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X-Men: Apocalypse is a retro superhero blockbuster, and not just because it happens to be set in the eighties.

At this stage, the X-Men franchise is practically a warhorse of superhero cinema. Although Blade tends to get overlooked in discussions of the current superhero boom, it is fair to trace the current deluge of superhero films back to the twin releases of Bryan Singer’s X-Men and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man. Without those two films, released more than a decade-and-a-half ago, the current blockbuster landscape would look a lot different. Those films changed audience expectations and demonstrated what could be done with the format.

There have two big screen reboots of Spider-Man in the intervening years, with both Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland stepping into the red booties vacated by Tobey Maguire. In contrast, the Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart are still playing the iconic roles they established more than fifteen years ago, with X-Men: Days of Future Past straining to reconcile the original cast with the replacements who appeared in X-Men: First Class. However, in the intervening years, superhero cinema has changed dramatically.

In many respects, Apocalypse feels like the X-Men is playing catch-up with the generation of superhero blockbusters that arrived it its wake, taking the opportunity to do its own big “rock ’em, sock ’em” apocalyptic superhero team-up showdown of the kind that has never really featured in the franchise. Apocalypse finds the X-Men franchise embracing a particular style of superhero brawler typified by The Avengers back in 2012. Ironically, the genre itself has moved on, leaving the entire exercise feeling a little quaint.

One of the things that Bryan Singer brought to the superhero genre with X-Men was a sense of seriousness. In the wake of neon disasters like Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, Singer grounded the superhero genre. The opening scene of X-Men is set at Auschwitz, and remains one of the most harrowing and effective sequences in the history of the genre. That opening sequence changed everything in a way that seems almost quaint after The Dark Knight. However, Christopher Nolan could never have made Batman Begins without X-Men.

Part of that seriousness involved a relatively muted tone. X-Men was definitely a superhero film; it featured a frog man with giant tongue who could spit bile, and had a sequence in which Bruce Davison literally melted into a puddle. There were plenty of gags, some of which worked well and some of which were “do you know what happens to a toad when it gets hit by lightning?” However, there was a clear emphasis on darkness and seriousness. Magneto wore grey rather than red. The heroes wore black leather instead of blue and gold spandex.

This is not to dismiss or belittle X-Men in any way. However, there was a sense of restraint to the film. The film clocked in at approximately one hundred minutes. The climax unfolded pretty much entirely on and around the Statue of Liberty, with a largely abstract threat posed to the city of New York. Singer very consciously put the emphasis on characters and dynamics rather than on large scale spectacle, and it was something that worked in the movie’s favour. X-Men helped to give the genre credibility and weight.

However, times changed and the superhero movie evolved. As audiences become increasingly comfortable with the narrative conventions and basic rules of the genre, film-makers began to feel comfortable stretching them and playing with them. Marvel began to build its own gigantic shared universe of overlapping properties. Budgets ballooned. Large-scale property damage became the norm. Over time, a basic structure emerged, one honed and perfected by Marvel.

In contrast, the X-Men movies remained quite apart from all that. The original trilogy took place before these genre conventions settled into place. X-Men II set its big climax at an abandoned dam. X-Men III set its royal rumble on Alcatraz Island. Compared to the siege of New York in The Avengers or the attack on London in Thor: The Dark World or the destruction wrought through Washington in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, these sequences seem positively quaint.

Even when Fox decided to do a loose reboot of the franchise with First Class and Days of Future Past, the franchise remained its own little subgenre of superhero action movie following its own conventions rather than those of the larger genre. Inevitably, Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr would team up; unavoidably, they would clash. There would be mutants on both sides of the conflict. As much as Magneto was the “big bad”, he was always a sympathetic and well-drawn character who was more of an anti-villain than a comic book villain.

Days of Future Past saw Singer return to the franchise, following his departure after X-Men II. That film was largely about bridging the various X-Men films and serving to tie them all together into something loosely resembling a cinematic continuity. Of course, as anybody who has ever tried to read an X-Men comic would attest, the characters seem to resist such “tidying.” It is highly debatable whether the continuity wrangling of Days of Future Past makes sense on its own terms. It is impossible to reconcile it with Apocalypse.

Nevertheless, regardless of whether it actually makes sense or not, Days of Future Past served to clean the slate. It restored Bryan Singer’s stewardship of the franchise and created a clear thematic continuity with the earlier films. It also represented the fifth consecutive X-Men film to take the concept of mutants as a “feared and hated” minority as its central emotional crux. The X-Men have long been a metaphor for minorities or oppressed groups, but there is a sense that the franchise had to look a little bit beyond that basic template.

While the X-Men are an effective metaphor for those with differences, they are also comic book characters. The fifty years of comic book stories that inspired these six feature films have used the X-Men to tell all manner of stories, not all of which are civil rights allegories. Chris Claremont wrote Uncanny X-Men for seventeen years. That would be an impossible length of time for a writer essentially telling variations on the same story over and over and over again. In fact, Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men is notoriously elastic in genre.

Claremont tied the X-Men into all sorts of stories, from space operas to time travel epics to magic adventures to fairytales. Under Claremont’s pen, Uncanny X-Men could go from referencing classic samurai films to riffing on Alien. The X-Men faced more than just other mutants and bigots, they stared down intergalactic empires and clones and demons. There was an extended stretch under Claremont’s pen when Uncanny X-Men was the superhero comic book to read, much like Singer’s X-Men films had once been the superhero films to watch.

Days of Future Past offered a little hint of the flexibility of the X-Men as a film franchise. Although most viewers would recognise the plot as an homage to James Cameron’s The Terminator, with a character travelling back in time to prevent a dystopian future featuring killer robots from coming to pass, the truth is that Chris Claremont and John Byrne had conceived that story years before the release of The Terminator. While the film still fell back on the whole “racist humans oppress mutants” beats, the structure was relatively novel.

In that context, Apocalypse makes a great deal of sense. Apocalypse pretty much amounts to a bit of genre experimentation for the larger X-Men franchise. In particular, it seems to have stemmed from a single core idea, “What if we did what The Avengers did, but with the X-Men?” With that in mind, a lot of the film’s creative choices make a great deal of sense. Apocalypse is a film that takes a great deal of pleasure in running through what is effective a very typical superhero play book.

A lot of the beats in Apocalypse are incredibly generic, feeling almost like stock elements lifted from the kinds of films inspired by Singer’s original X-Men. This is particularly true of the villain. Apocalypse is an iconic and popular X-Men villain, but he is a fairly generic bad guy. He is a genocidal megalomaniac who is tied to the X-Men mythos by the recurring suggestion that he is one of the earliest reported mutants and that his particular brand of mass murder has a consciously Social Darwinist aesthetic.

That is about as much development as the character receives over the course of Apocalypse, to the point that it seems almost perverse to cast Oscar Isaac in the role and cover him in blue paint so that he can wax lyrical about “the strong.” In many ways, the character of Apocalypse resembles the version of the Red Skull who appeared in Captain America: The First Avenger, a stock comic book bad guy who looks like he is up to no good and never really bothers outlining a motivation beyond a desire to inflict casualties on a massive scale.

There are a few hints at a more complex motivation or interpretation of what Apocalypse is and what he represents. Over the course of the film, Singer returns time and time again to the idea of religion and godhood. The first image in the credits sequence is a station of the cross. Apocalypse refers to the inhabitants of the world as his “children” and decries the betrayal of “false gods.” He explains that he has been known by many names, including “Ra.” At one point, the classic Star Trek episode Who Mourns for Adonais? is even playing on television to help signal theme.

There are a few suggestions scattered through the film that Apocalypse represents religious violence. Certainly, his nihilistic apocalyptic philosophy taps into certain interpretations of ISIS. The bulk of the action unfolds in Egypt. Apocalypse looks longingly at Xavier’s ability to literally tap into hearts and minds, to brainwash. Confronting an old friend who has been seduced by Apocalypse’s rhetoric, Xavier urges, “He’s tapping into your rage and anger.” At one point, Apocalypse prepares to stage the public beheading of a captured foe.

However, Apocalypse never quite commits to this idea. Apocalypse’s religious violence is contrasted with Kurt Wagner’s more silent and optimistic faith, quietly praying in moment of stress. Similarly, the religious elements of Apocalypse’s rampage are contrasted with quick cuts to the situation room in the Pentagon, in which members of the United States government are shown to be praying. Apocalypse hints at these ideas, but never commits entirely. Apocalypse is himself a relatively blank slate.

In this, the character is true to his comic book roots. Apocalypse is a recurring foe of the X-Men, who likely made a big impression owing to two significant factors. The character featured heavily on X-Men: The Animated Series in the early nineties, which puts him in prime position to capitalise on the wave of nineties nostalgia that is currently sweeping into cinemas. (The trailer for Independence Day: Resurgence played right before this screening of Apocalypse.) The second factor is the character’s prominence in the nineties crossover Age of Apocalypse.

Of course, Apocalypse himself is somewhat tangential to that massive mid-nineties crossover, the big bad who happens to benefit from (rather than instigate) a split in the timeline that sees him successfully conquer the world because the X-Men were not around to stop him. While Apocalypse is a major figure in that crossover, lending it his name, the big selling point of those comics was the opportunity to explore the X-Men in a dystopian alternate present not too far removed from that seen in Days of Future Past. Apocalypse himself is incidental.

While it might have been fun for Apocalypse to run with that big idea of an alternate world in which all of our heroes have transformed into anti-heroes because of a single death all those years ago, the film is not interested in such high-concept storytelling. Days of Future Past just did time travel; it might be a bit much to jump right into parallel timelines. Instead, Apocalypse revels in the relatively one-dimensional nature of its antagonist who engages in large-scale destruction seemingly for the sake of it.

When Apocalypse assembles his four horsemen and starts wreaking havoc on a massive scale, Mystique and Beast effectively forced to assemble a rag-tag bunch of teenagers in order to save the world. There is no real emotional core to the conflict. Although Apocalypse features a number of sequences of characters attempting to convince one another not to do terrible things, the film consciously lacks the richness and ambiguity that defined such earlier instalments. Charles and Eric have been having the same fight for over a decade, the edges have dulled.

This is perhaps most obvious in the way that Apocalypse handles the relationship between Charles Xavier and Moira McTaggart. One of the more interesting aspects of First Class was the recurring sense that Charles Xavier was not a good person, certainly not as good as he claimed to be. This is, after all, a man with the ability to control minds who runs a school where he turns vulnerable young teenagers into weapons of mass destruction. While he advocates peaceful coexistence over Erik’s retaliatory violence, Charles comes from a position of privilege.

First Class presented Charles as young and reckless, a man dedicated to pursuing his own agenda with no concern about the experience or welfare of others. The character seemed just as committed to the idea of mutants inheriting the earth as Erik was, to the point that his thesis posited humanity as a species on the verge of extinction. Charles was just willing to wage a war of attrition rather than outright violence, using his family’s money and the bomb shelter under their estate to effectively “wait out” the older species.

Key to this ambiguous portrayal of the character was the recurring suggestion that Charles was not entirely altruistic with his mental powers. First Class framed a narrative of the friendship between Xavier and Erik where the metal-plated telepath-proof helmet seemed like a prudent rather than paranoid fashion choice for Eric. This was underscored at the end of the film, when Charles uses his mental powers to wipe Moira’s memory. It was a scene evoking the iconography of Superman II‘s infamous “kiss of forgetting”, but consciously playing up the creepiness.

Days of Future Past toned down this portrayal of Charles, somewhat. The character was still presented as selfish and privileged, disconnected from the world and willing to sit on the margins as terrible things happened, but the film seemed more sympathetic to its protagonist. Charles represented a generation that had allowed their dreams to erode in the gap between the sixties and seventies, hope giving way to cynicism. Charles was not as creepy as he had been in First Class, presented more as a failed and ineffective guardian than a selfish manipulator.

However, Apocalypse strips any hint of ambiguity from the character and opts for a much more conventionally heroic portrayal. Whereas First Class problematicised the character’s abilities, Apocalypse treats them as a standard superhero skillset. When Alex Summers asks if Charles has been using Cerebro to “check up” on Moira, Charles bumbles, “Maybe once… twice. Not in a long time.” While First Class treated Charles’ mental intrusions as voyeuristic and creepily paternalistic, here they serve to make him a superpowered Hugh Grant.

This has the unfortunate side effect of downplaying his violation of Moira at the end of First Class. Singer was widely criticised in Superman Returns for mishandling that infamous “kiss of forgetting” to turn the Man of Steel into a date raping super stalker, and there are faint shades of that here. The movie makes repeated reference to the heavy burden of Charles’ power, with little regard for the violation of Moira. In fact, Moira’s hazy memories of her time with the X-Men are played as a joke, subject to knowing glances from the cast.

Whereas First Class suggested that wiping Moira’s memory was a matter of convenience for Charles, an easy way to tidy up a loose end, Apocalypse attempts to cast him as a martyr who sacrificed love to protect those under his care. When Moira is reintroduced to Cerebra, she gasps, “The CIA would kill for this.” Singer offers a closeup on Charles’ anguished face. “I know,” he solemnly replies, as if justifying past wrongs. When Charles states that wiping Moira’s memory was “for the best”, Alex Summers pointedly asks, “Was it best for you?”

This is perhaps the biggest misstep and the strongest tonal shift on trying to transition the X-Men film franchise into a more conventional superhero narrative. Apocalypse is drawn a lot broader than First Class or Days of Future Past, which means that Charles is transformed from a flawed leader to a paragon of virtue. Apocalypse is such a clear-cut bad guy that he serves to transform Charles into an unambiguous hero. Charles might use his powers to spy on unsuspecting young women, but Apocalypse has truly evil intentions for them.

Allowing for these issues of tone, there is something quite fun about watching Apocalypse cut loose in a more cartoonish manner than any of its predecessors. Apocalypse is not sympathetic or an anti-hero. At times, the particulars of why he does what he does are somewhat unclear, but the movie is never on the fence. Apocalypse is always doing stuff because it is evil, and he is always opposed by those who are morally righteous. As a result, Apocalypse can indulge in the kind of superhero bombast that defines films like Captain America: Civil War.

It is worth, for example, comparing and contrasting the presentation of the classic X-Men character Psylocke in Apocalypse with her appearance in X-Men III. When the character was employed as part of Brett Ratner’s conclusion to that first trilogy, she was very much toned down to the point that it would be hard to recognise her as the same character. However, by the time that Apocalypse rolls around, it is possible for Bryan Singer to use the character of Psylocke, using her classic (and ridiculous) swimsuit ninja costume.

Of course, it is worth debating whether any of this is a good idea. By its nature, Apocalypse is a fairly hollow film without a lot of the resonance that made so many of the earlier X-Men films so effective. This is arguably reflected in the movie’s eighties setting. While First Class used its sixties setting to help contextualise its civil rights metaphor and embrace the spirit that gave birth to these characters, while Days of Future Past explored how the utopian idealism of the sixties gave way to the cynicism of the seventies, Apocalypse‘s period setting is strangely vapid.

It is lovingly recreated. Jennifer Lawrence has a fantastically eighties hairstyle. James McAvoy spends the second half of the film wearing a blazer and purple v-neck combo that would make Don Johnson blush. Ms. Pacman puts in an appearance. The movie’s most joyous set piece is set to Sweet Dreams by the Eurythmics. Ronald Reagan hangs on the wall. However, there is very little of the spirit of the eighties captured on film, in the same way that the First Class embraced the sixties or Days of Future Past ran with the seventies.

There are little touches, here and there. There is more than a little Raiders of the Lost Ark to the sequences of Moira McTaggart investigating a mysterious tomb in Cairo. The ancient circuit boards employed by Apocalypse occasionally light up like Tron. The movie’s focus on Egypt perhaps reflects the way that much of the modern-day strife in the Middle-East can be traced back to the eighties. Perhaps its is even more than that. Perhaps the soullessness of the eighties is the central thematic point of the film. Either way, there is a hollowness to it.

Similarly, as much fun as Singer is having running through the conventional superhero film beats, it feels like Apocalypse has arrived relatively late to the party. This sort of blockbuster should have arrived four or five years ago. The aesthetic of the film is very much that of The Avengers, with its emphasis on a team of losers and their sense of humour and the fairly one-note bad guy played by a lovable actor who might be described as “the internet’s boyfriend.” However, The Avengers feels quite dated at this point. It is a previous generation superhero film.

Contemporary superhero cinema has moved on from those sorts of generic slugfests in favour of experiments with genre. The Winter Soldier is largely an espionage film with political subtext. Guardians of the Galaxy is a space opera. Ant Man is a heist movie. Iron Man III is a Shane Black film. Deadpool is a spoof. It seems like the genre has reached a point where it needs to diversify in order to survive, to the point that Apocalypse’s Social Darwinism feels almost like a cruel punchline. The character himself needs to move on.

There is an irony in all this. This year has been all about big “hero-against-hero” showdowns; Daredevil, Batman vs. Superman, Civil War. In some respects, it feels like those films learned a lot from the earlier X-Men movies, with their emphasis on a conflict between two sets of reasonably sympathetic characters. Charles and Eric are more convincing frenemies than Tony and Steve or Bruce and Clark. In fact, that aspect of their character has been established much longer. So modern superhero cinema is incorporating a lot from the X-Men films.

At the same time, it feels rather retrograde for Apocalypse to incorporate the rather basic plotting and large-scale destruction that marked so much of the last decade’s superhero films. There is something very quaint and endearing about this, a sense of nostalgic attachment and affection. This is Singer very consciously setting out to do archetypal superhero cinema, even if superhero cinema has begun to focus on concepts like speciation and definition. Singer is going broad at a time when the genre is going narrow.

This nostalgia is something of a recurring thread. Apocalypse returns time and time again to ideas already established in the X-Men film canon, taking them and tweaking them. There are points where it does feel like Singer is repeating himself. There is a return to Auschwitz that does not feel entirely deserved. There is a subplot borrowed pretty much beat-for-beat from X-Men II, even involving the same antagonist. Charles and Erik have the same conversation they had at the end of X-Men almost verbatim.

It is hard to figure out what point Singer is trying to make including these particular sequences. Are these just crowd-pleasing moments remixed for a younger audience because they worked the first time, an example of pop culture effectively eating itself? Are these a wink from Singer assuring viewers that he is perfectly willing to reclaim and reimagine aspects of the mythos already explored? After all, it seems like everybody is expecting another attempt to do the “Dark Phoenix” saga. These elements are not strong enough to hurt the film, but they are distracting.

And, yet, in spite of all these issues, there is a certain charm to all of this. Apocalypse knows exactly what it is trying to do, and it knows how to accomplish it. This is pure indulgence, but it is indulgence that has been earned. Singer is an energetic and excited director. Apocalypse is not a short film by any measure, and features perhaps a few too many characters and a few too many diversions, but boy does it move. The film never quits, never slows down, never stops. It is infectious and exciting in its own way.

Singer is clearly relishing the opportunity to put his own slant on superhero set pieces like large-scale urban destruction and unnecessarily complicated exposition. Apocalypse might not be a three-dimensional foil for Charles or Erik, but is make-up and costuming is bold and distinctive. Isaac is not given any nuanced material, but he gladly swings wild. There is very little in Apocalypse that is new or novel, but the point is that it is new and novel to this production team. It feels like everybody involved is glad to have a crack at doing “generic superhero film.”

In its own way, the film embraces its own weird internal comic book logic. One of the joys of the superhero explosion has been in watching the genre incorporate elements from the source medium, whether it is the superhero team-up in The Avengers, the idea of legacy heroes in Ant-Man or even notion of heroes fighting heroes in Civil War. In moving the action forward another decade, Apocalypse seems to embrace the idea of so-called “comic book time”, the idea that time movies slower for these characters than it does in real life.

After all, twenty odd years have passed since the events of First Class. In an early classroom scene, a teacher makes it clear that many years have passed since the events of Days of Future Past. While Mystique is a shape-shifter, Charles and Erik do not look twenty-years older. When Charles encounters his old flame Moira McTaggart, he wryly reflects, “She hasn’t aged a day.” There is a sense that the characters are somehow timeless, frozen in time. It is an interesting approach, one made possible by the “period” trappings of the trilogy.

This is a comic book convention. Uncanny X-Men has been in constant publication since the sixties. However, Cyclops is not a septuagenarian. Peter Parker might have graduated high school and college, but he has not aged consistently with the publication of The Amazing Spider-Man. Trying to explain the workings of time within a shared comic book universe is a fascinating topic of discussion, where the world changes around the characters while the characters themselves remain (relatively) static.

Apocalypse embraces this aspect of comic book time-keeping. The characters feel like they have been trapped in amber since the end of Days of Future Past. How close can Charles and Erik really be if they only met once in the sixties and then randomly bumped into one another in the seventies and eighties? It makes no sense if time flows as the audience understands it, but works quite well within the emotional framework of the movie. It feels real, and the film does not care at all that it does not hold up to any scrutiny.

It helps that the X-Men movies have always benefited from great casting. Charles Xavier has been played by Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy. Erik Lensherr has been played by Ian McKellen and Michael Fassbender. McAvoy and Fassbender have been somewhat sidelined since First Class, but they remain two of the best actors in superhero cinema at the moment. Watching the pair interact is always fun, even if the material is shallower this time. In particular, McAvoy does “bumbling English charm” particularly well.

Apocalypse is rounded out by veterans including Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult and Rose Byrne. Lawrence is very much the star of the show, her celebrity offering her incredible gravity over the series around her. First Class was phenomenally lucky when it signed Jennifer Lawrence, casting her as a character secondary in importance to the then more recognisable Fassbender and McAvoy. By the time Days of Future Past rolled around, Lawrence was a big enough star that Mystique was the point around which the movie must pivot.

By Apocalypse, Mystique is the de facto lead character. Both Charles and Erik are conspicuously sidelined by the half-way point in Apocalypse, forcing Mystique to effectively assemble a squad of heroes. Lawrence is great in the role, and the script acknowledges how strange the character’s arc must be. Characters repeatedly acknowledge Mystique as “the hero” and “the symbol of a new age”, to the point that seems like the film is aware of how Lawrence’s fame and success have warped the character’s role in the narrative to make her a lead character.

Lawrence is good enough to play that role, and there is something strangely appropriate in allowing Mystique to occupy that space in the story. Mystique was positioned as pawn between Charles and Erik in First Class, fighting for her own agency in Days of Future Past. It makes sense for Mystique to emerge as a hybrid, to effectively chart her own course between Charles’ pacifism and Erik’s more militant sensibilities. Apocalypse never dwells too heavily on it, but the script is sharp enough that works.

The script never takes itself entirely seriously. In fact, despite the apocalyptic scale of the destruction, it is possible to argue that Apocalypse is the lightest of the six primary X-Men films. (The influence of Deadpool might be keenly felt.) Highlights include a charming moment of Nightcrawler trying to count to three, only to realise that he only has two fingers on each hand, and just about any moment featuring Evan Peters as the faster-than-sound mutant Quicksilver. He even gets an extended (and more playful) riff on his scene from Days of Future Past.

There are moments when the script almost seems a little too self-aware for its own good. At one point, Cyclops decides to play hookie from school and takes his friends on a trip to the mall. While there, they catch a screening of Star Wars: Episode VI – The Return of the Jedi. It is an appropriate choice, given that the X-Men films have a continuity that quite clearly mirrors that of the Star Wars series; three original films, followed by three prequels, with a series a standalone adventures in between.

Leaving the cinema, the young mutants argue about the respective merits of the various films in the trilogy. Jubilee contends that Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes back is the true classic of the series. Scott Summers, purest that he is, insists that the original must be considered more important. Jean Grey suggests some common ground, “At least we can agree that the third film in the series is always the worst?” she quips. It is a moment that stops just short of having the characters turn to the camera and wink, while leaving a little ambiguity.

Is Singer taking a pot shot at the infamous X-Men III, the first film in the franchise to be directed by somebody other than himself and which is widely blamed for derailing the franchise to the point that a soft reboot was necessary? After all, it seems like a nice way to clear the decks and set up the idea that Singer might finally get a chance to put his own spin on the infamous Dark Phoenix Saga, by completely and utterly disowning the last big budget attempt to do justice to that iconic (and defining) superhero story.

However, it is worth acknowledging that Apocalypse is itself the third film in a trilogy, and Singer might just as easily be making reference to his own work here. It is certainly a wry and self-aware way to preemptively shrug off any criticism, as if conceding right off the bat that Apocalypse is a weaker film than First Class and Days of Future Past. Nevertheless, Singer doesn’t labour the point long enough to make it clear whether the remark is dig at X-Men III or a self-aware ironic jab at Apocalypse at both. There is a lightness and irreverence to it that suits the movie around it.

Apocalypse works very well, despite its noticeable handicaps. It is very much an indulgence that feels out of touch with the cinematic landscape around it, but one that works because of the charm and energy of the cast and crew. The X-Men films effectively birthed the superhero movie genre. It only seems appropriate that they should enjoy some of the spoils.

Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: film, Movie, non-review review, review, x-men, x-men: apocalypse |