X-Men: Apocalypse

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Alexandra Shipp, Angel, Apocalypse, Beast, Ben Hardy, Cinema, Comic, Comic Book Movies, Cyclops, Days of Future Past, Film, First Class, Game of Thrones, Guardians of the Galaxy, Hugh Jackman, Iron Man, James McAvoy, Jean Grey, Jennifer Lawrence, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Last Stand, Lee Pace, Magneto, Marvel, Michael Fassbender, Movie Review, Mystique, Nicholas Hoult, Nightcrawler, Olivia Munn, Oscar Isaac, Professor X, Professor Xavier, Psylocke, Raven, Ronan, Sophie Turner, Storm, Superhero Movie, Superheroes, The Dark Knight, Tye Sheridan, Wolverine, X-Men, X-Men : Apocalypse, X-Men : Days of Future Past, X-Men : First Class, X-Men : Last Stand

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“X-Men: Apocalypse” is the third film in the latest “X-Men” trilogy, and maintains the tradition of the third film in a franchise being the worst. In the original trilogy “Last Stand” was heavily criticised for being a poorly written and character-polluted film, and sadly the same can be said of “Apocalypse”. Whilst it has moments of quality, and some memorable action set pieces, it fails to capitalise on what made the previous films in the franchise successful and thus ends up becoming a generic superhero movie.

“First Class” and “Days of Future Past” were both exceptionally good superhero films so expectations were high for “Apocalypse”. It started promisingly; the first half of the movie was fine, even though Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac) as a character wasn’t fully-developed or particularly interesting, and I was hopeful that with a satisfying conclusion it would be an acceptable way to cap the trilogy. However, the second half of “Apocalypse” was a shoddily written and action heavy escapade which crushed previous character development for important figures like Magneto (Michael Fassbender) and Raven (Jennifer Lawrence), and it also clumsily showcased the abilities of the new mutants.

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What made the first two films in the trilogy so successful was; 1) the quality of the actors involved – Fassbender, McAvoy, Lawrence, Hoult, etc.; and 2) the dynamic between Xavier (James McAvoy), Erik, and Raven. Sadly, this film offers nothing to that dynamic, and rather than building on its characters it pushes them down, muddying their motivations.

The only real moment of character development for the pre-existing cast of characters is given to Magneto, who in the years since “Days of Future Past” had formed a rather normal life for himself. When the film begins he has a daughter and a wife, and by all accounts he lives a peaceful existence, yet by the halfway point he’s back to being a one-note villain. This is a real shame, because whilst it makes sense that Erik’s tragedy would lead him back to villainy, his complete U-turn isn’t believable. In my opinion his change of character is an insult to both the character and Michael Fassbender, because Erik is intelligent and frequently compassionate despite his violent tendencies, and Fassbender has the acting ability to portray complex and multi-layered motivations and emotions.

The “new” characters are afforded slightly more time to establish themselves, particularly Cyclops (Tye Sheridan) and Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), although this doesn’t make them any more compelling. I’ve read certain publications that’ve praised the way that the new characters were introduced, as well as the performances of the actors playing them such as Sophie Turner and Kodi Smit-McPhee, but I have to say that I don’t share these sentiments.

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The characters themselves are visually striking and fit my expectations for how they should look on screen, but apart from that there’s very little to like. Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is unnecessarily used for comic relief, Cyclops is okay but isn’t very interesting, and the accents of Sophie Turner and Alexandra Shipp (Storm) are woeful. I love Sophie Turner in “Game of Thrones” and I think she looks great as Jean Grey, but the problem is that her accent is obviously put-on and it doesn’t kick in until the third word of every sentence!

Still, the new X-Men definitely aren’t the worst thing about the film; Oscar Isaac’s Apocalypse takes that prize. Isaac is another great actor, but he can’t save the character because there’s no effort made to flesh out his motivations or why he feels that the world needs to be cleansed. This is a massive shame coming off of a film like “Days of Future Past”, which portrayed a malicious but physically diminutive human as the real villain of the piece rather than Magneto, and took away from the message of the previous films in the series which was that whilst mutants are powerful they face constant ridicule because they’re different.

The villains in “First Class” and “Days of Future Past” forced the characters to come to terms with who they were and what they wanted to be, and the protagonist’s motivations were informed by the pain that their mutations had caused them over the years. In contrast, the only lasting implication that the villain in this film will have on the “X-Men” universe is to bring Storm into the fold.

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There are numerous issues with Apocalypse as a character, so to go through them all would be laborious and excessive, but I’d feel remised if I didn’t at least mention a few:

• The physical design of the character was awful and made him look like a knock-off version of Ronan (Lee Pace) from “Guardians of the Galaxy”. Whilst he looked physically imposing because of his size, the make-up for Apocalypse looked silly and cheap, and made it difficult to feel worried for the protagonists.

 

• Apocalypse chose the wrong mutants to act as his horsemen. Firstly, he chose them far too quickly and there was no method to his madness; but secondly, and more importantly, the process was one of the least interesting parts of the movie when it should’ve been the best. By having Apocalypse search for followers the writers were able to give mutants like Angel (Ben Hardy) and Psylocke (Olivia Munn) more screen time, but this only made the film feel convoluted and busy. Instead of Apocalypse asking Psylocke which mutants to search for, a far more reasonable way to move the story forward would’ve been for him to bump into Storm (because she was in the same location as him) and then Psylocke (because she provided a means of transportation) just as he did in the film. But then, rather than going for Angel who was completely useless, he should’ve gone for Magneto because he’d already decided that he wanted him – if he’d done that then he could’ve asked Magneto for advice on who to recruit next, and thus he would’ve known that there was a veritable vegetable patch of powerful mutants out there waiting to be picked in the form of Xavier’s school! This would’ve cut time from a film which dragged significantly, because there would’ve been no Angel recruitment scene, and would’ve also been easy to execute as Apocalypse went to the school anyway!

 

• Apocalypse’s powers were poorly established and underutilised. At points in the movie Apocalypse turns people to sand with a flick of his wrist, thus rendering him unstoppable, yet when the time comes for him to fight the protagonists he forgets all about this ability. If he’d wanted to, Apocalypse could’ve killed all of his enemies in an instant and left the world powerless to stop him, but instead he leaves the fighting to his horsemen who are clearly less powerful than his enemies! This made no sense, and begs the question as to why the writers bothered to give Apocalypse the powers that they did at all.

So, at best “X-Men: Apocalypse” is a disappointment and at worst it’s a franchise-killer. Personally, I don’t think that it’s the latter, but I do think that the introduction of the new X-Men leaves the series in a precarious place. If the series is going in the direction of the initial trilogy by establishing the main cast as Cyclops, Jean Grey, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), Nightcrawler, Xavier, Magneto, and Mystique (with Quicksilver, played by Evan Peters, who is brilliant), then it risks becoming irrelevant. The great thing about the first two films in this series was that they felt fresh because they introduced several new mutants whilst still focusing on a couple of established characters, and also that they took place on a historical backdrop (the Cuban Missile Crisis in “First Class”, and the Vietnam War in “Days of Future Past”), but “Apocalypse” seemingly forgot this and thus lost focus. It feels like a pre-“Iron Man”/”Dark Knight” superhero movie, as it focuses far too heavily on a hollow and predictable villain and not on character development. Hopefully, the next film in the franchise will return to what made these characters relevant again – i.e. the relationships that they share and the issues that being a mutant creates.

5/10

Into The Storm

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Cinema, Film, Gravity, Into The Storm, Movie Review, Rain, Richard Armitage, Sarah Wayne Callies, Storm, The Day After Tomorrow, Tornadoes, Twister

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When I saw the trailer for “Into The Storm” I was sceptical, it looked a bit like “Gravity” to me, in that it seemed as though it would have good visual effects but nothing else. There are people out there who might think that comparing a movie to the Oscar-winning “Gravity” is pretty high praise, given its success, but I am not one of those people, to say that I disliked that particular film would be a massive understatement.

“Into The Storm” is a clichéd mess of a film, and despite its grand nature I wouldn’t recommend seeing it in a cinema. There isn’t actually a lot to it and the effects aren’t groundbreaking enough to warrant paying the price of the ticket. This movie feels as though it belongs on a dodgy daytime television channel rather than the big screen, and you would only watch it at home if there was absolutely nothing else on. This film doesn’t have that much going for it, so if you see it you really shouldn’t be surprised by the fact that it’s complete garbage.

You don’t have to be a storm chaser to figure out the plot of this movie, just watch “Twister” or “The Day After Tomorrow” and you’re halfway there, except this film is less interesting and has a much lower level of acting. “Into The Storm” is about Gary Fuller (Richard Armitage) trying to find his son in the midst of a storm that is ‘bigger than any storm that has ever been’ (I’m directly quoting a line from the trailer there, that’s the standard of writing we’re working with). In the process he crosses paths with a group of documentary filmmakers who are carelessly following the storm, and things only get more ridiculous from there.

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I’ll admit that written down the story doesn’t sound all that bad, but we aren’t talking about a journey through a panicked city filled with exciting action sequences and massive destruction. We’re talking about a lot of shaky cameras, multiple tornadoes doing as little damage to any interesting structures as possible, indestructible main characters who should’ve died ten times over, completely deserted streets, and a lot of predictable dialogue such as ‘oh my god’ and ‘this is unlike anything I’ve ever seen’. There were moments in “Into The Storm” where the characters said things that were just plain idiotic; ‘he’s not breathing’, when a character has been drowning for about five minutes, or ‘I don’t have any signal’ (I don’t get signal when I go to my kitchen, never mind getting signal in the eye of a tornado). This film could’ve been written by a secondary school student and directed by a monkey.  

“Into The Storm” is such an unintelligent movie, plagued with clichés and ridiculous plot points. The token storm chasers seem to know all there is to know about their field, yet they aren’t successful and they don’t come across as intellectual at any point.

The film only flirts with the idea of a “love story”, and when it does things get quite boring. Donnie Fuller (Max Deacon) and Kaitlyn Johnson (Alycia Debnam-Carey) are good looking teenagers, they go to the same school and they’re approaching graduation, but we’re led to believe that they have never had a proper conversation. The former is the main character’s son (we haven’t seen that before – just pretend “The Day After Tomorrow” didn’t happen), and his acting isn’t exactly brilliant. There’s something so absurd about his character, he speaks calmly and is expressionless for the majority of the movie, even though he’s in a terrible situation with someone that he barely knows. The handiness in the fact that Donnie decides to make a move on the love of his life on the day that all Hell breaks loose is just ridiculous, and you feel that it’s just a convenient way to move the story forward. The way that the “love story” culminates says everything about this film, it really is bizarre, all that Donnie’s effort amounts to is a hug and Kaitlyn deciding that he is ‘sweet’, how humiliating! He puts his life at risk just to find the friend-zone!  

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The trailer for “Into The Storm” was slightly deceptive, because it disguised the fact that it was advertising a found footage movie. I was actually really annoyed by that and felt slightly cheated, because the only found footage film I’ve ever enjoyed is “Paranormal Activity”, and if I had known that this was going to be filmed through a series of handheld cameras I probably wouldn’t have wasted my money. A movie like this just doesn’t work as a found footage film; there’s no way that these characters would be so reckless as to stand and stare at a tornado, camera in hand; their lives are in genuine danger. What’s even more absurd is that some scenes aren’t shot through handheld cameras or cameras mounted to vehicles! For instance, when an extremely large tornado threatens to kill our heroes towards the end of the movie, we see footage that couldn’t possibly have been filmed by anyone (not if they valued their lives). I really don’t understand why you would ruin the majority of a film with found footage if you aren’t going to fully commit to it.  

The special effects in this film were quite good, the tornadoes started off looking fairly menacing and they were complimented by the heightened sound in the cinema, so I was hoping for some interesting visuals. However, as the film progressed the computer generated imagery lost all of its power and became extremely tedious, because we only saw tornadoes. There just wasn’t enough variety. A storm isn’t made up of six or seven tornadoes which get progressively bigger, there’s thunder, lightning, heavy rain, fog; things which if used correctly could’ve made this movie a lot more interesting. The effects were all that this film had going for it so the fact that they weren’t absolutely amazing meant that “Into The Storm” was a really unpleasant movie to watch.  

None of the performances in this movie are good. None of them. I have seen certain reviews approving the performances of one or two actors, particularly Matt Walsh for his role as Pete Moore, but being the best of a bad bunch isn’t high praise. I actually felt that Matt Walsh didn’t seem to care about what he was doing for the majority of the film, and maybe that’s why some people thought he was okay, because he didn’t take his part too seriously, but I just thought that he seemed uninterested.

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It was a shame that Richard Armitage was so poor in this film, because he is a good actor. In “Spooks” he is excellent, he really won the audience over after replacing one of the most loved characters on the show. However, his accent in this movie is unforgivable. He only sounds American at the end of each sentence, as if he’s struggling to get the accent right until he’s said a few words for practice. A lot of the time he just sounded like he does in “The Hobbit”, which was extremely distracting and it was just embarrassing to watch. Sarah Wayne Callies was awful as Allison Stone, she has no personality and isn’t likeable in any way whilst on screen; it continues to baffle me that she gets casted for anything.  

“Into The Storm” also suffers from a complete lack of character development and emotion; I made no connections with any of the characters and I know nothing about any of the their pasts or motives. The death of the Gary Fuller’s wife is thrown around every now and again in conversation, yet we never get any real understanding of the situation and I felt no sympathy for him given the terrible acting. It’s as though the filmmakers thought that mentioning the tragedy would make us care about his character, but that’s just senseless. I couldn’t care less about what happened to this man’s wife because I couldn’t care less about him! If you want me to give a damn then you should give your character a personality, you can’t make me sympathise with him if I know nothing about him. For all I know this man could be a complete monster who didn’t truly love his wife at all. Obviously that’s not a genuine possibility for the character, but if the writers aren’t willing to give him a persona then I will, and I won’t be kind.  

Despite its numerous problems, “Into The Storm” did have two really memorable death scenes. The deaths themselves were quite clearly about to happen, so there wasn’t even the slightest element of surprise, but they were very cool. The tornado of fire was one of the best visuals on the trailer and I was glad that something interesting happened with it in the film, however, no one in their right mind would go anywhere near it. The film tried to give the character a reason to risk his life, but that reason was so stupid that it was laughable. If there is ever a television programme on the best movie deaths then one of the deaths in this movie might find its way onto it, but the film as a whole might make its way onto a similar programme, listing the worst films of 2014.  

“Into The Storm” isn’t a good movie. There are lots of things out there on Netflix and Sky Movies which are much more worthy of your time and your money, so I’d recommend giving it a miss. However, I didn’t walk out of the theatre feeling let down by it, because frankly I was expecting something pretty bad to begin with. The cast was average, the story seemed silly, and the whole premise has been done thousands of times before. I went to see the film mostly out of curiosity, hoping that it might be a little better than it looked on the trailer, but I’m afraid that what you see is what you get in this case. If you want to see a movie for cheap thrills then fine, turn your brain off, relax, and you might be able to forgive the terrible directing and awful acting; but if you do see “Into The Storm” you have to be aware that it’s just a glorified television movie which happens to have a few big budget tornadoes trying, and failing, to keep you interested.  

4/10