Tag: Movies

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

The Huntsman – Winter’s War: “How are you alive?”

Assessment: Rental Worthy

Hey, Everyone! Welcome to another movie review from FlickMuncher.com! Today we’re going to be looking at another current release that hasn’t been receiving a lot of attention, The Huntsman: Winter’s War. The sequel to 2012’s Snow White and the Huntsman, a modest hit when it came out, this movie was about as anticipated as you can imagine any generic fantasy not named Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter being…which is to say, not at all. So why am I reviewing it then? Because I’m a completely shameless sucker for said generic fantasy movies. So let’s get into it.

WARNING – There will be spoilers in this review. Continue reading at your own risk. Unless you don’t care about spoilers in which case you’ve already ignored this WARNING.

The story of this movie is a little tricky starting off with the first twenty to thirty minutes detailing the backstory of the Huntsmen. Not the Huntsman (Chris Hemsworth), but Huntsmen, plural. It turns out that back when they were children, they were all kidnapped by the evil Ice Queen Freya (Emily Blunt) to fight her wars and serve as the ultimate soldiers. To make sure that her Huntsmen remain completely loyal to her Freya, get this, completely outlaws love. I don’t know if this just applied to the Huntsmen or to the entire kingdom—which creates a whole host of practical problems—but she does this because of her own backstory where she lost her infant child in a fire and discovered she has ice powers. Oh, and it also turns out that she’s the Evil Queen Ravenna (Charlize Theron)’s younger sister. Go figure.

Anyway, it turns out that outlawing love among soldiers where there are both boys and girls is slightly difficult to enforce because our hero falls in love and marries one of his redhead female comrades named Sara (Jessica Chastain). Needless to say, the Ice Queen isn’t very happy about this and so has Sara killed and the Huntsman left for dead in an icy river.

Cut to several years later, after the events of Snow White and the Huntsman, where the Huntsman is asked by Snow White, or rather Prince Charming I guess since Snow White never actually appears, to go and escort the Evil Queen’s magic mirror to this vaguely safe place called Sanctuary. But his past begins to catch up with him as the Ice Queen also wants the mirror and is willing to do anything to get it. With the help of a couple of dwarves, because this exists in the Snow White movie and there have to be dwarves helping out our protagonist, the Huntsman sets off to stop the Ice Queen from using the mirror to take over the kingdom.

Story-wise, this plot isn’t bad. After all its a common thing in fiction and movies to have a sequel show a new villain that has a beef with the hero because of the previous villain. This movie takes that and adds a further connection between the Huntsman and the Ice Queen by having her treat the huntsmen as her surrogate children. That’s an interesting twist and it explains a lot of her motivation and her actions for much of the film.

Where the movie stumbles is in its execution of those elements. Great ideas inhabit every film but if they aren’t presented well then to the audience, its as if they never existed. Freya’s backstory of losing her child and it driving her mad is an interesting, if often-used, idea. But when you introduce people to parts of a character is as important as what it is you’re introducing them to. Instead of introducing the audience to Freya’s character slowly and allowing us to see what makes her who she is, the movie gives it to us in one long bout of exposition. I’ll get to the exposition in a minute, but that’s such a waste of a great idea that was never followed through on.

The same goes for the idea of the Mirror itself being possessed somehow and for the Huntsman and his wife, Sara. If you saw the first movie you already know that his wife was supposedly dead and he was a man without a country, so to speak. That could have made his remembering her and her subsequent return from the dead very compelling drama. But instead they give us exposition about the two of them at the beginning so that her return isn’t the least bit surprising or interesting, to us as the audience because we already know their history and what separated them. It’s just poor execution on what could have been some very interesting ideas.

In addition to this it adds in Charlize Theron as the Evil Queen Ravenna at the end as the movie’s “final boss”. I love Charlize Theron’s work and I’ll be singing her praises here soon but her presence in the story completely undercuts Freya as the movie’s villain. Its a simple unspoken logic that if you have a villain in one movie, then the sequel should have a villain that is equally if not more dangerous for the hero to overcome. This takes that in the completely wrong direction. Freya goes from first string baddie to second fiddle in the course of a few minutes after spending the majority as the main antagonist for our heroes. That’s a huge problem when you’re trying to provide a major challenge for our heroes.

I mentioned the exposition at the beginning because its a huge part of what I don’t like about this movie. Liam Neeson plays the role of the Narrator in this section and it sounds like he’s narrating a segment on the Conspiracy Show Channel That Used To Be About History—or is that the actual History Channel? At any rate, the exposition in this movie is utterly awful. It tells us things that we could have easily learned just by seeing these characters interact together and speaks to lazy or rushed writing. That is one of the worst plagues in all of Hollywood and one of my personal pet peeves. SHOW, DON’T TELL!

This movie does deserve some credit though. Some of the landscapes, creatures, and places that are visited in it are dripping with color and imagination even though they are CGI. The phrase “its too CGI” is tossed around a lot but in a day and age when filmmakers use CGI that goes by so fast you barely see it, or hardly use color at all, I found these moments both welcome and refreshing.

The cast should be applauded as well given what they have to work with in this movie. I mentioned Charlize Theron and she’s allowed to be deliciously evil once again in the role of Ravenna, chewing scenery left and right.

Chris Hemsworth is also great as the titular Huntsman. He has a huge amount of confidence and charm to him that makes him the sort of hero that you could see yourself following even if you didn’t know what his plan was. It’s that old-school Errol Flynn-like feel to his performances that makes me wish I could see him in better films. Maybe he should consider getting a new agent.

Emily Blunt brings the amount of grace and hardness that one would expect an actress of her caliber would bring to a character like the Ice Queen but I was disappointed that she didn’t get a lot of moments to stretch her acting legs.

Then there are the Dwarves. These guys are by far the highlight of this entire movie for me. I was laughing regularly whenever they were on screen. The jokes they brought to the table were consistently funny and helped bring a lot of heart and levity to a movie that could’ve easily become too grim to be taken seriously. I could watch a movie of just Chris Hemsworth and those Dwarves sitting around a table talking for two hours. That’s how good they are.

Oddly enough the one part of the cast that doesn’t really stand out to me is Jessica Chastain as Sara. There’s nothing particularly wrong with her performance. It’s just she doesn’t bring anything special to that role. It’s…forgettable. Which is probably the worst thing anyone can say about any performance.

Conclusion:

At one point in the movie one character says to another, “How are you alive?” My sister, who I went to see this movie with, leaned over to me and said sarcastically “I think that’s the prevailing question.” I think a lot of people will agree with her, not just about what’s in the movie but about the movie itself.

How is it alive? As I said before, Snow White and the Huntsman was a modest success but it wasn’t a blockbuster. The worst thing about this movie is that there wasn’t really much need for it to be made.

That being said however, I do like a lot of the elements that were put into this film. It’s well done technically and a lot people worked really hard to put it together. Its no Lord of the Rings but I can’t say I wasn’t entertained by it which is more than I can say for some other fantasy movies I’ve seen. And really, that’s what a movie is supposed to do. Some films do it better than others but for what I paid for, I don’t regret buying a ticket to this one. If you see it in a rental box sometime, I’d check it out.

Have you seen this movie? What did you think of it? Let me know in the comments below or tell me on twitter @Lightwielder524. In the meantime, have a great week and May the Flick be with You!

%d bloggers like this: