The circle of woe is now complete. What started off as a
remarkably fresh and invigorating take on a franchise that has had its share of
hits and misses, ends in utter catastrophe, and that’s not half due to its
doomsday focused storyline. For fans who thought that The Last Stand was bad
(personally I felt it was at least fun and coherent), with Apocalypse you’ll
hit a new low, that you didn’t even realize was possible.
The warning signs came with Days of Future Past I suppose.
An overly complex plot had past, present and future all melded together – but at
least the plotline had a defined sense of flow to the proceedings. The way
Apocalypse starts you’d be forgiven for thinking that you’d walked into an
alternate production of The Mummy and it goes further downhill from thereon.
The pacing slows down to a crawl, as the pitiably shallow plotline is put in
place.
Mr. Singer has a thing for flying stuff – debris, cars,
gravel and sand I suppose. He used it liberally in The Last Stand, Days of the
Future Past and its back in all its supposed glory with Apocalypse. None of it
works. There is no sense of underlying tension – the action is either thick and
fast or non-existent. There are some
moments of humor, that keep you moderately interested but these too don’t last
long enough to make an impact. If the build up is bad, the climax is laughably
pathetic – leaving you to wonder if there was any time spent in putting
together this script at all. The dialogue delivery is so predictable that you'll be completing the characters' dialogues before they've said them, on more than one occasion.
The star cast tries its best to prop up a weak script. Fassbender
and MacAvoy reprise roles that were made memorable by First Class but the
beautifully complex relationship they share is given little screentime. All the ‘past’ X Men make an appearance and new
faces like Sophie Turner (better known as Sansa Stark from Game of Thrones
fame) Evan Peters and Tye Sheridan set up the characters of Jean Grey,
Quicksilver and Scott Summers. There’s even a decent surprise that lasts a few
moments but all of this is not enough to give Apocalypse an identity of its
own.
In fact, there is enough evidence, that the movie is so weak that it needs
to prop itself against flashes from its singular gem, First Class, every now
and then. Somebody had remarked that 20 minutes of the movie are really great.
I have a feeling they referred to the numerous flashbacks we see of First Class
when they made that statement. Apocalypse, of its own, has not a single worthy
moment. There are two ‘Ahas’ to be had, if you will, but they will pass you in
such a cataclysm of other banality, that even they wouldn’t stand out as much.
There is absolutely nothing about Apocalypse that I can recommend.
I had alluded in my previous post, to the fact that if this
franchise is to have any hope at all, Matthew Vaughn needs to be back in the
driver seat. Well, Apocalypse with Singer at the helm, extinguishes any hope of
resurrecting the glory days of X-Men that First Class gave any glimmer of. I
can only wonder where this franchise is headed next since there’s ample
evidence, complete with a painstakingly late end-credits scene that confirms that
this is far from the end of the saga – if anything, its only set up now for
more installments. One can only hope, that some more thought goes into the next
one that would inevitably follow. For now though I think its about time we said
RIP to the legacy of First Class. What a pity...
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