by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was X-Men: Apocalypse, the latest in the sequence and a quite good movie on its own terms
but also oddly disappointing. Directed by Bryan Singer (who made the first two
films in the X-Men cycle before
turning it over to others, then came back for the immediately previous movie, X-Men:
Days of Future Past) from a story by
himself, Simon Kinberg, Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris — though Kinberg gets
sole credit for turning the committee-written story into an actual script — X-Men
Apocalypse takes about half an hour of its
144-minute running time (including the typically interminable closing credit
roll) before its various story threads congeal into an actual plot, but once it
does that the script is surprisingly well constructed for a modern superhero
film and one doesn’t get the impression, as one often does in the genre, that the “plot” portions are there only to set up
the spectacular action scenes. The film opens in ancient Egypt, where En Sabah
Nur (Oscar Isaac, a marvelously “reversible” name), appears to be leading a
cult that is aimed at deposing the rightful Pharoah and installing himself as
king not just of Egypt but the entire world, and not just for a normal lifespan
but forever.
He can do that because he’s built a pyramid that contains a magic
technology through which he can make a gold-colored fluid flow upwards, defying gravity (one of the many special effects in
this film that couldn’t have been done without CGI) and enabling him, once his
body is so old and decrepit it’s about to croak, to transfer his essence into
some other body and thereby continue his existence literally indefinitely as
long as he does the transfer in time. (This was also the central plot gimmick
of that ridiculously slovenly 1959 Columbia “B” horror film The Man
Who Turned to Stone, though in that case
the apparatus involved was considerably less spectacular, basically a giant
bathtub with electrodes through which the baddies could drain the energy out of
a young woman and transfer it to themselves; as I wrote when Charles and I
watched that one, it’s hard to get excited about a horror film whose big fright
gimmick is the Bathtub of Doom.) The scene then flashes forward to 1983, when
the bulk of the film takes place — it’s very carefully not presented as a contemporary story; Ronald Reagan is
President and East Germany is still a going concern, though the presentation of
East Berlin as a wide-open city where a sinister cabaret owner hosts extreme
cage-fights between mutants Angel (Ben Hardy) and Nightcrawler (Kodi Smith-McPhee,
who has a tail but otherwise sports a bizarre purplish-blue face makeup and
overall appearance that makes it look like they dug up Prince and revived him)
seems even for a superhero fantasy to fly in the face of everything we know
about the real East Berlin. (If East Berlin had really been like this it would
have been the West that built the
Wall!) We cut again to the school for “gifted children” — i.e., mutants — run
by the young Professor Charles Xavier (James McAvoy), a long-haired cutie but
one already needing a wheelchair (albeit a high-tech powered one of his own
invention that apparently moves by sheer thought — at least there aren’t any
visible controls like there are in a real power wheelchair); in the first cycle
of X-Men films, made earlier but
taking place later, he was middle-aged, bald and played (brilliantly) by
Patrick Stewart, though he loses his hair in the final confrontation at the end
of this one (oh darn, I’ve just spoiled it).
The film is essentially yet
another battle between good and bad mutants: the good ones are Xavier, Raven
a.k.a. Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence, ill-used in this role — in the Hunger
Games cycle she was great because she
actually got to play a character with some depth, but here she’s just another
action heroine who can turn her skin blue at will), Quicksilver (Evan Peters),
Beast (Nicholas Hoult), and Cyclops (Tye Sheridan), whose non-mutant identity
is Scott Summers and who discovers his power — his eyes can emit red flares
that burn up everything in their path — when he’s bullied at high school by a
typical asshole jock (who probably went on to become a Republican candidate for
President) and, trapped in a restroom, uses his power to melt the hinges of the
restroom door and send it hurling through space until it crashes into his
tormentor. (Everyone who was ever bullied in school — including me — probably
seized on this scene as a sort of ultimate wish-fulfillment.) Scott hopes he’ll
find a home at Xavier’s school, especially since his older brother Alex, a.k.a.
Havok (William Till), is already there — only Alex gets killed almost
immediately when a bomb set off at the school destroys it. Quicksilver, with
his power to move so quickly he can literally stop time (director Singer
illustrates this by a number of freeze-frames that might have you wondering if
your DVD or Blu-Ray player is working properly), rescues the others at the
school but Alex was too close to the blast’s epicenter to be saved.
The bad
mutants are Apocalypse, a.k.a. En Sabah Nur, a.k.a. whoever’s body he’s using
this week; Magneto (Michael Fassbender), who’d managed to run away from his
mutant lifestyle and settle in Poland as a factory worker with a wife and child
until he inadvertently “outs” himself at the factory one day (Charles and I couldn’t
help but quote the famous lines in Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda? over a stock shot of a steel mill in operation: “Did
you hear about the boy mutant who wanted to be a girl mutant?”) and a group of
Polish secret police, or something, attempt to take him into custody — Our
Anti-Hero fells them by throwing his daughter’s locket at them with such
ferocity it cuts off their heads (here, and in a later scene in which someone
is almost beheaded, Singer seems to have been inspired by the real-life
beheading videos from ISIS), though alas his wife and daughter are also killed
and Magneto is sufficiently embittered he throws in his lot with the baddies;
Storm (Alexandra Munroe), who’s discovered by Apocalypse as a thief and
shoplifter in Cairo and who, with her lithe body, slender build and magnificent
Mohawk hair, is (at least to this Queer boy) the hottest-looking woman in the
film; Angel and another mutant he picks up so he can fill out the Four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse (you remember from the Book of Revelation; in the film every manifestation of the Four Horsemen, including the
one set down by St. John the Divine, was part of a generations-long campaign by
Apocalypse to destroy the world and virtually all its populations so the little
bit of humanity that’s left can rebuild a world cleansed of all human
corruption).
There are also a few non-mutant humans in the dramatis
personae, including a CIA agent named Moira
MacTaggart with whom Xavier once had an affair, only he used his powers to burn
out any memory of it from her brain (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless
Mind is about the last movie I expected to see ripped off in a superhero
film!) with the odd result that other mutants at the school recognize her and
she can’t fathom how they know her name; and Col. William Stryker (Josh
Helman), who’s determined to capture the mutants and doesn’t care that some
mutants are good and in fact are needed to stop the bad mutants from wrecking
the world. Col. Stryker has also got custody of Wolverine (Hugh Jackman, who
says he’s going to do a sequel to the Wolverine origin story and then hang up
his adamantine claws forever — I still think Jackman got a raw deal when his marvelous film Australia failed and kept him stuck in roles like this), and
in any event he appears in just this one scene as a deus ex machina who helps the other good mutants break free from
Stryker’s custody, and doesn’t speak. Apocalypse has the embittered Magneto
pull out all magnetic metal from the bowels of the earth, meaning that
skyscrapers and bridges crumble and so do ships (though there’s one scene in
which Magneto attacks a container vessel and makes the containers do aerobatics
while not harming the ship, presumably vulnerable to him because it too would
be made of steel; later the good mutants fly into battle on a military plane
they’ve stolen from Col. Stryker, and at least one imdb.com contributor
wondered how they could use the plane in the face of Magneto’s power; Charles
wondered that, too, but I reasoned that since Magneto’s power is based on magnetism
it wouldn’t affect an object made out of a non-magnetic metal like aluminum, which in fact is what
most modern-day military aircraft are made of) — director Singer said he wanted
within the superhero genre to
stage a world-threatening catastrophe like the ones in Michael Bay’s films like
Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow and Armageddon, and he
did. Eventually there’s the expected fight to the death between the good
mutants and the bad mutants, though not before Apocalypse has incapacitated Xavier
and chosen his body to be his
next incarnation — there’s some good, if not great, suspense editing between
Apocalypse’s diabolical machine and the efforts of the other good mutants to
come and save Xavier, who’s trying to save himself by fighting back against
Apocalypse’s mind control (and doing so in sequences in which he still has hair
even though the “real” Xavier has gone bald) — and though the overall intrigue
ends more or less happily there’s one of Marvel’s trademark post-credits
“teaser” sequences in which agents from the Essex Corporation steal a serum
vial containing “Weapon X,” the drug that created Wolverine in the first place.
X-Men: Apocalypse is a good film
in the modern-day superhero genre,
but what I missed in this one that I got in previous episodes in the cycle was
the humanity. Marvel head honcho Stan Lee (who not only makes a cameo
appearance in this one but brings his wife into it; they’re an elderly couple,
he blind, who witnesses the detonation of all the nuclear-armed missiles, flown
into space by Apocalypse’s power as part of his effort to cleanse humanity —
the idea that a super-powerful being would unilaterally disarm the world by
setting off its nukes harmlessly in space was also part of Arthur C. Clarke’s
original conception for 2001: A Space Odyssey, but director Stanley Kubrick didn’t use it because
he thought it would be too close to the ending of Dr. Strangelove) created X-Men in 1963 largely as a metaphor for the African-American civil rights
movement, but later, with the advent of Gay Liberation, it became a favorite
comic among Queer people because they, like the mutants, not only had to deal
with social hatred and prejudice but also had the dilemma of whether to stay
closeted or “come out” in their real identities. Some of the most powerful
scenes in the earlier X-Men
movies deal with the very real human emotions behind mutant-dom and in
particular how they shape the decisions of various mutants either to be
closeted or “out,” and whether to fight for humanity or against it. Here
there’s very little of that — or of the moral ambiguity of the characters that
made the earlier films in the cycle interesting; it’s basically a tale of
good-good mutants and bad-bad mutants, and the only good-bad mutant (the Gollum
of the tale, as it were) is Magneto, who’s persuaded to switch sides and
reverse his assault on human technology because Xavier can offer him what
Apocalypse can’t: a family. Other X-Men stories have been strong human dramas while still delivering the
super-powered action superhero-film fans crave; this one delivers the action,
all right (though most of it looks typically CGI-fake), but not (except intermittently
in Scott’s character) the emotions.
