I just recently rewatched X-Men: Days of Future Past and was struck again by what a good super hero movie it was.
It handled the mythos and back story well, it had characters following consistent motivation, and it had characters growing and learning. And… it told an exciting story with interesting villains. It also had characters with lots of shades of grey about them. You have Professor X trying to deal with the reality that he is not as all-powerful as he had thought – at least when it comes to outcomes. You have Magneto and Mystique figuring out how to live in a world that does not welcome these new mutant variants of humans. And you have the brilliant Peter Dinklage as an interesting and complex villain.
This week I finally saw X-Men: Apocalypse, and I was sad to see that it lived up to the dismal reputation reviews had put forward for it. It felt like there were two or three different movies going on that were only marginally connected with each other. There was a Mummy-style story of Apocalypse – The First Mutant, an Indiana Jones kind of story tracking him down, and finally a what was supposedly an X-Men story that had very little heart to it.
Worst of all, the film completely wasted Michael Fassbender’s Erik/Magneto. Magneto is to me, the most interesting of the X-Men, loving his brother/sister mutants and willing to do anything to help keep them safe. The risk that mutants face in the world is all too clear to him, having grown up in part in a Nazi concentration camp.
In Apocalypse, we learn almost nothing new about his character and instead see him mostly standing passively by as a stooge of ancient Egyptian mutant Apocalypse. And we also see little of the tortured soul that actor James McAvoy brought to Professor X in Future Past. Finally, Oscar Isaac, who was so fresh and fun in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, brought no life or heart to the mutant Apocalypse, stuck under layers of make up and CGI and an always-processed voice.
I suppose Apocalypse followed much the same path as the Avengers movies did, but in the Avengers, our heroes have to come to terms with what they have wrought. In Apocalypse, no one seems to learn anything other than to let sleeping mummies lie. I’m really sad to see the X-Men reboot mutate into just another tired almost-the-end-of-the-world story.
Afterword: This blog post started out to be a two-line Facebook post and grew into a multi-movie review. Beyond some meditations on recent super hero movies, this could be used as a launching ground for a discussion of how characters are developed in popular movies. Can summer popcorn movies still be great movies? Can you get interesting character development in a big-budget super hero movie? What are the differences between a good and a bad super hero movie, regardless of what the box office says?