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- Jun 10, 2003
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- Josh Steinberg
I saw this last night and enjoyed it.
Without wanting to get all spoilery, what worked about the movie best was that it was just another X-Men movie. Bryan Singer has directed a bunch of these, and his style and the material continue to be a good marriage. Though the movie is nearly 2 1/2 hours, it doesn't feel that long. It felt shorter than the other similar length superhero films from this year, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Captain America: Civil War.
I didn't really like that the movie was set in 1983, because the cast through no fault of their own couldn't really sell that they had aged the 21 years that have elapsed in story since X-Men: First Class. That movie was made in 2011 but set in 1962. For Jennifer Lawrence's character, it's explained in that movie that she'll age much slower than everyone because of her mutation, but for the rest of the cast, I'm just not buying it. (I'm not sure it was necessary to set Days Of Future Past in 1973, and the 11 year time jump was a little difficult to buy then, but that suspension of disbelief is easy compared to the one required here.) I don't think the plot was enhanced in either Days Of Future Past or Apocalypse by having them set so far apart from each other in time. Maybe it's a nitpicky complaint, but it's one of those things that just makes it harder for me to stay immersed in their world. Then again, internal continuity within the X-Men movie series has pretty much always been terrible, so this shouldn't have been a giant surprise.
I saw the movie in a new format called 4DX - there are apparently four theaters equipped for 4DX in the U.S., two in Los Angeles, and two in New York City where I live. Instead of conventional seats, they've been replaced with motion capable seats that also are equipped for wind, water, scent, fog and lightning effects. The company that makes 4DX works before the movie's release to design a program for each movie, so that you're rocked, pelted with wind, sprayed with water, etc., etc., at the appropriate moment in the movie. The idea is sort of like one of those 3D rides at Disney or Universal like Star Tours where you feel like you're in the movie. I wasn't sure exactly what to expect or how much I'd like it, but I figured that an X-Men movie would be the way to go. After seeing the movie in this format, I can't recommend 4DX to anyone. It's a decent idea but one that wasn't well executed. For instance, the lightening effects were terrible, and didn't actually correspond to lightening onscreen, they'd just occasionally happen at big, loud, explosive moments - but the problem was, bright flashes of light in the auditorium only served to make the room bright and wash out the screen completely. Granted, there were probably only ten or so two-second flashes in the 2 1/2 hour movie, but each time it happened, it reminded me I was sitting in an auditorium in Times Square, which I think is the opposite of what they were going for. Similarly, while the wind effects were more effective as a whole, there were times they were used where nothing "windy" was happening onscreen, and they just drowned out dialogue. There was one moment where Jean Grey comes to a realization about her powers in a quiet scene and delivers a line to explain what she's learned that should be important for the audience to hear - but wind started blowing right as she delivered her final line, and we couldn't hear it, so the whole point of that scene remains a mystery to me because the stupid effect got in the way of the movie. And while it was cool to have the chair rock during the most large scale explosions, they could have dialed down the number of times they did the effect. That's my biggest overall critique of the 4DX format - they just tried to do too much, too often, regardless of whether it matched what was onscreen or whether it would be comfortable for an audience to do it. I think they could have cut back the number pf physical effects at least by half, and instead focused on making each effect seem motivated by the story, made sure that they didn't take away from the movie, and increased the intensity on a few of the more dramatic ones. My theater charged a $9 surcharge to see the movie in this format, and it was almost as if they knew they were charging a lot so they had to deliver a lot. I would have preferred a more artful approach.
Overall, I found X-Men: Apocalypse to be the weakest of the McAvoy-Fassbender series of films, but still an enjoyable movie, and certainly not the worst of the X-Men movies. There's just nothing in it that we haven't really seen before. And though the producers have teased that because the timeline was reset in Days Of Future Past, that the fates of all the characters are up for grabs and that people could die, etc., I found that to be a little disingenuous, because we see the adult version of so many of these characters in the new reset future at the end of DOFP, so in fact we do know that most people in it can't die, and because the future is seen as being okay at end of that movie, we know that the world can't actually end in this movie before it even starts. So what we've got here is an entertaining but inconsequential movie that is a lot of fun but has no suspense and fails to build on the promise shown in 2011's X-Men: First Class.
Without wanting to get all spoilery, what worked about the movie best was that it was just another X-Men movie. Bryan Singer has directed a bunch of these, and his style and the material continue to be a good marriage. Though the movie is nearly 2 1/2 hours, it doesn't feel that long. It felt shorter than the other similar length superhero films from this year, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Captain America: Civil War.
I didn't really like that the movie was set in 1983, because the cast through no fault of their own couldn't really sell that they had aged the 21 years that have elapsed in story since X-Men: First Class. That movie was made in 2011 but set in 1962. For Jennifer Lawrence's character, it's explained in that movie that she'll age much slower than everyone because of her mutation, but for the rest of the cast, I'm just not buying it. (I'm not sure it was necessary to set Days Of Future Past in 1973, and the 11 year time jump was a little difficult to buy then, but that suspension of disbelief is easy compared to the one required here.) I don't think the plot was enhanced in either Days Of Future Past or Apocalypse by having them set so far apart from each other in time. Maybe it's a nitpicky complaint, but it's one of those things that just makes it harder for me to stay immersed in their world. Then again, internal continuity within the X-Men movie series has pretty much always been terrible, so this shouldn't have been a giant surprise.
I saw the movie in a new format called 4DX - there are apparently four theaters equipped for 4DX in the U.S., two in Los Angeles, and two in New York City where I live. Instead of conventional seats, they've been replaced with motion capable seats that also are equipped for wind, water, scent, fog and lightning effects. The company that makes 4DX works before the movie's release to design a program for each movie, so that you're rocked, pelted with wind, sprayed with water, etc., etc., at the appropriate moment in the movie. The idea is sort of like one of those 3D rides at Disney or Universal like Star Tours where you feel like you're in the movie. I wasn't sure exactly what to expect or how much I'd like it, but I figured that an X-Men movie would be the way to go. After seeing the movie in this format, I can't recommend 4DX to anyone. It's a decent idea but one that wasn't well executed. For instance, the lightening effects were terrible, and didn't actually correspond to lightening onscreen, they'd just occasionally happen at big, loud, explosive moments - but the problem was, bright flashes of light in the auditorium only served to make the room bright and wash out the screen completely. Granted, there were probably only ten or so two-second flashes in the 2 1/2 hour movie, but each time it happened, it reminded me I was sitting in an auditorium in Times Square, which I think is the opposite of what they were going for. Similarly, while the wind effects were more effective as a whole, there were times they were used where nothing "windy" was happening onscreen, and they just drowned out dialogue. There was one moment where Jean Grey comes to a realization about her powers in a quiet scene and delivers a line to explain what she's learned that should be important for the audience to hear - but wind started blowing right as she delivered her final line, and we couldn't hear it, so the whole point of that scene remains a mystery to me because the stupid effect got in the way of the movie. And while it was cool to have the chair rock during the most large scale explosions, they could have dialed down the number of times they did the effect. That's my biggest overall critique of the 4DX format - they just tried to do too much, too often, regardless of whether it matched what was onscreen or whether it would be comfortable for an audience to do it. I think they could have cut back the number pf physical effects at least by half, and instead focused on making each effect seem motivated by the story, made sure that they didn't take away from the movie, and increased the intensity on a few of the more dramatic ones. My theater charged a $9 surcharge to see the movie in this format, and it was almost as if they knew they were charging a lot so they had to deliver a lot. I would have preferred a more artful approach.
Overall, I found X-Men: Apocalypse to be the weakest of the McAvoy-Fassbender series of films, but still an enjoyable movie, and certainly not the worst of the X-Men movies. There's just nothing in it that we haven't really seen before. And though the producers have teased that because the timeline was reset in Days Of Future Past, that the fates of all the characters are up for grabs and that people could die, etc., I found that to be a little disingenuous, because we see the adult version of so many of these characters in the new reset future at the end of DOFP, so in fact we do know that most people in it can't die, and because the future is seen as being okay at end of that movie, we know that the world can't actually end in this movie before it even starts. So what we've got here is an entertaining but inconsequential movie that is a lot of fun but has no suspense and fails to build on the promise shown in 2011's X-Men: First Class.
