X-Men - Dark Phoenix

50 Shades Of Jean Grey

X-Men - Dark Phoenix
USA 2019 Directed by Simon Kinberg
UK cinema release print.

Well, my credibility as a reviewer is tested again as I seem to be of a completely opposite opinion to the rest of the world about this movie. I can’t remember hearing as much negative word of mouth about a film as I have about X-Men Dark Phoenix and, I have to say, since the continuity of the X-Men series was completely destroyed early on in their run, I have found the series to be a bit hit and miss, to say the least. And news just came in that the box office on this one is a disaster so... yeah, I guess I’m a bit out of synch with people in general. This one, however, is one of the better entries in the film series as a whole as far as I’m concerned and, I have to say, I really wasn’t expecting that.

The film is yet another adaptation... and I use that word in a very loose sense here... of the Dark Phoenix story arc from the comics and the first time around they tried this with Marvel Girl (aka Jean Grey), was way back in the first real mis-step of the series... X- Men - The Last Stand. In that film, Jean Grey was played by the wonderful Famke Jansenn in what turned out to be... definitely not the super-group’s last stand. Here she’s played by Sophie Turner and, over the last few films, I’ve really got used to her in the role and here, where she has to carry big chunks of the plot as the film is literally centred around her and her ‘Dark Phoenix’ incarnation, she proves herself more than capable of carrying the movie.

And, like the title implies, it’s a dark film. Well... mostly. It maybe is a little too light at the end but there is the death of one of the major characters fairly early on in the movie (no, I’m not going to spoil it and say which one) and, although I was kinda hoping for a Blake’s Seven style bloodbath at the end here, it does lighten up a little on the aftermath. Also, this is definitely the last of the X-Men films as we have come to know them. In a final twist coming in hard from the real world, this part of the Marvel Universe owned by 20th Century Fox is now owned by Disney (who now own Fox) and so when the characters inevitably return, I expect they’ll be going for a completely different look and feel so they can dovetail them into the current Marvel Cinematic Universe so, yeah, end of an era.

What this also means is it doesn’t make good on the post credits sequence of the previous movie and nor does it have its own post credits tease. More annoyingly, perhaps, is that the developing plot line of Quicksilver being Magneto’s son without the father realising yet is never finished off. No resolutions on that front here so... it’s kind of a shame they didn’t sort this loose end out.

However, almost everything else about this movie... I liked. The strong cast of regulars supporting Sophie Turner such as James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence and Nicholas Hoult etc were all great... as was Jessica Chastain as the lead alien villain of the piece. The action set pieces were good and the story was a little smaller in its focus but there is still a sense of something huge at stake here... not just the future safety of the Earth but also the impact of the consequences of events here flipping public attitudes to mutant-kind back to those of non-acceptance and intolerance (something which I don’t think was credibly resolved at the close of this film, to be honest).

There are also some nice shot compositions and transitions too, including a nice moment where, after pulling a wooden chest out and revealing his Magneto helmet, Fassbender pulls it down onto his head as a way of showing the audience he’s coming out of retirement which then immediately cuts to a similar close up of McAvoy as Professor X pulling off his Cerebro helmet.

There’s also Hans Zimmer’s score which, even though I love this composer (see here for a review of one of his wonderful live shows), I was somewhat sceptical of. As it happens, he does a really good job here and I’m looking forward to grabbing the CD of this one as soon as it goes on sale (it’s rumoured there will be a proper CD release sometime after the stupid download and I hope this is the case here... although the company might have a change of heart after seeing the box office if we’re extra unlucky).

The special effects look pretty good too and even the Magneto stuff, which I sometimes find a bit rubbishy looking, was pretty amazing this time around.

On the downside, this film continues to throw continuity to the wind and, after the events we heard hinted at in Logan (reviewed here), totally fails to conform to them in this movie and has you wondering just who the heck is green lighting writing decisions such as these.

However, despite the odd grumble, I have to say that this is easily the best Marvel movie so far this year.... after the not too terrible Captain Marvel and the, well, way too terrible and disappointing Avengers Endgame. X-Men Dark Phoenix walks all over them, in my opinion and I am just breathing a sigh of relief that, even though it’s had its ups and downs, the franchise is definitely going out on a high note here... despite what other reviewers would have you believe. Will definitely be picking this one up on Blu Ray the week it comes out over here and, you never know, might go back and have another look at it at the cinema too (the IMAX 3D was quite good on this one, for a change). Definitely a darkish film, like a few of its predecessors (one might even say a Dark Grey film) but that’s definitely a strength and it looks like a solid entry into the franchise to me.

Red Sparrow

Nate N’ Sparrow

Red Sparrow
2018 USA Directed by Francis Lawrence
UK cinema release print.

Red Sparrow is a Cold War spy thriller based on a novel, the first part of a trilogy, by ex-CIA agent Jason Matthews. So I guess you can certainly say the writer of the source material knows where he’s coming from in terms of the nuts and bolts operating procedures used in the story and this certainly, I think, comes through in the filmed version.

Now before I go any further, I have to say that I went into this movie knowing it was pre-cut for release in the UK... which is something I almost never humour or entertain. However, the trailer really intrigued me so I made one of my rare ‘window shopping only’ cinema trips. If I liked this ‘selected highlights’ version of the movie then I would buy the full, uncut version from the US market when it comes out on Blu Ray. Which I will be doing, as it happens. However, I really wouldn’t consider the UK presentation the same as being able to actually watch the movie itself. Why? Because I consider even a single frame (one 24th of a second) excised from a movie to be an incomplete edition and not the full work of art. I remember well the old late 1980s TV showings of Blade Runner (reviewed here) where, just the removal of one single swear word totally changed the underlying atmosphere of a specific scene and gave a different emotional hit from it. So... no... watching a movie with cuts is not the same as watching the actual film and I’m both ashamed and offended that censors in this day and age still exist. And I am certainly not giving any respect to the studio who released this and allowed it to be cut just to get a lower rating. Forget the money, guys, it’s about the art... let it lose money, it’s not that important. Art is more important. Entertainment is art and art is not a business. I know that’s a totally naive and less than credible thing to say about the Hollywood money machine but I don’t care... unless we strive to reach that ideal then we’ll never, ever get there.

So anyway... Red Sparrow is not the film I was expecting it to be.

It looked, from the trailer, like an edgier version of the film the Marvel Black Widow movie... if that ever sees the light of day... should be but, although it certainly is edgier than I would imagine Marvel would let their Natasha film be, this one isn’t an ‘action’ thriller by any sense of the expression and if you’re looking for a ‘high octane’ guns and explosions kind of movie, you’re definitely in the wrong place.

This film is actually a proper spy thriller.

It has an edge to it for sure but it’s more like a brutal version of something that John Le Carre or Len Deighton might have written so, oh yeah, I’m definitely a big fan of this film (or what little I saw of it... one of the cuts made is clumsy and obvious so I'm looking forward to seeing the ‘Jean Rollinesque’ pay-off to a certain, early sequence in the film).

Jennifer Lawrence is an actress who impresses me more and more with every film I see her in. I didn’t see her Hunger Games films by the same director (who is no relation to her, despite the surname) because the Young Adult nature of the source material put me off but everything I have seen her in, I have sat up and taken note. I hated Aronofsky’s Mother! (reviewed here) for example but, even in that, you can see what a great and dedicated performer she is and my respect for her deepens with Red Sparrow because, well, it’s a really brave part to take on and she really runs with it. Considering you have some real acting heavyweights in the cinematic ring with her on this one, such as Jeremy Irons and Charlotte Rampling, she does a really good job and more than holds her own. Watching her career now with a lot of interest.

The film is about her character, Dominika Egorova, once a world famous ballet star but now recruited, due to circumstances I won’t spoil here (even though they’re on the trailer), to the secret government division of agents code named the Red Sparrows. It’s specifically about a plot concerning US intelligence operative Nate Nash (played by Joel Edgerton) and the identity of a Russian mole he is trying to keep secret. The film tells the story of the grey areas where the lives of these two agents overlap and penetrate each other. It raises the obvious questions about whether Dominika is committed to the Russians or whether she is really helping the Americans and, any weaknesses in the story come, I think, from the writing more than anything else. For instance, there’s a scene where you will definitely find out one way or another, whose side she is on  but I was pretty sure the way it has been set up to make you think the opposite of the truth of the situation was, in itself, giving the game away. Another slightly problematic thing is the identity of the mole, who I was pretty sure I had guessed correctly from the outset and when the reveal came later... again, it was the obvious choice. That being said, there is a nice bit of shenanigans with that character right near the end of the film where Dominika pulls her own trump card which is a moment I didn’t quite see coming... although it makes perfect sense with the way the recruitment of her character is pitched at the start of the piece.

However, these little obvious things really don’t stop this movie from being a tight spy thriller and I really enjoyed this one a lot more than some of the other, recent attempts to juggle the expectations of ‘action thriller’ as opposed to ‘spy thriller’ in modern cinema. There’s also some really great stuff going on with the way the film is put together too... asides from the nude scenes with Jennifer Lawrence which, of course, are already leading this movie into ‘great’ territory. ;-)

For instance, there are some nice things done with the sound in certain sequences, such as the boiling sound of a whistling kettle transmuting into the squeak of an opening door in the next scene. Also, the crosscutting of the plot set up with Nate and the introduction of Dominika’s character in the pre-credits sequence, long before either of these characters meet in the chronology of the story, is handled really well and could have gone completely wrong but it’s edited very competently and doesn’t lose the atmosphere of two things coming to a simultaneous, mini climax.

Another thing the director seems to like to do is to set up expectations of a sequence by showing you what happens with a different character earlier in the film and then upending that expectation the second time around. Such as showing the presence of another character’s nasty demise in a similar situation before leading up to it again with a slightly different denouement. This is something which another great spy thriller, The Quiller Memorandum (reviewed by me here), does in its opening phone booth sequence, setting the audience up for a similar moment much later in the film. In Red Sparrow, this technique almost takes on metatextual proportions when one of the characters uses a video of a sequence to deliberately foreshadow the possibilities of ‘what comes next’ to one of the other characters in an interrogations scene. So the film really wears its foreshadowing on its sleeve here and demonstrates an awareness of how those same, subconscious tricks used on the audience can also be brought into play in the context of the movie itself.

Another thing which got me into the cinema to see this was the promise of a new James Newton Howard score. This composer has grown on me over the years and my appreciation increased after I saw a London concert last year. This isn’t, as I’d initially expected, in the same kind of mode as his excellent score for Salt (movie reviewed here) but is a much slower score with a lot of Russian flourishes (or possibly the Westernised perception of Russian musical phrases) peppered into the mix. I suspect it will take me a few stand alone listens to fully get into but it will be getting a proper CD release at the end of the month so I will, at least, get a chance. There’s some stuff in it, especially in a later scene where Dominika meets Nate in his apartment, which plays out like something Bernard Herrmann might have written for it so, yeah, definitely looking forward to the physical release and it certainly works in the context of the movie itself.

The film has a wonderfully ambiguous ending too. I am in no way spoiling it but, now that I know the source material is a trilogy of novels it certainly makes more sense that things aren’t so ‘spelled out’ for the audience and I can only hope (although somehow doubt) that the director and actors reunite for two sequels. Time will tell, I guess.

Red Sparrow is definitely a solid recommendation from me, especially to fans of spy movies which don’t just limit themselves to the action packed confections of the James Bond or Jason Bourne movies. A proper espionage thriller with a very cold sting to it and something which deserves to do a lot better at the box office than I expect it to. Absolutely go and see this one because it’s rare these days that movies like this are let out the gate, so to speak. Stupid plot holes for sure (like how can a world famous ballerina go under cover by dying her hair blonde?) but a top notch thriller, nonetheless.

mother!

Writing Home

mother!
2017 USA Directed by  Darren Aronofsky
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Yeah, I’m going to discuss most of this with “big spoilers” full on and right from the outset. If you don’t want to know then please don’t read.

Sigh.

Darren Aronofsky used to be one of my absolute favourite modern directors. The first three feature films he made blew me away. They were like a triumvirate of works of genius that repeatedly hit and engaged the brain on every level from the opening scenes through to the breathtaking finales. So yeah... Pi, Requiem For A Dream and The Fountain... three truly spectacular works. Even the director’s fourth feature, The Wrestler, was a pretty cool film. True, I couldn’t watch it more than once like I could his first three, which I would be happy to leave on repeat play throughout various stages of my life but, it was still a great film.

Unfortunately, Aronofsky starting mis-stepping, for me at any rate, with Black Swan (reviewed here), which I was so looking forward to and which managed to somehow underwhelm me on almost every level. And then he brought out Noah (reviewed here) which... honestly didn’t endear me to him and made me laugh when he decided to have giant rock creatures helping Noah fight off all the pesky humans who wanted to get on his ark. He might as well have had Transformers in there, to be honest.

And so we come to mother! which I thought had quite an interesting and edgy trailer but, after having been let down by this director twice in a row now... well, I really wasn’t holding my breath to go and see this thing. However, I then got wind of a critic (via 'Twitter buzz') who had called the movie something along the lines of “the most disgusting and depraved, vile film ever to be allowed in a movie theatre” with the clear warning that audiences should not go out to support this kind of thing. So, of course, my ears immediately pricked up and I was all full on about to going to see a movie that would provoke such an unequivocally negative response and I suspect the person who wrote that review did more to get people into cinemas to see this movie than the actual trailer campaign did. No publicity is bad publicity is something I’ve always, more or less, believed but with many films, such as this one, this is a case of bad publicity being hugely more preferable and influential than any positive press could be.

To be frank, though, having seen the movie myself now... if that reviewer genuinely felt like that about mother! then, honestly, he or she needs to get out and see some more films because there’s pretty much nothing here that hasn’t been seen before. It’s not really that impressive as a movie and certainly not going to disturb anybody but the most sensitive, 'wrapped in cotton wool' souls, I would have thought. Pseudo film reviewers who say such things should maybe get a life (and stop getting my hopes up that the film is a lot more vital to the art of the moving image than it actually is).

Okay... let’s get to the good stuff first, which won’t take long.

Jennifer Lawrence is someone I’m really getting the hang of lately. She is absolutely excellent in this role and, I would say, pretty much carries the movie on her lonesome. Javier Bardem, who I first saw in Jamon Jamon many years ago at the cinema, is an actor I’m not all that familiar with but he’s pretty great here, too, as a successful writer struggling to write new poetry. And both these titanic actors are ably supported by the likes of Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer and Domhnall Gleeson... and, of course, they’re all great in this too.

Not only that but Aronofsky manages to take these pitch perfect performances and fashion a movie which, at the very least, engages some interest at the start and patiently renders his vision in a way that’s assured and leaves the audience in no misunderstanding about what is going on within the narrative... which could have got out of hand with so many of the crowded frames filled with noise, chaos and people, especially towards the last twenty minutes or so of the movie. Which really is no mean feat... Aronofsky knows how to craft a movie.

Here’s the thing, though. It’s one thing to be able to render your vision above and beyond the level of most of your contemporaries but... when the vision is a little lacking or simplistic, as I felt it was in this film, then it doesn’t matter how good you are technically, the film is not necessarily going strike true with an audience. Or at least hold their interest for the entire time.

The first thing he gets wrong here, from my perspective, is that he telegraphs the end of the movie right from the start and, once you kind of get the hang that the movie is probably somewhat cyclic in nature, it kind of becomes a dead give away that the whole thing is not necessarily to be taken on a ‘realistic’ level and that the film is merely a kind of metaphor for the creative process, with all the central characters merely prose within the writer’s wrestling imagination. And once you realise this, probably from sometime around the first half an hour, the inevitability of the nature of the ending becomes something you are just kind of hanging around to see when the characters will catch up with that concept. Of course, they never really do because, you know, they are just characters within the fiction of the fiction... um... if you see what I mean. They are the fabric of the creative process and it kind of becomes like there’s less at stake here than you might have, at first, thought.

The film is quite Buñuelian, in some ways and while I was watching the film I couldn’t help but thinking that the director had maybe seen the truly great The Exterminating Angel (reviewed here) a few more times than was good for him (which, it turns out, was a bit ‘on the nose’ because I just found out that Aronosfsky is listing it as one of his influences on the making of this film). The lunacy and chaos of the film feels like that mixed with the kind of freeform visual stream of consciousness of The Monkees’ movie Head and Fellini’s Otto E Mezzo (Eight and a Half) although, to be honest, I could watch all of those three films I just mentioned quite often whereas mother! is not something I’d ever need, or want, to bother to see again in my lifetime.

The continuous assault on the senses never really matches the madcap lunacy of, say, The Marx Brothers in Duck Soup (another film this might be said to superficially resemble at a genetic level) and instead maybe drifts off into the 1960s mainstream Hollywood, bloated and relatively less interesting hijinks of movies like What’s New Pussycat? (which I still have a slight, soft spot for, nonetheless) or the Peter Sellers vehicle, The Party. The resemblance is there, perhaps unintentionally and, like those kinds of Hollywood attempts at recapturing the madball antics of earlier generations, mother! kind of falls flat on its face in terms of continuing to engage interest after the, quite compelling, first half hour ...before the languid pacing and tranquil camerawork give way to handheld chaos and an almost reactive way of tracking the action.

So there you go. I didn’t really like mother! too much but it’s not in any way extreme or too disturbing like some of the word of mouth is suggesting. I think the film’s biggest problem is that, after a while, the constant pandemonium which the director is trying to bombard you with just gets a bit boring and you kind of can’t wait for it to end so you can get some peace and quiet. Which is a shame because, like I said before, I truly believe that Aronofsky was one of the great directors of modern cinema and I just wish he would be again. This film, though, feels a little like a diluted, ‘seen it all before’ kind of experience with a simplistic story and, alas, for me... that doesn’t quite tick all the boxes, I’m afraid. If you want to see what stunning work this director can really do then check out Pi or Requiem For A Dream. Those are the two movies that are really going to hook you.

Passengers

Woken Blossoms

Passengers
2016 USA Directed by Morten Tyldum
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Yeah... there are a few spoilers in this one.

I kinda half avoided Passengers over the recent Christmas holidays because of the response I saw it getting on Twitter. However, when I returned to work, somebody told me it was actually very good (and that Jennifer Lawrence wears a bikini a lot) so I thought I’d better go and take a look for myself and see what kind of sci-fi movie this is and... well, it’s problematic.

There’s a kind of moral judgement to be made about a certain character in this movie, right from the early set up of the film, and although the director (who also directed the adaptation of Jo Nesbo’s Headhunters, reviewed here) found this aspect to be what made the story interesting, from what I read, this doesn’t make the character all that palatable the way he’s been played here by Chris Pratt. Possibly my own disappointment in Chris Pratt gleefully owning up to being someone who hunts animals may be some baggage I’m bringing to the film myself though... so I have to be careful about my gut reaction on this one.

It’s funny. If I’d have seen this as a kid in the 1970s, where it might have stood side by side with such classics as Silent Running (reviewed here) I would probably have had no problem at all with this film. As it is and with the current climate of madness to be found on various social media outlets, the central moral question is something which doesn’t sit comfortably with me... particularly the way it’s presented here.

So, okay... the plot is a ship carrying hundreds of passengers across the galaxy in suspended animation for well over a hundred years to start life in their new home malfunctions and one of the passengers, played by Chris Pratt, is woken up 90 years too early... with no hope of getting back to sleep again. After a year with just the robot bartender played by Michael Sheen to keep him company, he finds himself hopelessly on the verge of committing suicide because he is so lonely... and the director, and Pratt, play this for all it’s worth. And the reason the set up is so long... maybe half an hour... is because the story can only move forward if you can sympathise with Pratt’s character and the distraught state he’s in. However, instead of blowing himself out into space without a suit, he falls in love with the profile of another passenger, Aurora, played by Jennifer Lawrence, and wakes her up to keep him company... thus ruining her chances of ever seeing her destination. He doesn’t tell her he woke her... only that her pod malfunctioned like his.

And so the two fall madly in love and, in a whirlwind of interstellar cliché, Pratt is just about to ask her to marry him (being as they’re the only two souls around) when the android mistakenly reveals that Pratt ruined her future by waking her up. She then totally freaks, understandably, and cuts off all communication with Pratt. And here’s where the real problem with the movie kicks in. She could have either forgiven him after a few days of anger or, never forgave him. At least that’s the way I see it. There’s no slow burn that can fix this kind of dilemma that Pratt has been a bit of an eel, suicidal or not, and I think if she is going to go off and refuse contact for as many months as she seems to in the movie, then there’s no going back for them.

However, when one of the ship’s crew, played by Laurence Fishburne, is also woke by his malfunctioning pod, the three are forced to work together to save the ship to stop it, and its crew of hundreds of passengers in suspended animation, from blowing up. However, Fishburne’s character is not so lucky as Pratt’s and it turns out the machine didn’t wake him properly. He’s got maybe a day or two to live due to not coming out of hypersleep properly and then, for the final half an hour or so of the film, Pratt and Lawrence have to put their differences aside and work together. And this is where, for me, the film falls down flat in that Jennifer Lawrence’s Aurora soon forgives and rekindles her love for Pratt as they collaborate against their mutual peril. And it seems to me that this wouldn’t be something that could happen if she had already severed contact for as long as she did. There’s also the problem that giving her love and then making a certain decision she does about something near the end of the film, not going to say what, almost validates and empowers Pratt’s morally grey decision.

And this was a real movie killer for me, it has to be said.

Mostly everything else is pretty good about it... although the script is extremely cliché ridden and there are absolutely no surprises all the way through. The special effects and shot set ups are fine and all the lead actors, including Pratt, are giving some great performances. I’ve not seen Jennifer Lawrence in anything else other than Winter’s Bone (reviewed here) and her three X-Men movies (to date, reviewed here, here and here) but I’m really loving what she’s doing here and suspect that she could reach ‘movie star’ levels pretty soon, if she manages to avoid the career pitfalls of being a successful woman in the Hollywood community. Really think she’s got something going for her in terms of being a box office draw.

Ultimately, Passengers isn’t something I could probably see again but I don’t think it’s a bad sci-fi film and, although it’s morally ambiguous (if you do happen to see Pratt’s character’s actions in shades of grey) I don’t think that die hard fans of the genre will have too many problems with this movie. I think it could have been a lot smarter and a lot less clichéd but I don’t think appealing to anything but the lowest common denominator IQs was probably a factor in the production of the movie. I was a little frustrated because it felt a lot like there was a better movie trying to get out of what is, essentially, just another old 1950s sci-fi short story plot but, I’m guessing I’m really not the kind of science fiction fan that this movie is aimed at. It’s certainly not a terrible film though and although it’s no Silent Running, it’s certainly no Plan 9 From Outer Space either so... yeah, if you’re in the right mood you may want to give this one a look.

X-Men: Apocalypse

Mystique’s Roadshow

X-Men: Apocalypse
2016 USA Directed by Bryan Singer
UK cinema release print.

Partial Warning: The only spoilers in here
are already revealed in the trailers for the film.

I was fulling expecting to have to title this review Apocalypse, No! and to really give this movie some stick. Well, as it turns out, X-Men Apocalypse, the 12th X-Men movie in the series, is actually one of the more entertaining, technically competent and dramatic of the movies in the franchise. What a shame, then, that the writers still find themselves unable to correct the glaring continuity errors thrown up by the movies following the third film in the series, X-Men - Last Stand... something which everyone was pretty much hoping they would have been able to finally put to rest with the ‘time fixing’ previous, mostly awful installment in the franchise, X-Men - Days Of Future Past (reviewed by me here).

The way I see it we’ve got two main problems in the cinematic narrative that really aren’t taken care of. One is the previous movie starting out from a point where the original timeline version of Professor X, played by Patrick Stewart, is alive and well and somehow still inhabiting a body with the same physical appearance and vocal chords, even though he was killed before Jean Grey died, which Wolverine from that timeline clearly remembers happening. So they shot themselves in the foot straight away as far as I can tell.

Next we have them journeying back to a time after the Cerebro machine was already built in the X-Men First Class timeline, therefore not correcting the fact that Professor X and Magneto were supposed to have built it together.

Thirdly, we have the X-Men Origins - Wolverine movie (reviewed by me here) fairly compromised in various ways and... I’m not even going to attempt to go there and unravel the fallout on that.

Most of the other ‘seeming’ continuity errors are, for the most part, explainable but it’s really a shame that the same writers who have given us a script as interesting and entertaining as this one can’t be bothered to solve these issues properly. This is what happens when you don’t properly follow the franchise bible folks... this is pretty much the ‘George Lucas’ way of ‘ignoring stuff writing’ that’s going on here... and it’s only twelve films in!

Alas, not only does it not correct these errors... it seems to compound them further in some sequences. Also... what gives with the actors in this trilogy (this film and the previous two X-Men badged movies) being set in three different decades of the timeline? The 1960s (X-Men - First Class... reviewed by me here), the 1970s (X-Men - Days Of Future Past) and the 1980s (X-Men - Apocalypse) are all covered by the same actors playing mutants and humans alike who... somehow... don’t seem to age at all in the movies between decades. Okay, so in the case of Wolverine and Mystique you can kinda understand it but everyone else? This is not good time-lining, people? I guess that’s why Magneto’s son is revealed as Quicksilver perhaps (no spoilers here folks... it’s in the trailer) but a certain other mother/son relationship is kept under wraps still (as it was in X-Men 2). Michael Fassbender still looks a little too young but can maybe get away with it. The other two... people might not find it all that credible, methinks.

Also... it’s interesting that we have Quicksilver’s sister absent here but, she’s all over the ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe’ Avengers franchise... with her origins somewhat different to the comic and with Quicksilver already killed off in that franchise. I’m wondering why more casual viewers to these films aren’t questioning this, to be honest. Or maybe people just don’t care?

Anyway, I suppose I’d better mention some of the good stuff about this movie now, right? Since I liked it so much.

Apocalypse is played absolutely brilliantly by Oscar Isaac, who manages to play a pretty shallowly written character with the amount of conviction necessary to make these cardboard bad guys stand out and seem way more interesting and vital than they perhaps usually are. You believe in him and his power to galvanise his ‘four horsemen’ and I really appreciated the Egyptian tint to the proceedings in the earlier part of the film. A very strong opening set in ancient Egypt satisfied my own penchant for the iconography of the time and place and, amazingly, the rest of the film lives up to the amazing opening sequence... not just in spectacle but in the way the characters interact. And that includes a lovely opening title design which matches the style of a lot of the previous films but with a load of entertaining ‘historical colour’ thrown in for good measure.

Michael Fassbender,  James McAvoy and Jennifer Lawrence all do a bang up job and they are ably supported by new and old cast members alike. The continuing drama of Magneto’s back story is extremely moving and takes us right back to reminders of the opening sequences of both X-Men and X-Men - First Class, building on the inherent, rich material of the character’s troubled legacy and adding to the psychological motivation of the character, explaining why he is who he is, still, and why he does what he does. It doesn’t quite explain the way in which the character veers towards the end of the movie, I think, but the choice he makes doesn’t break the boundaries of credibility too far and I think they just about get away with it without compromising Magneto too much, to be fair.

Evan Peters’ Quicksilver is great again in this one. He’s written well and his big set piece, which took some months to shoot and which involved him being on the set longer than any of the other cast members, by all accounts, is another triumphant one... with the quirky humour of the character coming out in a high pressure situation. Singer catches a repeat trick stylistically too, with composer John Ottman’s magnificent score stopping dead as the character is backed up again with a famous pop song for the entire sequence. Which is something which I suspect audiences will subconsciously get a lot of enjoyment out of... even if the sequence isn’t quite up to the calibre of the previous movie (which was one of the few good things about X-Men - Days Of Future Past).

And that’s about it for this one. If you like X-Men movies then this is certainly a good one... I’d say it’s my seventh favourite in the series so far. So don’t miss out on this one unless, like me, the screaming continuity problems of these films drives you absolutely mad. Then you might have a problem.