** MILD SPOILERS**
My Digital Crack podcast-mate, Punisher, gifted me a rare opportunity: a chance to see a movie I was afraid to spend my money on.
On the Wednesday before its official release, Punisher and I went to our local movie theater to catch an advance screening of X-Men: Apocalypse. It’s a movie that I dreaded seeing, because of both my love of the original source material – I love the X-Men comics and collected them for years – and the rather milquetoast way the trailers hyped it. I mean…doesn’t the word APOCALYPSE signify more than Ivan Ooze from Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers causing some property damage? I would think so, but the trailers gave me a Super Sentai vibe I didn’t like.
When the movie finished and I walked out of the theater, there were a couple of cheerful ladies present, clipboard in hand, ready to ask my opinion of the movie. I still feel horrible to this day that, upon encountering their smiles and marketing-prompted inquisitiveness, all I could do was say, “it was terrible,” then walk off as if my fingerprints would be found, and they would somehow implicate me in something illegal.
I don’t feel like I walked away from a movie theater that day; I feel like I fled an active crime scene.
This is not a review of X-Men: Apocalypse. I cannot be objective enough to review this movie properly; I am too fond of the original source material to ever believe I could give this movie anything even remotely close to a fair chance. This is, instead, an article that poses one honest, serious question:
When did the word APOCALYPSE become the equivalent of a really bad day?
For the record, I believe Oscar Isaac is a phenomenal character actor. When he was cast as the titular character, I held hope that the role would be, at the very least, in the hands of someone who could do the character justice. Bad writing can sometimes be remedied by someone who can make the character surpass its dialogue.
Not in this case.
In order to explain just how underwhelming En Sabah Nur – Apocalypse’s given name in the books – seemed in this movie, I will have to do what I would normally refuse to do under these circumstances: compare this movie to a Hollywood classic.
Imagine a movie that sought to reenact the awe and spectacle of Cecil B. Demille’s epic film, The Ten Commandments. In that classic movie, Moses was more than just a prophet; he was portrayed as God’s very own pointer finger. Wherever he tread, the world moved. Imagine the scene where he parted the seas to let his people pass as an example. In the era of its filming, that scene was pure magic. People of that time were absolutely dumbfounded by its sheer awesomeness. As a 5-year-old child watching that movie on TV decades later, I was flabbergasted. My mind could not properly process the scene without crying out a chorus of oohs and ahhs. The man just split a sea in half because GOD SAID HE COULD!!!
Well, imagine if that scene today consisted of Moses simply parting a tub full of water with a really powerful fart. THAT was the level of dread Apocalypse exhibited in X-men: Apocalypse. Actually, I think the fart sounds more ominous.
Look, I know that the X-Men movies aren’t supposed to follow the comic books all that closely. Hell, the new trilogy of X-Men movies, starting with X-Men: First Class, have warped the original comic’s continuity so much, it’s stupid to even try to match them up. I’m okay with that, because until now that hasn’t mattered. I really enjoyed First Class, and the follow-up, Days of Future Past, was not so bad as to be offensive. But the characters were, at the very least, recognizable as something approaching their source material in those movies. If Professor X or Magneto or Wolverine were bastardized versions of their original selves, I would bet dollars to donuts that the general public, not to mention the hardcore fan base, would howl in protest.
Apocalypse was totally bastardized in his movie. The APOCALYPSE promised was nothing more than a series of unfortunate events.
In the comics, the appearance of Apocalypse and his Four Horsemen was a moment of pure dread. You KNEW that, whatever he was going to do, it would not be pretty or subtle. Apocalypse was one of the biggest hammers Marvel had at its disposal, and that hammer was going to drop hard and painfully when he showed up. Any individual who could convince Wolverine and the Hulk to join his quest to find the fittest – and they both did in the books! – was a bad-ass villain!
In X-Men: Apocalypse, he seemed like nothing more than a guidance counselor with pretensions. Yes, he has some awesome powers, but he used them so weakly and sporadically I almost felt like he was pacing himself. THIS is the almighty En Sabah Nur, the first mutant, the being who respects power and strength over anything else? This is the being who believes in survival of the fittest, to the detriment of anything else? In the comics, if you are not the strongest in his eyes, then you are worthless to him. In the movie, he (almost*) literally recruits THE FIRST FOUR MUTANTS HE COMES ACROSS! No test to see if they are worthy, no vetting to only enhance the strongest, just the first four mutants that crossed his gaze!
(* I say almost because he met Caliban – that pale, shifty bugger who was more pawn shop owner than anything – when he recruited Psylocke. Caliban – who was an ACTUAL HORSEMAN IN THE COMICS – barely registers in Apocalypse’s mind. I get it- Caliban ain’t all that impressive – but neither are Angel and Psylocke in this movie!)
I realize that I am showing a little too much bias as a Marvel fan in this piece. Well, to my DC brethren, let me ask you this: if Darkseid showed up and did nothing more than knock a few buildings down and break a bridge, how happy would you be? We’re talking about a being who wants to END ALL LIFE AS WE KNOW IT! Forget the Anti-Life Equation; what if he only did some property damage? Hell, in Man of Steel, Superman knocked a few buildings down. Does THAT count as an APOCALYPSE???
In the end, I don’t regret seeing the movie. I believe wholeheartedly that you should watch a movie before you pass judgement on it. I am glad, however, that I didn’t have to pay to see this atrocity. For that, I am indebted to Punisher, my Digital Crack savior. Money is too precious a commodity to be wasted.
Still, I do regret dropping my negativity on the poor ladies who just wanted to know if I enjoyed the movie. They were doing their job, and they probably thought the movie was good. I mean, almost everyone present clapped in approval when the movie ended. There were people that enjoyed it. Punisher and I – for the record, he did not enjoy the movie – were out of our element.
We couldn’t share their approval. This movie was pretty much a tire fire from our general perspective. But to me personally, the movie was worse. It took me a moment to properly express what I felt after watching it, and if I could once again speak to the ladies who asked me how I felt about them movie, I can give them a definitive answer.
The only apocalypse in that theater was the movie itself. Apocalypse the villain was nothing more than a nuisance – like Ivan Ooze.
