I saw X-Men: Apocalypse tonight. It sank in about 20 minutes into the movie that this wasn’t a story about people, but about gods fighting incomprehensible battles with each other. So we had one set of gods exerting their will and destroying human civilization all around the world (one lesson from all of these X-Movies: Magneto really hates bridges), and then some other gods opposing them with the force of their will, and then someone yells “UNLEASH YOUR POWER!” at one of the other gods, and a bad god gets magically zapped. That’s really it. There’s no interesting personalities interacting, and each escalation in the conflict is resolved by another mutant grunting really loudly and waving their hands.
Oh, and along the way, Cairo and all of its inhabitants are casually annihilated. No one seems to care.
That’s the other thing about gods. In addition to being mind-numbing and unimaginative, even the good ones aren’t very nice.
This is something that I don’t understand about super heroes: they need super villains to make them interesting. The result is that normal people tend to slowly disappear.
Disappear, or more spectacularly, get disintegrated during the destruction of a city.
But they’re weak nobodies, so it’s OK.
Doesn’t that describe most action-driven forms of media in general?
I have a much higher tolerance for action films than you do, and even I didn’t like this film. SPOILERS AHEAD!
Magneto kills a bunch of people after out of hate and fear they kill his family.
Xavier “I know that there is good in you still”.
Magneto kills a LOT more people after being manipulated by an evil fallen god.
Mystik “This isn’t you- please there is a better way”
Magneto stops killing people after he helps kill just one more person.
“Hooray, I knew you could be redeemed! Now let’s go back to the mansions, rebuild, and greet this better day”.
Um, what? Hundreds of thousands dead people at a minimum, or at the very least 2 dozen from your tiny Ukrainian town (and probably the largest employer) and you’re not going to jail? You’re not having to use your powers under restraints to rebuild the bridges and world you destroyed? You’re not having to apologize to each and every person who’s lives were effected and destroyed by your actions who will listen to your apology? THIS is justice? Teh fuck?
And that’s just the direct stuff. Yeah, other mutants helped save the day at the end, but you know that this is going to set mutant rights back. Not to mention that you helped someone completely re-arrange the balance of powers* and the geopolitical situation in ways that are not yet understood and could easily go wrong. It just seemed rather blase about the likely consequences, and muddled the civil rights metaphor in terrible ways.
I do like superhero movies. I like a kinetic movie, I like modern myth-telling, I find it interesting what it says about our culture and what we value and what we struggle with. Sometimes I think it does help to boil down metaphors to their component parts to look at it that way, and it’s a lot easier to get millions of people to watch a two hour movie than it is to sit through the same intro to philosophy course. But that’s why I hate it when they are paint by numbers CGI explosion fests with absolutely nothing to say about anything.
*Why are supervillians all for nuclear disarmament? GI Joe 2 pulled this as well. You’d think this is a superhero thing to do, but when Superman did it it meant he was sliding into facist-dom. Weird.
No way.
Calvinball is *awesome*.
@PZ well, yes. They are irrelevant to the plot and irrelevant to the drama.
Yup. :<
It's irritating, because I really wanted to like it. And it had Nightcrawler in it! Nightcrawler rocks! It is physically impossible to make an X-Men movie with Nightcrawler that sucks. Somehow they've managed it twice, but it is impossible, I assure you!
I did like the bits with Magneto being a normal guy with a normal family and normal things… and obviously I understand that couldn’t last, because narrative, but ffs, was it necessary to drop a fridge on his family? “And this is why he’s ok with mass murder again.” Bah!
The Quicksilver scene was alright, but I’m getting the feeling that he’s just there to pad the story, and is going to continue being there to pad the story in the rest of the films in this sequence, however many that might be. “And then a bad thing happened that happened very fast, but Quicksilver was there, so let’s watch him run around while the world moves slowly for 5 or 10 minutes.”
antigone10:
I’m not sure the hyper-kinetic superhero movie has ever been done better than The Powerpuff Girls Movie. And if you come away from that movie having absorbed no deeper a message than “never trust a monkey”, you’ve learned an important lesson.
Twice? X2 was one of the good ones.
“Top Ten” could actually make an interesting superhero film. Favourite character: The blind cab driver whose power is to drive people not where the want to go but where they are needed (while causing countless car accidents along the way)
A superhero movie about the Authority would also be something. Imagine watching Apollo and the Midnighter asking the Secretary of justice some hard questions about waterboarding while holding him from the top of the Empire State Building. Pure revenge fantasy, but fun.
Also, lots of gross humor, especially the stuff written by Garth Ennis.
Flashing back to the climactic duel between Harry Potter and Voldemort in “How Harry Potter Should Have Ended.”
VOLDEMORT: I’m pointing my wand at you as hard as I can!
Gods battle gods with humans suffering the consequences. This story is at least 4,000 years old.
During the first few scenes of the movie I had high hopes. We discover a certain character to have a family, for example, and the possibility of interesting character development is in the air.
Then the story gets rolling and…well, there is no real story. We meet new characters who aren’t interesting and get no real dialogue, we watch destruction ruin lives around the globe with apparently no consequences, and instead of a climax we get, as you say, “unleash your power” and some zapping.
Also, when the big god is giving all the little gods powerups, he armors all of them except one, who spends the movie glaring at people in what appears to be a very uncomfortable bathing suit.
@tarski
Oh my, the stupid costumes! SPOILERS AGAIN What, precisely was Psylocke’s motivation? Major character trait? History? The characters get broad strokes characterization, but we get nothing on Psylocke. Why did she turn on Callaban? How did she feel about killing people? Why did they let her leave at the end? What piece of personal information do we have about her in the slightest? She was the worst Sexy Lamp I’ve seen in a really, really long time.
Psyloche wasn’t a character, she was a pair of boobs and a lightsaber.
I have to admit that one of my reactions upon seeing it was, “And to think of the problems the Avengers had for destroying just a couple of cities. Imagine what kind of reaction the X-Men are going to have as a result of Magneto destroying civilization.”
As they quip in the upcoming Independence Day movie: They love destroying the landmarks.
Whoop. Dodged a bullet there. I saw the trailer and it had “X-Men 3” written all over it, and not even the presence of Psylocke in a relatively comics-accurate costume managed to convince me to buy a ticket. The suits involved in this don’t seem to get that what made the good X-Men movies good was the character drama, and the quality of the entries takes a plunge whenever it goes the “explosions, big set pieces, save the world” route.
Maybe the same reason so many movies have Nukes as the good guys’ deus ex machina of choice. See: Pacific Rim.
vaiyt wrote:
Yeah, the best people are giving this movie seems to be “At least it’s not X-Men Origins: Wolverine bad.” That’s a very low bar. Sadly, most X-Men movies seem to suffer from having too many characters, so none of them see any real development. You can’t really do character development on five to ten heroes and and an equal number of villains in two hours with or without the action sequences that people expect in these movies.
It says something that the best X-Men movie regarding characterization and respect to the original material has been Deadpool.