UHD Review X-Men: Apocalypse UHD Review (1 Viewer)

[Matt Hough]

Not as ambitious a production as Days of Future Past nor as emotional as First Class, Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Apocalypse still manages to stack and shuffle its multiple X-Men characters who must yet again face a force determined to bring the known world to the brink of extinction.



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[Josh Steinberg]

Nice review!

At the risk of being "that guy" there was just one thing I wanted to nitpick on from your review:

With these current X-Men films all prequels to the original trilogy, it’s no surprise that En Sabah Nur/Apocalypse doesn’t succeed in taking over the world (the climactic showdown between him and Charles Xavier is represented as both a physical and mental confrontation, neither of them having quite the impact we’re expecting and being something of an anticlimax).

Because X-Men: Days Of Future Past changed the timeline, Apocalypse actually isn't a prequel to the original series of films - it's an entirely new adventure in the films. Everything that happened in First Class is meant to be taken as a prequel to the original X-Men films. But starting with Days Of Future past, everything changes from 1973 onward. In the original timeline, the character of Apocalypse doesn't wake up, and the X-Men never face him. In the original timeline, Mystique is unambiguously a bad guy. In this new timeline, Apocalypse does wake up, and so it's a battle they have to have. The ending of Days Of Future Past changes Mystique's character, and introduces her to the world as someone who could be heroic, which is a major change from the character's original arc, and why she's present here as a good guy. If this had been just a prequel to the original series, Mystique would have been bad and not fighting on Charles' side.

It seems a pretty common mistake, so I'm wondering if the ending of Days Of Future Past wasn't as clear as I remember it, or if it's just the time from the two year gap between movies that makes memories a little fuzzy. I rewatched all of the older X-Men movies this year before the new one came out so it was probably fresher for me than it was for most.

 

[Matt Hough]

I assumed Mystique will have a change of heart at some point between now and when we first meet her attached to Magneto in the original movie, but I certainly can't debate you about these timeline things. It's well beyond my brain power to keep one timeline straight, much less multiple ones.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

I assumed Mystique will have a change of heart at some point between now and when we first meet her attached to Magneto in the original movie, but I certainly can't debate you about these timeline things. It's well beyond my brain power to keep one timeline straight, much less multiple ones.

To (hopefully) simplify, all of these movies take place in the original X-Men timeline - some are prequels to others, but they are all part of the same timeline:
-X-Men (2000)
-X2: X-Men United (2003)
-X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)
-X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)
-X-Men: First Class (2011)
-The Wolverine (2013)

In X-Men: Days Of Future Past (2014), the movie begins in the same timeline that all of those other movies have taken place in. However, when Wolverine travels back through time into the 1970s in Days Of Future Past, he alters history drastically, and everything after 1973 is now different. We see some of that in the movie's epilogue; for instance, Jean Grey and Scott Summers are still alive now. This changing of the timeline allows the filmmakers to make an entirely new series of movies where things don't have to happen exactly as we remember them or as we've been told they happen. Unfortunately, it seems that this wasn't always picked up on by viewers. Like in your review, you note (and I'm paraphrasing here) that the conflict has no suspense because we know they can't die, because it takes place before the original movies and we know all of the characters live to be in the original movies - that was actually part of the point of doing this timeline change. Now we don't know that any of them survive, so it would have been possible for the movie to end with the deaths of any or all of the major characters that appeared in the original "X-Men" movie and it wouldn't be "wrong". Any X-Men movie that comes out after Days Of Future Past, including Apocalypse and next year's Logan, will be in this new timeline and not beholden to anything that happened in any of the six original movies that I mentioned above.

Hope this helps, as you probably figured out, I really enjoy a good time travel story