‘Apocalypse’ a super smart superhero flick
This is turning into the season of superheroes battling other superheroes, but “X-Men: Apocalypse” is the first one, so far, to do it right.
One of the best of the “X-Men” franchise, the new entry is full of finely crafted action, all of it in the service of interesting and well-thought-out ideas.
The film’s first title card — 3600 B.C.E. — brings a mild feeling of oh-nomust-we-go-there, but this evaporates virtually from the first shot, as we realize that director Bryan Singer intends to do this for real. For a little precredits sequence, he recreates ancient Egypt, not just a little room somewhere in Egypt. He shows us a parade, where we can witness the opulence of the era, the pyramids when they were new and the faces of the slaves.
The idea at work is that the Egyptian rulers were actually the first mutants and that the top ruler — known as Apocalypse, so you know he’s not nice — had the ultimate power. By inhabiting the bodies of a series of mutants, he has maintained his youth and acquired multiple abilities. But then there’s a mishap, and Apocalypse is rendered unconscious, which is a very good thing for the course of civilization.
Singer illustrates the passage of time from ancient days through the late 20th century by catapulting the viewer through a twisting corridor, in which we see glimpses of the Crucifixion, Renaissance art, the rise of Naziism and the emergence of the Cold War. Finally, we arrive in the promising era of the 1980s, when Charles Xavier ( James McAvoy) has all his hair, as well as a school for mutants. And Magneto (Michael Fassbender) is living happily and anonymously, as a family man and factory worker in Poland.
So everything is going along swimmingly, and then Apocalypse wakes up.
A villain needs a rationale, a philosophy, a highly developed conviction that he’s right, as well as some twisted logic that lets us understand how he’s thinking. He also needs some personal magnetism, so that we can understand why others might follow him. Through the script and Oscar Isaac’s performance, we get that in Apocalypse.
The villain believes the strong should dominate. So when he puts on his hood and steps out of his cave, he is repulsed at what he sees. Instead of a world in which the strong are in control, he sees systems in place that protect the weak. To his eyes, the weak are dominating the strong, an ultimate perversity. So he has only one logical course, to figure out a way to destroy absolutely everything and start all over.
To complete this vision, Apocalypse recruits mutants — but they’re best left to be discovered. It’s how Apocalypse does it that’s worth noting. He tells the selected mutants that he wants to make them stronger, and then he actually does. In the case of Psy-locke, a quasidominatrix mutant played by Olivia Munn, he tells her, “Unlike others who seek to control you, I seek to set you free.” He’s going to make her great again, and it’s a beautiful thing.
As in the recent “Captain America: Civil War,” we soon have two teams of individuals, each with what could be called superpowers, fighting each other. But “Civil War” gave us a weak situation in which no one was wrong, little was at stake, and the consequences were mild. “X-Men: Apocalypse,” by contrast, goes for broke. Civilization is in the balance, and both sides are trying to kill each other.
The battle isn’t just more scenes of superpowered people tossing each other around. “X-Men: Apocalypse” is smarter than that, with the most important battles taking place inside the minds of Apocalypse and Charles Xavier. To succeed, tyrants need that final piece, complete control over communications.
Jennifer Lawrence, reprising her role as Mystique, is such a strong presence that it’s only when the movie is over that you realize her character serves a secondary function. The movie’s focus is mainly fixed on Xavier and Magneto and the evolution of their worldview. Like the best films in this well-told franchise, their stories echo and reverberate in a way that always means more than what’s on the surface.
Like its predecessors, “X-Men: Apocalypse” is a thinking person’s superhero movie.