leaving clues behind just to prove nobody can stop him? Is he an anarchist? I don’t know because the film never lets him be one thing long enough for us to understand him.

Because nothing says Riddler like a nerdy green ripoff of Pulp Fiction?

This brings us to my personal two biggest issues with the film: the length and the structure. This film is just shy of three hours long, and boy did it feel like it was three hours long. Now, I’m not against films with long running times. I’ve seen plenty of films that I actually think would have benefitted from a longer runtime than they were given. The Lord of the Rings is one of my all-time favorite film series to watch and each of those is over three hours—four if you watch the extended versions. Yet throughout those movies I never once recall checking my phone for the time. With The Batman, I recall doing so at least three times. In school, when kids start looking at the clock during class, it usually means either they have some place to be, or they are bored out of their minds and just want to be out of the room as soon as physically possible.
In either case they have disengaged mentally.

Now—you might ask—how could a movie starring Batman that allows you to see him in all his glory for three full hours, possibly be boring? The answer is actually pretty simple. Batman in his full glory is not interesting enough on its own to keep someone engaged. A simple screensaver with a picture of the Dark Knight will do the same thing and for far longer. Batman has to have something interesting to do in those three hours and unfortunately, after the first hour, he really doesn’t. This wouldn’t be so bad if there was fun stuff happening elsewhere in the movie but the rest of the film is so unfocused that it never got me back after that first hour ended.

Which is where the structure comes into play. Most films have a basic structure wherein an event sets the story in motion (Joker commits a crime), there’s a build-up (Batman searches for the Joker), a climax (Batman finds the Joker), and finally the story is resolved (Batman takes Joker to Arkham—again). The Batman starts out this way with Riddler murdering someone, leading Batman to try and catch him, but after the first hour it detours into a conspiracy story involving every major figure in Gotham (except the young black woman running for mayor. ‘Kay). Yhen when both the murder mystery and the conspiracy story have been wrapped up and you think it’s time to say goodbye, there’s still almost an hour left where Batman has to stop a terrorist attack that the Riddler happened to orchestrate. The movie feels like three movies in one with none of them being allowed to breath, ironically talking more and saying less.

CONCLUSION: Leaving the theatre with my brother after watching this movie I wasn’t sure what to think of this movie. It is a Batman movie so there’s always something to enjoy. Yet for all that there was I just felt…tired. Not in the way that you feel out of breath after a rollercoaster at the amusement park or exhausted after running a marathon. More tired the way you feel when you come home from work; where you did what you had to do and now you’re done.

I’m sure there are plenty of folks who will like or even love this movie and its dark and gritty realization of the caped crusader and as I’ve noted above there are a lot of things to like about this movie. It’s certainly not the worst batman movie we’ve ever seen, or even the worst movie with batman in it. But while that might not be a high bar to reach—thank you Batman and Robin—it does make me wonder what this movie could have been. Wasted potential is a difficult thing to measure but it’s easy to see when there’s as much richness of atmosphere, world, and characters as this movie has to offer.

As it is though, I cannot truly recommend it except to the most die-hard of batfans. For the time invested this movie, like the Batman’s entrance, is a long slow plod toward an unclear destination.

What did you guys think? Did you like this movie? What stood out? Reach out to me in the comments section or comment on Facebook. Thanks and have a wonderful weekend!

Aquaman Review: King of the Seven Seas

Hey Everybody! Welcome to another review from Flickmuncher.com where we entertain food for thought. My name is Ben and I’m the Flickmuncher. We’ve got quite the line up these next few weeks and I’m excited to share the next several reviews with you as well as show off the new collaborative reviews that I’ll be doing for episodes of the 2017 Ducktales TV series with our new contributor Mimi the Flickmunchkin, which should be starting in March. However, until then, let’s take a look at the recent DC movie release, Aquaman.

So let’s get right into it. What’s the story? Arthur Curry (Jason Momoa) was a boy born cursed. The son of a Lighthouse Keeper (Temuera Morrison) and the runaway Queen of the underwater Kingdom of Atlantis (Nicole Kidman), he was blessed with amazing abilities beyond that of normal people. Yet he is constantly split between the surface world that he calls home, and the realm of the sea that calls him to lead it. Uninterested in becoming Atlantis’ king since the death of his mother, Arthur spends his time using his abilities to do good deeds where he can. All this changes however, when his younger half-brother Orm (Patrick Wilson) starts to gather the kingdoms of the seven seas to attack the surface world. With the help of his mother’s old friend Volka (Willem Defoe) and the sea witch, Mera (Amber Heard), Arthur must become the Aquaman to defeat Orm and bring peace to Atlantis and the Surface.

In a switch on how I usually present my reviews, I’m going to cover the negatives first and get to the positives later.
To start things off, let’s look at the villains. First, our main villain, Prince Orm. As superhero villains go, Orm is actually not that bad. He has a connection to the hero, and a personal reason to hate him thanks to their mother’s death—she was executed for her relationship with Arthur’s father and having Arthur. Such brotherly conflict is often rich with drama and works well enough between these two characters. You might be thinking: well that doesn’t sound like a negative to me. And you’d be right. The negative with Orm is that he tends to fall back on the whole “rule the world” cliché and the brotherly conflict isn’t used as fully is it is like with Thor and Loki. This weakness is made more acute by the fact that Orm’s reasons for wanting to attack the surface are rather general and vague, owing to a generic “polluting the oceans” message. Alternatively, he could have blamed the death of his mother on the Surface and used that as his motivation, which would have served his character far better given his attitude toward Arthur and his mother, Queen Atlanna.

Then we have Black Manta, widely regarded by fans as Aquaman’s greatest enemy, who is given a terrific motivation when Arthur chooses not to save his father (a pirate but still a human being) from drowning. But then he basically gets relegated to the position of “hired thug” and gets one quick action scene before getting taken out and promised a sequel by the producers (depending on the box office, of course). If you’re wondering again why this is a bad thing, there’s a reason you don’t have a main bad guy get beaten in his first confrontation with the hero, let alone the second time. It makes that bad guy seem less of a threat to the hero. If he’s already gotten his head handed to him before, why should we as the audience believe that the next time will turn out any differently? We know he won’t have any lasting victory anyway so there’s less of a doubt in our minds about the hero’s chances.

Besides this are a number of smaller things that bugged me. First, the musical score in the film is appropriately epic and sweeping for the majority of the runtime. Which is why it feels so jarring when they play a piece of pop music or rap like “Ocean to Ocean” by Pitbull. It just sounds out of place.
Second, while the drama is good for the most part, there are several moments that felt rushed in order to move the plot forward to fit the runtime (which is already a colossal two hours and twenty-three minutes). For instance, a moment between Arthur and his Mom gets cut extremely short to make way for exposition that leads to the next major plot point. I feel like other scenes that dragged on a little too long, like Manta tinkering with Atlantean tech, could have been trimmed to make more time for scenes like this. It’s not a huge thing, but emotional scenes should always be given time to breathe against scenes that are window dressing, or just there for the sake of being cool.
Lastly, a lot of the jokes that I think were intended to make the movie feel more “marvel-esque” were either mistimed or just fell flat to me, and there were several points in the movie where the CGI—however stylish it was intended to be—just looks a little too plastic and fake, particularly during some of the action sequences.

However, with all of that said, there are a lot of positives about this movie that I did like, starting with the visuals. I’ve made no secret in the past of my dislike for films that needlessly desaturate the color from the picture to make things feel more “dark and edgy”. Color is a wonderful thing when you consider how much richer and more interesting it can make an image that would otherwise seem rather mundane. Other movies from the DC franchise have had an issue with colors in the past to an almost absurd degree. Happily though, Aquaman does not have a problem with color. In fact, it’s one of the most colorful films I’ve seen in awhile particularly during the underwater scenes which take up a lot of the movie. The glowing phosphorescence and wide variety of shades involved helps to make for some truly beautiful images. It also helps the various undersea environments feel like a truly alien environment, which is another strength of this film. It takes advantage of the natural strangeness and mystery of the oceans to make Atlantis feel like an actual underwater city with history. It has different levels with shell based high-rises, a customs and import system, catacombs and ruins beneath it that all combine to feel like an actual underwater city.

This would probably be enough if Atlantis was all we got to see. The filmmakers however, went one step beyond and made several different undersea kingdoms with their own inhabitants and cultures. None of them are as multi-layered or detailed as Atlantis itself, but it shows how much thought the creators put into making this world and that’s something I can appreciate.

Besides this the story is delightfully simple and easy to follow, yet it also has a good familial conflict that makes it a bit more personal. I know this might seem boring and unoriginal to some but there’s a reason that siblings fighting over power, one to preserve, the other to destroy, is such a regularly used trope dating back to ancient times. Because it works and works well. We’ve all had fights with our family. Those fights are often very emotional and very personal and in spite of what Hollywood would like us to believe, our families are not something we can simply choose to ignore. They are a very personal thing for each of us no matter how we feel about them. That’s why stories about them are so powerful for us. Aquaman may not use it as well as some other movies I’ve seen but it’s still done well so I have to applaud the effort if not the result.

Lastly, we have the action which takes advantage of the underwater environment to create some of the more unique looking set pieces that I’ve seen in a movie in quite awhile. Since the characters are buoyant and don’t often walk on the sea floor the battles are very—for lack of a better word—fluid; constantly in motion. Now, if this was lazy motion where the speed was always the same, it would probably get boring. But the movie varies the speed of combat enough to not get stagnant and in the one on one fights Jason Momoa and Patrick Wilson are physical enough actors to be convincing. Overall, the battle sequences are a lot of fun to watch.

CONCLUSION: By this point most people know that the DC movies (or the DCEU as they’re known by fans have not had the best track record for making quality films. In fact, one of my personal least favorite films of all time was 2016’s Batman v Superman, which was a commercial success but a critical flop. I’ve always supported the idea that blockbusters shouldn’t be critically condemned for being blockbusters but that they should also try to be more than just cash grabs for the studios. Whether that’s being a deeper more critically acceptable film, or one that is just plain fun to watch, it should at least try. Aquaman is a film that tries. It may not always succeed when it tries but at least it tries and tries hard. That is one of the best compliments I can give to a film like this, especially given my history with DC movies of the past. I can’t say whether this is the beginning of a new era of DC films with higher quality. But I know that this was a film I was prepared not to like, yet I enjoyed it anyway and look forward to seeing it again sometime.

What did you think of the review? Did you like this film? What parts of it stuck out to you? Let me know all about it on the Flickmuncher Facebook page or in the comments below. Thanks and as always, May the Flick be with You!

X-Men: Apocalypse Review: Is the third one always the worst?

Hey, Everybody and Welcome to another review from Flickmuncher.com! I apologize for taking so long to put up another review on this blog but things have been really crazy lately as I’ve been getting ready to move as well as working on writing my book and a couple other major projects. As such I haven’t had as much time to pay attention to this blog. However, I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to start providing a steadier stream of reviews again in the coming months. With that said, let’s get right into the review. This is X-Men: Apocalypse.

WARNING – THERE WILL BE SPOILERS

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the X-Men franchise, they are a group of movies based off the Marvel heroes of the same name who are mutants in a world where they are feared and hated by the people they are trying to protect.

Now, to give a bit of background, it’s important to understand that though the X-Men were created under the Marvel Comics banner, they have absolutely nothing to do with Iron Man, Captain America or the other heroes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The reason for this is that back in the 1990s, Marvel was on the verge of bankruptcy. To avoid this, they agreed to sell the film rights to some of their biggest characters to some of the movie studios. At the time, Spiderman and the X-Men were considered to be the most marketable characters that Marvel had. Spiderman ended up going to Sony Pictures, while 20th Century Fox picked up the rights to the Fantastic Four and the X-Men.

The result was the first X-Men movie (directed by Brian Singer) which was released in 2001. It was a modest hit and Fox continued to make them and the X-Men franchise is the longest running superhero franchise in history. So what’s the story?

The movie starts in 1983, ten years after the events of the previous movie, Days of Future Past. The world is quiet and Professor Charles Xavier is quietly tending his “school for gifted youngsters” in Westchester, New York, taking on several new students including a young Scott Summers (Cyclops) and Jean Grey. Meanwhile, Xavier’s long-time frenemy Magneto is living a quiet life in Poland with a wife and daughter. All seems well with the world. But that peace is doomed when an evil awakens from the ancient past in the form of the first mutant, Apocalypse, who wishes to tear down man’s entire world and raise himself up as its new ruler.

If it sounds to you like the premise is a bit generic as superhero fare goes then I would definitely agree with you. This is one of the movie’s largest flaws. In a day and age when superhero movies have started exploring stories beyond the simple save-the-world scenario, this movie’s story seems rather rote. Surprisingly so actually, given that the X-Men have some of the most interesting stories to tell, an inherent trait of the “persecuted heroes” concept that they champion. I won’t say that the save-the-world plot shouldn’t be done at all, it’s been done really well in such films as Superman-The Movie and The Avengers. But the X-Men have always worked best when focusing on the characters and their struggles with being the protectors of people who hate them. That is the core strength of the X-Men as a whole. And while this movie touches on that struggle it is not the focus. Rather the story is about stopping the bad guy who is bent on destroying the planet. I’ll get to my thoughts on Apocalypse in a little bit.

Please don’t misunderstand me though, there are a number of things in this movie that I really liked and I think are great about both the X-Men movies and the X-Men in general. The biggest of these is Magneto’s (Michael Fassbender) subplot. I mentioned in the story summary that Magneto has settled down to live a quiet life with his new wife and daughter while working in a steel-mill. What happens to cause him to return to his alter-ego is heartbreaking and chilling. Much of this is carried by Fassbender’s performance. You see the weight of everything he’s done, everything he’s lost, and all the anger and resentment he holds, just through the expressions in his eyes. That is the indication of a truly good performance where the actor is truly doing everything he can to get the right emotions out of the scene.

In contrast, we have Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence). I’ve heard a number of people refer to her performance in this movie as “phoned in” and I tend to agree. Phoning it in is a Hollywood term for a particularly wooden performance, as though they’re doing little more than reciting words from the script. There’s very little emotion involved in what they’re doing. I understand that Jennifer Lawrence is a popular award-winning actress but even the best actors have bad performances and this is one where Jennifer Lawrence doesn’t look like she wants to be there, at all. This affects the film because so much of it revolves around her character. She is one of the major moving pieces that the plot needs to get where it’s going. Because Lawrence’s performance is so wooden it’s tough to believe in what the character is doing or what she’s after and the movie as a whole suffers for it.

One of the major points about this film is that its bringing in younger versions of the original X-Men films with Cyclops (Tye Sheridan), Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), and Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee). This was really exciting for me because while they appeared in the original movies, they were always outshone by Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) who was the real focus of those films in spite of the fact that they were called, y’know, X-Men movies. I still hold that Fox should rename the originals The Wolverine Trilogy, with appearances by the X-Men but I digress.

The three I just mentioned have always been the X-Men to me. And this was the first film that I felt actually made good use of them as characters. Admittedly they do take a backseat to Magneto, Professor X (James McAvoy), and Mystique but I enjoyed seeing them work together using their powers. There’s even a sequence where they have to infiltrate a military base to rescue their teachers. I could watch a whole movie just of that. It’s really fun to watch and the acting by the three is great, especially Sophie Turner as Jean Grey though she does get the most to do of all three.

On the flipside, we have Apocalypse and his Four Horsemen: Magneto, Angel (Ben Hardy), Psylocke (Olivia Munn), and Storm (Alexandra Shipp). The Horsemen are supposed to be the most powerful mutants on the planet with their abilities augmented by Apocalypse’s own power. But really, aside from Magneto, none of them are given any but the barest of backstory and personality. Olivia Munn as Psylocke only gets two lines in the whole movie. Furthermore, their reasons for joining Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac) aren’t made clear beyond simply becoming more powerful. This makes them feel more like standard henchmen than true threats in their own right.

This brings me to Apocalypse himself. To give some context to his place in X-lore, while Magneto may be the X-Men’s most well-known villain, Apocalypse is their greatest foe. His very name is enough to inspire dread in even the most powerful of mutants. He is Magneto’s agenda taken to its ultimate extreme. For while Magneto desires a world where mutants are dominant, Apocalypse wants a world where only the strongest of mutants survive, wiping humanity out entirely. The X-Men have faced him multiple times in the comics and each time have only just succeeded. He is their ultimate threat.

Which is why I find it so odd that this version of Apocalypse doesn’t feel very threatening. He is uber-powerful and he does kill a lot of people but those he kills are either people we want to see die, or people we didn’t care about. Magneto probably kills more people in this movie than Apocalypse does. Part of the reason for this is he never really harms any character that we really care about so it makes him seem like less of a threat. Even his mental battle with Professor X is unthreatening because he’s only getting bigger. His costume doesn’t help things. I give Oscar Isaac (who incidentally plays Poe Dameron in Star Wars VII) full credit for doing his best to act beneath all those prosthetics and makeup but there’s only so much he can do to mask how cumbersome the costume looks. At times it almost seems like he’s ready to fall over on one of his Horsemen. This leads me to think that despite the filmmakers’ desire to do Apocalypse practically he might have worked better and been more impressive if they’d used motion-capture, the technique used to create Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. Obviously this can’t change but it is disappointing because Apocalypse is a villain whose talents and goals are usually so massive in scope and yet here he feels surprisingly small.

That metaphor could also be applied to the action in this movie. There is a setpiece with Quicksilver saving everyone in the school as it explodes which is easily a highlight of the entire film, and the sequence I mentioned earlier where Cyclops, Jean Grey and Nightcrawler infiltrate the Weapon X facility. These are both really enjoyable sequences but aside from them the action is decidedly lacking in creativity and narrative weight. Especially the climax which seems remarkably isolated for an apocalyptic event. I don’t think I saw one innocent bystander at all during the fight. That’s not to say you should always have bystander’s in the fight but when Apocalypse is planning to control the entire population of Earth using Professor X and our heroes are the only ones doing anything about it, it makes it feel less important than it should be. At least in Man of Steel and The Avengers they showed the armed forces doing something to help the situation.

The one thing I did really like about the climactic battle was the reveal of Jean Grey as the Phoenix firebird. That moment was just as awe inspiring as it should have been and I’m hopeful that we’ll get to see the Dark Phoenix Saga from the comics done right in a future entry.

Finally, one last thing I’d like to address is Professor X constantly letting Magneto walk away. It’s becoming a bit irritating to see this happen time and again where Magneto does something bad that endangers or kills hundreds of people and yet the Professor lets him walk because…they’re friends. This time was even worse because Magneto, thanks to Apocalypse’s augmentation, levels half the cities around the globe at one time. They never say how many people died or were injured because of this but you can’t tell me no one got hurt in that catastrophe. Even my suspension of disbelief only stretches so far. Magneto should be an even more hunted criminal than before.

This extends to Storm as well who started out as a Horseman and yet by the end is a welcomed member of the team in spite of the fact that she only helped them out at the very end of the climax and was aide to the destruction of thousands of lives. To quote Commodore Norrington from the Pirates of the Caribbean, “One good deed does not redeem a man from a lifetime of wickedness”. There have to be consequences and to see these characters misuse their powers and walk away without any repercussion or even welcomed into the fold is a very unwise thing to do. I get that Magneto is an anti-hero with an understandable perspective but that doesn’t justify his actions or Professor X condoning his actions by letting him go. It makes his and the X-Men’s crusade to protect people from mutants using their power irresponsibly seem foolhardy, especially when that person has shown time and again that he’s just going to go back to the same old routines. It’s like cleaning up a drug addict and then dropping him off on the same street where his dealer works, it won’t change him. I only hope that they address this in future X-films.

Conclusion: My rant aside, this is still a movie that has an upside in that it actually makes you think about things and it’s the closest thing we’ve gotten to an actual X-Men film so far. However, this upside is buried beneath the poor execution of the film itself. Sabotaged by poor creative choices, wooden acting, a sub-par villain, and an ultimately uninteresting story, it fails to live up to the potential that everyone could see.

There’s a scene in the movie where the kids come out of a showing for Star Wars: Return of the Jedi and Jean Grey says the line, “Well, I think we can all agree that the third movie is always the worst.” I find that a bit ironic since this is the third film in its line and while its meant to be a slam against the abysmal X-Men: The Last Stand, it also ends up slamming itself in the process as the third film in its line. While I don’t think that X-Men: First Class and Days of Future Past are masterpieces, I do think that they are both better than this one. They have better conflicts, better acting, more interesting characters, and are just put together much more solidly.

This movie does set up a lot of interesting potential for the future with the return of the classic X-Men and the possibility of the Dark Phoenix but until we see those things realized in another movie it remains just that, potential. As it stands X-Men: Apocalypse is a fun but disappointing entry into the franchise. If you’re a real fan of the series or the X-Men in general, you’ll find plenty to enjoy but if you are on the fence I’d recommend saving your money for a rental.

Recommendation: Rental Worthy

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