What’s great about Thursday night screenings is that you get to see movies earlier than most people, which means that you can review the movies even earlier. And seeing as this is Fox’s last comic book movie this year, it’s only fitting to witness the apocalypse of mankind before it’s actual wide release. That’s what we call “quality entertainment”.
 

X-Men: Apocalypse is the seventh film in the X-Men franchise and the fourth one directed by Bryan Singer. Starring most of the cast from X-Men: First Class and some new and recognizable faces, Apocalypse revolves around the main villain, En Sabah Nur, who sees that the world is in need of cleansing. With the help of four powerful mutants, Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac) planned to destroy the world and rebuild it in his own image. With the stakes as high as they are, it’s up to Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) and the new X-Men to stop him. Critics, however, have been less-than-favorable to this movie. It is the lowest-rated X-Men movie ever released on Rotten Tomatoes. Quite honestly…I don’t see it.

The movie was actually pretty good. First, of course, is the action. This had some of the best action scenes in the X-Men films. There are a lot of really sweet scenes throughout the entire movie. Quicksilver, played by Evan Peters, had another standout scene, just like in X-Men: Days of Future Past. If you loved the Pentagon kitchen scene in the previous film, you will love this scene even more. Seeing the X-Men work together to face off against Apocalypse and his four Horseman is pretty cool. Speaking of which, The Four Horsemen in the film – Psylocke, Storm, Magneto and Angel – were for the most part amazing in the film. The two stand-outs from the Horsemen were definitely Magneto and Storm. Storm added a new perspective to the X-Men, while Magneto brought a very powerful and emotional perspective. Psylocke was cool, but I wish I had seen more from her. She was vicious and cold and an overall awesome fighter. Even better, the new characters were great. Sophie Turner as Jean Grey is a really deep and more emotional character who’s afraid of her powers. Same with Tye Sheridan as Scott Summers and Kodi Smit-McPhee as Kurt Wagner. As the film goes on, they begin to gain more confidence to the point where when they team together to actually fight, it’s heartwarming.

The biggest plus in the movie is the fan service. There was so much fan service in the movie that it’s almost extremely hard to keep up with it. No spoilers on some of the bigger fan service moments, but the scene that was teased in the last trailer with Wolverine is among the highlights of the movie. It’s very rare for a Fox/Marvel movie to be jam-packed with so many X-Men Easter eggs, but most, If not all of them, were fantastic. There’s one at the end I won’t spoil, but I will say that if you hated X-Men: The Last Stand, the end of the movie will have you grinning ear-to-ear. Another compliment of the movie is its fantastic score. John Ottman, for the 3rd time, delivered an incredible score for the film, going so far to make one of the best renditions of his original X-Men theme back in 2000. The theme has become iconic at this point, and Ottman made it even more iconic with his variation in Apocalypse. And speaking of that, the opening titles in X-Men: Apocalypse is among the film series’ best. The X-Men film always has amazing opening credits, and Apocalypse is no exception.

That being said, no X-Men film has been perfect. Does Apocalypse buck the trend? Unfortunately, no. One of the big draws of the film is that while Storm and Magneto are excellent and Psylocke was more-or-less pretty cool, Angel was useless. Making him one of the Four Horseman was a brilliant concept and the trailers made him look like a formidable adversary for the new X-Men. But, alas, it was not so. His first scene in the Fight Club-esque cage match was pretty sweet. Afterwards, he turned into a drunkard. Hope turned into frustration and sadness at the waste of what could have been a really sweet addition to the X-Men roster. Also, it’s kind of obvious to bring up Mystique in the film. In First Class, she was a very interesting character. Days of Future Past made her more of a whiny anti-hero, but still kept her kind of interesting. Apocalypse murdered her character. The story of her character is that she became an unwilling hero to young mutants, but doesn’t want to be. Yet, she constantly tells Professor Xavier to teach his kids how to fight. Wow, Fox: Hunger Games much? Don’t get me wrong: J-Law is an amazing actress and a deserving award-winner. But in this, it’s like she was still holding on to poor Katniss Everdeen and made her into Katniss with mutant powers. In any other movie, this would be at least passable. But this is Mystique: a well-established character who has a lot of really cool arcs to tell. At most, this is a disgrace to the character. At the least, it’s really lazy. And some of the dialogue was bad too. Like hilariously bad. Some of it involved the new X-Men. There were good lines in the movie. There’s even a really funny jab at Ratner’s X-Men: The Last Stand if you can catch it. But some other lines were just laughable.

X-Men: Apocalypse isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, naturally. It’s a movie for action-lovers and hardcore X-men fans and fans of superhero movies. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad. It’s actually a very well-made piece of superhero cinema. While not on the level of Days of Future Past, it’s still deserving of a few watches in theaters. Superhero films are batting 3 for 4 this year so far, and with Suicide Squad and Doctor Strange on the way, it doesn’t show any signs of stopping.