***This post contains SPOILERS for X-MEN: APOCALYPSE.***
***You've been warned.***
Editorial: On paper it was a solid plan by Fox, producer Simon Kinberg and director Bryan Singer to use Apocalypse as the main villain in X-MEN: APOCALYPSE. Previously, Magneto has been a central villain in all of the X-Men films and Apocalypse has been one of the most popular X-Men comic book villains for a very long time.
Unfortunately Fox, Kinberg and Singer struggled with Apocalypse and his Four Horsemen in X-MEN: APOCALYPSE. Please note: This is post does reflect anything on Michael Fassbender as Magneto since he is the single best performance of this movie. There just never enough screen time for him which means he really should get his own Magneto spin-off movie.
This really has nothing to do with the performances of the actors who played these villains and it is more an inditement of how the X-Men franchise needs new life breathed into it by new writers and/or a new director. Basically, several of these villains were boring.
Oscar Issac (Apocalypse) should have been a revelation of a fantastic, up-and-coming actor being a great villain, but he was more talk and voice modulation than anything else. Olivia Munn (Psylocke) was quiet but moved like a ninja and you probably wanted to see more of her motivations in why she is who she is. Maybe she'll be back in a hopeful X-FORCE movie so this can happen. Ben Hardy (Angel / Archangel) was just there which is disappointing because Archangel should have been more lethal than how he was shown. Finally, Alexandra Shipp (Storm) had potential but that potential was not tapped into enough even though she got more screen time than Archangel and Psylocke combined.
Apocalypse did more talking than action in the first two Acts of the film and he never really felt like a legit threat in this movie, even during the big battle at the end of the movie. And speaking of not feeling like a threat to the X-Men, the Four Horsemen just stood around doing nothing. To finally bring comic book-inspired versions of Storm, Archangel and Psylocke into an X-Men movie should have been a revelation. Instead, it was quick introductions for each character which followed that up by seeing the members of the Horsemen stand beside Apocalypse looking cool like bandmates standing in the background while the singer stands front and center.
Missed opportunities is the best way to put it when it comes to Apocalypse and his Four Horsemen. This should have been a villain team-up of spectacular power and you never got the feeling the Four Horsemen were any threat to the X-Men when the big battle started. There was no real build-up of them using their Apocalypse-enhanced powers and the film's creators did not show how powerful these villains had become. There's just the big battle where you know going into it that the X-Men can handle things even though its younger members haven't yet mastered their powers.
X-MEN: APOCALYPSE is not as bad of an X-Men movie as X-MEN: THE LAST STAND is, but it isn't much better than it, too. In fact, the only thing that helps X-MEN: APOCALYPSE stay away from being the worst X-Men ensemble movie is that it does a lot of fan service for its comic book readers which includes cool looking individual costumes. For years fans have wanted the X-Men movies to honor its source material more and is finally showing up in this movie.
"Each movie is only as good as its villain."
This quote by Roger Ebert continues to carry weight to this day and especially in X-MEN: APOCALYPSE.
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