#john schork

There are many forces in opposition in X-Men: Apocalypse. The titular heroes versus the titular villain, the grating battle of shoddy, bargain basement CGI versus human eyeballs, and the latest salvo in Bryan Singer’s seemingly endless war against storytelling. Apocalypse is a narratively muddy, stylistically bereft, emotionally dead piece of zero-calorie filler disguised via hundreds of millions of mysteriously disbursed dollars as a rollicking summer event.

Opportunities for character development, world building, visual panache, and human resonance are summarily jettisoned in favour of a formless, shapeless waste of time, money, and a great cast. Where colourful visuals, a coherent, engaging plot, and intriguing characters would suffice as a bare minimum, Apocalypse whiles away what feels like four interminable hours unearthing a dull, ugly, humourless cadaver, one whose coffin is festooned with brief glimpses of beloved characters and stories.

Apocalypse is a film pulled in a thousand different directions, and it feels so fractured as a result of indecision. Dully realistic costumes clash with flamboyant yet cheap-looking make-up effects, while most of the world is seen being destroyed by the same infuriatingly boring particle-sucking effects that have been dismantling recognizable world monuments since the first practical effects house was replaced with an iMac.

X-Men: Apocalypse’ s greatest sin is its complacency. In practically every aspect, its various sliders have been left set at levels of achievement gratingly bereft of ambition or tangible accomplishment. Even taking a violent-though-totally-telegraphed Wolverine sequence (influenced by Barry Windsor-Smith’s seminal Weapon X storyline) into account, Apocalypse is powerless to rise above even the most generous tonal sinus rhythm.

This might have been a base hit fifteen years ago—where Bryan Singer seems to be frozen in time—but we live in an era where modern movie audiences are inundated by more ambitious and successful superhero movies on a nearly monthly basis. Treating a franchise like X-Men as if it’s being released in a vacuum in this day and age will only choke the life out of it, like so many licensed Marvel properties before it.

X-Men: Apocalypse’s greatest sin is its lack of imagination and commitment. It creates a world wrought almost entirely of appallingly low rent-looking CGI and make-up effects, and characters written just one-dimensionally enough to populate it, but with no further effort put forth on either side to honour the source material or the considerable goodwill and pedigree of the cast.