First off... spoilers... duh
So, let's start with the really quite desperately low hanging fruit. There was a lot of concern about Olivia Munn's acting chops when it was announced that she would be playing Psylocke. Sadly, or fortunately, depending on whether she's a good actress. She had all of about 3 lines. Those lines were rather blandly delivered, but they were pretty blandly written too, so is it her fault or the writer's? We may never know. What I do know is that Olivia (and the PR machine for the movie) made a huge deal about her enjoying fighting with swords. I know that Psylocke is a badass fighter and has psychokinetic powers. I also know that Psylocke in this movie spends all of like 2 minutes fighting, and most of that is just posed stuff and not actually combat. Drawing your sword and putting it to someone's throat or cutting a car in half and then posing with lots of CGI do not count as combat. So, yeah, as you may have figured out, I'm severely disappointed in the movie because of that.
Slightly less low, but still low hanging fruit. Why... why... WHY are we still having Mystique appearing "naked"? Admittedly, they finally put some clothes on her that was somewhat almost reminiscent of her comic costume, but it took the entirety of 2, count them TWO trilogies to get us there. They had the opportunity with the semi-reboot to fix it, but no.
Next topic. Can we, for the love of comic book movies, not force every movie to act as 10 different entities? This one was not just completing the set of 3 movies and therefore rounding out the story arcs of several characters, most notably Magneto, Mystique, and Professor X. But my biggest annoyance with the multiple-functions would have to be the attempt to promote the next Wolverine standalone, otherwise why divert to Stryker's facility at all. Seriously, the action at Stryker's facility did not promote anything other than to remind us that Wolverine was there which then supports the post-credit sequence... which was also lame. This movie is 2 hours 27 minutes, and how much could that have been reduced by using another, less time consuming plot device to get the 6 heroes away from the rest of the youth at the school? Because this movie was trying to be too much, the story telling suffered. This is just sad since this movie deserved better.
Back to sexism. There's this great opportunity with the X-Men with such powerful women characters. They, in fact, tend to be the most powerful of the X-Men. Yes, Cyclops has his beam, Wolverine is near invincible, and Xavier, well, let's just put him aside for a bit. Then you have the likes of Storm, Jean Grey and Rogue. Talk about power houses. Rogue was introduced in the original trilogy but never came to the fruition that would see her character truly showcase herself. Storm was there too, and while she showcased her abilities, they were never quite awe-inspiringly, jaw-droppingly demonstrated as they really should be. In this movie, we have the promise that we'll see more, since she's a horseman of Apocalypse... but no, we still barely see anything... just a bit of lightning in the final fight, not much more than that. Jean Grey seems to be the only one we really get to see show off in a semi-constant manner. O.k., and Mystique... she's also shown with her powers and her badass fighting (as poorly choreographed as it is in the original movie. But I maintain that the women of the X-Men remain under-represented in terms of just how magnificently powerful they are, both in terms of their abilities and in terms of their characters.
There's one last thing that I'm going to complain about, at least in this post. The villains. And this topic has a few sub-topics.
First of all.. Magneto. I get it, we need to have Magneto in every movie because he's a draw... but, no, seriously, please don't. Have him show up briefly or something but don't have him be a lackey of the big-bad. He's a big-bad on his own. He doesn't need Apocalypse to empower him. I must accept that this was a trilogy and therefore they're rounding out his arc, but perhaps in the next X-Men movie he can either play a much smaller role or not be there? Perhaps he shows up to recruit for the Brotherhood but doesn't actually do anything else? Or maybe it's just mentioned that he's off recruiting or hasn't been heard from?
I like that Psylocke walks away having witnessed Apocalypse being betrayed by both Magneto and Storm. I love that both Magneto and Storm betray Apocalypse with good reason... but Apocalypse dies (or so it seems). I'm tired of the arch-enemy dying at the end of the movie. If Apocalypse hadn't just woken up during the movie, I would have been more accepting as he could have created other villains over the years that would come up later. The original X-Men trilogy had a common enemy, even if Phoenix stole the show in the final part of the final episode. I want a bit more of that. And the enemy doesn't have to be on the forefront... you could have had Apocalypse show up, create 4 horsemen for the X-Men to fight, or create another super-villain, and stay in the background and come back in the second and third episodes of the trilogy. Magneto, it can be said, is that common villain I'm looking for... and I agree that he could have been, but I would say he hasn't been in this trilogy. In fact, he's played roughly the same role in each of the first two movies: reluctant hero -> villain. And then he transitions in this movie to the pattern of villain -> hero. But he's never the big-bad. He's always reacting to others. This is fine, but I want something a bit more. I want the leader of the Brotherhood of Mutants. I want a series of movies based on the sentinels. I want Apocalypse empowering mutants and sending them to battle the X-Men on his behalf. In short, I want a big-bad with staying power that doesn't just do a quick one-off thing in each movie (such as sending the missiles back at the ships that fired them or parking a stadium around the White House and taking over a few sentinels for around 30 minutes).
And lastly, Apocalypse deserved better story telling. He's a big-bad and you saw that he needed an introduction. Do that introduction well and don't rush the rest of the story. You could easily have made this movie a two-parter. Introduce Apocalypse, let him start recruiting, have the X-Men tangle with a couple recruits... maybe even kidnap Xavier in the first movie and blow up the estate and leave that as the cliff hanger. That way you spend an entire movie just on the recruiting and don't rush through it. The first movie becomes more a story about the formation of the 4 Horsemen and the second movie becomes a much better movie about the X-Men coming together and finding their ability to work together.
Alright, that's it for the moment. Hope you enjoyed this rant. Have other aspects of the movie you didn't like? Do you feel I've judged the movie too harshly? Let me know.
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