5. X-Men: Apocalypse
Why I Like It (Christopher Diggins): There’s no denying that X-Men: Apocalypse is far from a perfect movie. It’s plodding and overstuffed, most of its character motivations are confusing or underdeveloped, and it manages to make Oscar Isaac a pretty charmless and uninteresting villain. Yet there are still enough flashes of the style Bryan Singer brought to the earlier X-Men movies to make it worth watching. Whether it’s a return of Quicksilver’s slow-motion super speed escapades, Magneto’s emotional destruction of the ruins of Auschwitz, or Jean Grey unleashing the power of Phoenix to incinerate Apocalypse, few other directors embrace the true awe and joy of superpowers the way Singer does. The movie around them may be weak, but these scenes still manage to impress by their sheer scale and imagination.
The new prequel trilogy of X-Men movies has also been blessed with an excellent cast, and that helps bolster Apocalyspe. James McAvoy continues to charm as a younger, smarmier Professor X, while Michael Fassbender manages to match up to the legendary Ian McKellen in portraying Magneto’s despair and deadly resolve. As for the newcomers, Game of Thrones’ Sophie Turner makes the most of an underwritten role, but it’s Kodi Smit-McPhee who truly shines. His portrayal of the shy and vulnerable Nightcrawler is eminently charming, and it’s always a delight when he’s on screen. Between these great performances and the occasional awe-inspiring scene, one can look past X-Men: Apocalypse‘s faults long enough to appreciate what it gets right.
Favorite Scene: Apocalypse destroying the world’s nuclear arsenal
-Apocalypse is rather poorly defined in personality and power, but in the few moments when Singer can embrace the true apocalyptic scale he is meant to represent, it becomes seriously impressive. We get our first glimpse of this when Apocalypse seizes control of Cerebro and reaches his mind out to people all over the world, forcing them to destroy the weapons of a new age. Set over a dramatic score and a grandiose speech in which he proclaims “No more weapons,” it could easily seem cheesy and over-the-top, but it works just right to set the stakes and reveal how powerful Apocalypse is.
Favorite Performance:Michael Fassbender (Magneto)
-We’ve seen the “Magneto wavers between good and evil” storyline plenty of times before, and this is definitely not its finest incarnation. Still, Fassbender deserves credit for successfully portraying all the shades of grief, anger, and conflict that make up Magneto’s journey in this movie. He makes Magneto’s joy with his wife and young daughter in Poland feel real, and even the ridiculous method by which they die can’t rob his resulting despair of its power. A weak performance here would have made the movie immeasurably worse, so we’re lucky Fassbender is there to make sure the material holds up.
Favorite Line: “So much faith in their tools, in their machines. You can fire your arrows from the Tower of Babel, but you can never strike god!” -Apocalypse
-Said during the aforementioned scene of Apocalypse destroying the world’s nuclear arsenal, this line embodies the only moments when Apocalypse truly works as a villain. The total embrace of his grandiose spectacle and pretensions to godhood result in some fantastic supervillain declarations. The movie is extremely inconsistent about maintaining this level of menace and overwhelming power, but when it does, it feels perfectly at home with the movie’s over-the-top comic book sensibilities.
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