X-Men: Apocalypse

The accepted critical thinking on ‘X-Men: Apocalypse’ is that:

1. It’s the same old “battle for Erik Lenscherr’s soul” story pace ‘First Class’ and ‘Days of Future Past’;

2. The Auschwitz bit is really tasteless;

3. The Quicksilver set piece is merely a reprise of the one in ‘Days of Future Past’;

4. Too many characters are thrust into one movie without development;

5. The finale is sprawling and incoherent.

Maybe I saw a totally different cut of the film, but I enjoyed the hell out of ‘X-Men: Apocalypse’. Granted, it might not have the sharp stylishness of ‘First Class’ (which I still regard as a Bond movie with mutants) or the timeline-jinking audacity of ‘Days of Future Past (which I still consider a horribly clunky title); nor is it as keyed into its period setting as those two. But it develops the themes of family, mistrust, politics and absolute power present in the preceding instalments; it brings Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) and Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee) into the new timeline in fine style; and it turns its mutants vs. mutants storyline into a commentary on political manipulation, menticide and man’s inhumanity to man. In this respect, just as ‘Days of Future Past’ earned itself major kudos for obliterating the fuck-awful ‘Last Stand’ from the chronology, ‘Apocalypse’ assimilates everything ‘Last Stand’ tries to be and does the job properly.

Only the mainstream reviewers would have you think otherwise, so in lieu of the more traditional Agitation review, let’s have a look at that quintet of critical carping and subject each item to a validity test:

1. The Professor X (James McAvoy)/Magneto (Michael Fassbender) conflict is the dynamic upon which the franchise is founded. It’s like Bond/Blofeld or Batman/the Joker, and for my money the new X-Men timeline ups the ante on the conflict by grounding it not in the differences between Professor X and Magneto but the battered and compromised but still salvageable friendship between Charles and Erik. Throwing all of that away just to have Magneto as an all-purpose villain would be akin to flushing the crux of the franchise’s human drama down the shitter;

2. Yes it is, but this is the third film that explicitly references Auschwitz and (a) the sequence is shorter than in ‘X-Men’ or ‘First Class’; (b) nobody carped about using the Final Solution as a plot device in those two films; and (c) it’s where Magneto’s powers and his anger were forged so of course it’s where Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac) would take Magneto to ensure his complicity;

3. Quicksilver (Evan Peters) having a big set piece where time seems to slow down as he casually moves people and objects across a spatially intense chess board is basically what Quicksilver fucking does and having him in the movie and not giving him that moment would be like having Blofeld in a Bond movie and not giving him a crack at world domination, or not letting Inspector Morse have a pint while he listens to some Wagner. Or not letting Inspector Regan clobber a suspect. Or not letting Scottie beam anybody up. You’d be missing the fucking point. Besides, the context, logistics and outcome of Quicksilver’s race against time are drastically different from ‘Days of Future Past’.

4. True to a degree, with Storm (Alexandra Shipp) locked into a narrative arc requiring a last reel volte face that never quite seems earned and Psylocke (Olivia Munn) given some visually iconic moments but criminally underused; but the same can be said of ‘Captain America: Civil War’ and again nobody seemed to complain about the overstuffed and – let’s be honest – unsuspenseful airport showdown.

5. No more so than any finale in any superhero movie ever. In fact, it didn’t seem to drag on anywhere near as long as the ‘Hulk’ finale (in which I zoned out as two screensavers threw ever larger objects at which other), the ‘Age of Ultron’ slugfest or the double denouement of ‘Batman vs Superman’. In fact, I’d say that ‘Apocalypse’ is the paciest of this year’s triptych of two-and-a-half hour comic book adaptations. (Assuming that neither ‘Suicide Squad’ or ‘Doctor Strange’ will be grasping for such epic running times.)

In addition to the above, factor in Jennifer Lawrence finally making Mystique her own, stepping out of the shadows of both Magneto in terms of the character and Rebecca Romjin-Stamos in terms of performance; Fassbender nailing a squirmily inevitable moment where Magneto, trying to live a normal life, is pushed back onto a vengeful and destructive path; a Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) cameo that gives us the character as a vessel of pure animalistic rage; CGI that serves the story rather than swamping it; and a genuinely chilling scene, scored to the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, where Apocalypse prompts a simultaneous launch into space of all nuclear missiles.

All things considered, it’s only the foul-mouthed and fourth-wall-breaking loveability of ‘Deadpool’ that’s stopping me from proclaiming this as the best superhero movie of the year. Sorry, Cap.

X-Men: Days of Future Past

In which Bryan Singer returns to the fold, the promise of ‘First Class’ is delivered on, the fanboy’s God is in his heaven, and all is right with the world. All rise, please, for a vigorous rendition of the Hallelujah Chorus. 

Taking its cue from a brief scene embedded in the closing credits of ‘The Wolverine’ – Logan (Hugh Jackman), warned by Magneto (Ian McKellan) that “dark forces are at work”, responds antagonistically until a revivified Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) shows up, apparently now allied with Magneto again – ‘Days of Future Past’ wastes no time in establishing its irresistible narrative hook.

 The film opens in an apocalyptic future where mutants are hunted down by androids called Sentinels. A small group of survivors holed up in Russia are attacked and almost decimated, but Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) is able to send their leader’s consciousness back in time a couple of weeks; armed with knowledge from the future, he is able to warn them their security is compromised, whereupon they up sticks and move to a new hideout. Xavier and Magneto, attended by Storm (Halle Berry) and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), make contact with them; Xavier doles out the necessary exposition: at a post-Vietnam treaty summit in 1973, Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) assassinates anti-mutant arms dealer Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage) but is captured by the military; as a result of his death, Trask’s Sentinel programme goes into overdrive and Mystique’s DNA provides a breakthrough by which the androids adapt to the mutants they’re targeting. 

Xavier asks Kitty’s help in sending him back to his younger self in 1973 so that he can stop Mystique. Kitty refuses on the basis that Xavier’s mind will not survive the transition. Step forward Wolverine who can pretty much survive anything and was never known as the cerebral addition to the team in the first place! Thus it is, with the Sentinels closing in and absolutely everything at stake, that Wolverine finds himself in 1973 entrusted with convincing the much younger and less reasonable Xavier (James McAvoy) to believe him, and the much younger and inconveniently incarcerated Magneto (Michael Fassebender) to help them. (The circumstances of Magneto’s imprisonment add up to one the film’s best jokes.)

Wolverine finds the Xavier of 1973 an embittered drunkard, trading his psychic powers for a temporary cure that allows him to walk again. His school for gifted youngsters is closed, his students having been drafted wholesale for ’Nam. Only Beast (Nicholas Hoult) remains, acting as a de facto minder, guardian and nurse. Magneto, meanwhile, is languishing in a specially constructed cell deep under the Pentagon. Persuading Xavier to snap out of his self-pity is the easy bit, and Wolverine achieves it through sheer bull-headedness and one little fight with Beast. Freeing Magneto takes a bit of help – cue Quicksilver (Evan Peters), who has the single best scene in the movie, a pure cartoon piece of non-reality that pays off in such glorious style that the auditorium rang with applause at the screening I attended.

‘Days of Future Past’ hits many high points, the best of which is finding a way to erase ‘The Last Stand’ from the franchise’s continuity. It’s not without its fair share of flubs, though: firstly, Wolverine is returned to the America of 1973 in which he’s working as a bodyguard whereas ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ has him conscripted into Stryker’s mutant black-ops outfit at this point in history. The discontinuity is pointed up by Stryker (Josh Helman – better than Danny Huston, still nowhere as good as Brian Cox) working privately for Trask in the ‘Days of Future Past’ timeline. There’s also the business of Wolverine still having adamantium claws in the future sequences when they were severed and replaced by the erstwhile bone claws at the end of ‘The Wolverine’. However, it’s clear that Singer’s priority was to clear out the rammel of ‘Last Stand’ and ‘Origins’ and give the fans the movie they wanted and deserved, and for that reason he gets a pass on the (admittedly very few) discontinuities and cheats that the film needs must indulge in in order to function. 

And how beautifully it functions! The opening sequence – Kitty desperately racing against time to cheat time itself while Blink (Fan Bingbing), Colossus (Daniel Cudmore), Bishop (Omar Sy) and Iceman (Shawn Ashmore) duke it out with the Sentinels – is breathless, inventive and brilliantly conceived, the perfect opener to a film that’s as smart as it is spectacular. Blink in particular is a character I’d love to see more of in future instalments. Magneto’s breakout is a lovely nod to ‘X-2’ and pays off with a gnarly reunion between him and Xavier which sets the tone for much of what follows. Whereas McAvoy never quite seemed to reverse engineer Stewart’s performance in ‘First Class’ as intuitively as Fassbender did McKellan’s, ‘Days of Future Past’ is where he nails it – and ironically Xavier has to regress as a character in order for the breakthrough to occur. A terrific (and almost logically convincing) moment where McAvoy and Stewart share the screen seals the deal.

Fassbender, meanwhile, marches Magneto further and further towards McKellan’s personification. The dude is authentically badass. Jackman is functioning here the way he did in ‘The Wolverine’, genuinely investing in the character and delivering a memorable performance. Dinklage brings an appropriate inscrutability to Trask, playing what could have been a pantomime villain as a buttoned-down combination of messianic obsessive and box-ticking bureaucrat; another intriguing characterisation from an actor who has been consistently interesting throughout his career. Only Lawrence falls short: whereas ‘First Class’ saw her take Raven to the cusp of becoming Mystique and doing so appealingly enough, ‘Days of Future Past’ requires her to complete the transformation – what we know of Rebecca Romijn-Stamos’s Mystique should freight the finale with tension and unpredictability – but she never quite achieves Romijn-Stamos’s confident, mocking sexuality and dangerous athleticism.

A small thing to carp about, though, when ‘Days of Future Past’ gets so much right. Unlike ‘X-2’, the previous franchise highpoint, which wrote its greatness upon what was pretty much a clean slate, ‘Days of Future Past’ had a very muddied slate and needed to erase the bad feeling of two crass instalments before it could even being staking its own claim; that it ends on its own terms and leaves an open door for the next film to continue the retro-timelines only emphasises its resounding success. ‘Days of Future Past’ reclaims the X-Men, heroes and villains alike, and lets us unabashedly love them as if everything since ‘X-2’ had never happened.

X-Men: First Class

You know how they didn’t make ‘X-Men Origins: Magneto’? They did at least have the good grace to incorporate a chunk of it into ‘X-Men: First Class’. And with only a few caveats, they made one hell of a good job of it, reinvigorating the franchise and happily setting things up for the late-period shot at greatness that is ‘X-Men: Days of Future Past’.

When I originally reviewed ‘X-Men: First Class’ for on this blog in June 2011, I couldn’t make up my mind if it was a piss-take, a prequel or director Matthew Vaughan’s showreel for the Broccolis. I also speculated that he’d make a darned good Bond director and that if Daniel Craig decided to hang up the mantle, Michael Fassbender would make a damned good 007.

Watching the film again, for the first time in three years, I’m still of the opinion that it’s a bit of all three, but leaning very heavily towards the Bond-film-with-mutants aesthetic, referencing ‘Thunderball’ and ‘You Only Live Twice’ specifically. The opening sequence, however, takes us back to Bryan Singer’s first X-Men flick as the young Erik Lehnsherr is pried away from his mother by Nazi guards in 1944 and responds with a metal-bending display of power until a rifle butt to the head knocks him out. Next we’re in some Ivy League part of America where the privileged young Charles Xavier meets the young Raven. They’re all kids, and they all realize they’re not exactly normal. But whereas Xavier subjugates his power (or, as he calls it, mutation) and impresses on Raven to do the same, Lehnsherr doesn’t have the same luxury. He’s delivered into the hands of Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), who quickly discovers that the key to unleashing Lehnsherr’s power is his anger. He discovers this by shooting Lehnsherr’s mother.

The juxtaposition of Xavier and Lehnsherr’s formative years continues apace as Xavier (James McAvoy), now in his twenties and a graduate of “Oxford University, England” (‘First Class’ boasts some howlingly obvious establishing credits, the next best one being “Moscow, Russia”) is steered away from the groves of academe by CIA agent Moira McTaggart (Rose Byrne) who recruits him into an unofficial intelligence branch headed up by The Man in the Black Suit (Oliver Platt); while Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbinder) – all growed up and pretty freakin’ mean with it – is on a globe-trotting mission of revenge against Shaw.

It’s 1962 by this point in the narrative, as evidenced by more of those idiot-proof establishing credits and enough stock footage of John F Kennedy that I’m surprised the family’s lawyer didn’t write to Vaughan and co. demanding a percentage point of the box office gross. Anyway: it’s 1962, all groovy tunes and Cold War shenanigans, and the world’s attention is focused on Cuba. Shaw is intent on playing the superpowers off against each other a la Blofeld, assisted by sexy but deadly right-hand-woman Emma Frost (January Jones) and their entourage of seemingly invincible goons. In addition to the Bond-isms – a globe-trotting narrative, entire swathes of funky 60s décor, a determinedly unPC attitude to female characters (Rose Byrne’s intro has her sashaying around a go-go bar in her underwear; January Jones’s cleavage puts the fucking missiles to shame); more gadgets than Q Department could shake a standard issue stick with modifications at (allowing, of course, for the fact that the mutants are pretty much gadgets in their own right) – there’s also a touch of the ‘Dr Strangelove’ in the politicking and the pseudo-tense council-of-war scenes. There were whole tranches of the movies where I was praying for someone to pop up and say, aghast, “Gentlemen, you can’t mutate in here. This is the war room.”

In between all of this business, Vaughan economically establishes the (albeit brief) friendship between Xavier and Lehnsherr, and has fun staging a “rounding up the team” kind of sequence with Xavier using a prototype Cerebro to identify fellow mutants. Cue a Hugh Jackman cameo where he delivers a gruff three-word line of dialogue and pretty much walks off with the whole film.

‘First Class’ is fun and frothy for much of its two hour plus running time, and it’s perhaps because of the sheer entertainment value that the continuity flubs don’t bother me here as much as they do elsewhere in the franchise. Flubs like Emma Frost being a twenty-something hottie consort of Shaw in 1962 while ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ has her as twenty-something hottie incarcerated by Stryker in the mid-1980s. Flubs like Xavier losing the use of his legs in the big finale whereas he’s fully ambulatory at the end of ‘Wolverine’. Flubs like Mystique seeming only to age about a decade between ‘First Class’ and the original trilogy (or maybe the gal just found a way to halt the ageing process, in which case good for her!)

It’s also very well acted for the most part. Fassbender takes the honours, capturing every bit of Ian McKellan’s ruthless charm and steely intelligence as Magneto. McAvoy doesn’t do quite as well at reverse-engineering Patrick Stewart, but he plays it utterly straight and that’s what counts. Lawrence is very good as Raven, but on less confident ground as she becomes Mystique towards the end (a problem that carries over into ‘Days of Future Past’. Bacon has huge fun as Shaw, every bit as suave, cruel and egomaniacal as any Bond villain you can imagine. Byrne and Platt acquit themselves well, if not memorably, and the only let-down is January Jones: instead of imbuing Frost with ice-maiden seductiveness, she comes across as simply disinterested.

Apart from Jones’s performance, the only problem with ‘First Class’ is that it’s so busy being an origin story, an espionage epic, a revenge thriller and a production designer’s wet dream that it barely has time to draw a breath. The scenes of Xavier and Lehnsherr working together – which are, let’s face it, the absolute heart of the film – feel rushed and Vaughan never quite finds that one defining moment that explains why, half a century later and with all manner of perfidy between them in the meantime, Xavier still refers to Magneto as “my friend”.

X Men: First Class (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Get My Sixties Groove On; or, For Your Mutants Only)

Okay, I’m pushing it a bit trying to shoehorn this one into Shots on the Blog. But what the hell, it’s got a CIA department doing covert things. And, uh, there’s more than a shade of Matt Helm to it. And, uh … all right, it’s more a spy movie than a crime movie but, as Lesley Gore almost put it, it’s my blog and I’ll review if want to. Anyway, here’s a picture of January Jones:

Now, where was I? Oh yes. ‘X Men: First Class’, Matthew Vaughan’s piss-take/prequel/showreel for the Broccolis [delete as applicable]. Things kick off with the prologue to Bryan Singer’s original ‘X Men’: the young Erik Lehnsherr being pried away from his mother by Nazi guards in 1944 and responding with a metal-bending display of power until a rifle butt to the head knocks him out. Next we’re in some Ivy League part of America where the privileged young Charles Xavier meets the young Raven. They’re all kids, and they all realize they’re not exactly normal. But whereas Xavier subjugates his power (or, as he calls it, mutation) and impresses on Raven to do the same, Lehnsherr doesn’t have the same luxury. He’s delivered into the hands of Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), who quickly discovers that the key to unleashing Lehnsherr’s power is his anger. He discovers this by shooting Lehnsherr’s mother.

The juxtaposition of Xavier and Lehnsherr’s formative years continues apace as Xavier (James McAvoy), now in his twenties and a graduate of Oxford (or “Oxford University, England” as the establishing credit trumpets)*, is jarred from his enjoyment of the academic life by CIA agent Moira McTaggart** (Rose Byrne) who recruits him into an unofficial intelligence branch headed up by The Man in the Black Suit (Oliver Platt); while Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbinder) – all growed up and pretty freakin’ mean with it – is on a globe-trotting mission of revenge against Shaw.

Meanwhile, Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) is all growed up and so damned cute with it there ought to be a law against it. Exhibit A, m’lud:

Um, sorry. Lost my train of thought again. Oh yes. Vaughan explicitly establishes that it’s now 1962, through more of those idiot-proof establishing credits and enough stock footage of John F Kennedy that the family’s lawyer is probably writing to Vaughan and co. right now to ask what their percentage point is of the box office gross. The Cold War is heating up (sorry: that was poor, even by my standards) and the world’s attention is focused on Cuba. Shaw is intent on playing the superpowers off against each other and here’s where the whole ‘X Men First Class’-as-Bond-movie thing really kicks in.

After all, we have an egomaniacal supervillain (Bacon’s performance suggests he’s channelled a big fat helping of Blofeld), his sexy but deadly right-hand-woman Emma Frost (January Jones), their entourage of seemingly invicible goons, a globe-trotting narrative, a loose-cannon operative (if Craig hangs up the mantle any time in the near future, Michael Fassbinder should immediately be signed up as the next 007), entire swathes of funky 60s décor, a magnificently unPC attitude to female characters (Rose Byrne’s intro has her sashaying around a go-go bar in her underwear; January Jones’s cleavage puts the fucking missiles to shame; and Jennifer Lawrence exists in an entirely different universe and time zone from the ugly stick), and more gadgets than Q Department could shake a standard issue stick with modifications at (allowing, of course, for the fact that the mutants are pretty much gadgets in their own right). Add to this Shaw’s labyrinthine inner sanctum, a pleasure cruiser whose hull turns into a submarine and various narrative beats that recall at least four different Bond titles and the evidence is nigh on incontrovertible.

There’s also a touch of the ‘Dr Strangelove’ in the politicking and the pseudo-tense council-of-war scenes. There were whole tranches of the movies where I was praying for someone to pop and say, aghast, “Gentlemen, you can’t mutate in here. This is the war room.”

Vaughan’s directorial approach vacillates quite wildly between moody, broody, angsty stuff (the young Lehnsherr suffering at Shaw’s hands), straight down the line action thriller business (Lehnsherr’s pursuit of same) and camp, OTT set-pieces (remember that advert, I think it was for vodka, when all the rammel on the seabed rises up, breaks the surface and erupts into the air? get ready for a re-edited version of same as part of the big finale). It shouldn’t work. It should be piss-awful. But somehow it’s supremely entertaining. Of course, it arrives in the wake of the wrist-cuttingly awful ‘X Men 3: the Last Snore Stand’ which gives it a certain advantage. After ‘X Men 3’, an episode of ‘Postman Pat’ where his black-and-white cat mutated into a slightly bigger cat and they went and delivered some letters would be a hundredfold improvement!

‘X Men First Class’ is a real curate’s egg of a movie. Plot holes abound, not least when Xavier does something during the aforementioned big finale that leaves you wondering why he doesn’t pull the same trick on two other specific people and – hey presto – problem solved. And yet there performances are generally effective, with only – surprisingly – McAvoy struggling to suggest Patrick Stewart’s Xavier. Fassbinder, however, captures every bit of Ian McKellan’s ruthless charm and steely intelligence as Magneto, while Lawrence nails the character arc that transforms Raven into Mystique.

Yup, it’s a weird ’un all right. But it’s the best ‘Dr Strangelove’-meets-James-Bond mash-up you’re likely to see this summer.



*Establishing credits are plentiful and bludgeoningly over-explanatory in this movie. Every couple of minutes, it’s reinforced to us poor geographically-challenged idiots in the audience that we’re in “Oxford, England”, or “CIA headquarters, USA” or “Moscow, Russia”, the latter particularly redundant given the proliferation of mushroom-domed buildings in every Moscow-set backdrop.

**Which is about as subtle as implying a character has Australian heritage by calling her Sheila.

Atonement

My thanks to Viv Apple for the following review:

I found ‘Atonement’ so absorbing and involving that it took me some time to untangle my thoughts about it. It was certainly beautiful, but was it about class, or love, the pity of war, or the foolishness of youth? It was all of these and more. The opening scenes, set in a country house in the 1930s, seemed to exaggerate class attitudes a little too much, but even that became acceptable for the times as the drama took over.

In a key scene the teenage Briony (Saoirse Ronan), a dreamer, looks through a window and sees her sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) strip off her dress and dive into a fountain watched by Robbie (James McAvoy), the housekeeper’s son who has just graduated from Cambridge. Briony misinterprets the situation, which leads to more complex misunderstandings and eventually to the tragic separation of Robbie and Cecilia just after they have acknowledged their love for each other.

Although the story was made believable by sensitive performances, there were some flaws which could have undermined the whole narrative. For example, the police investigation which hinged on a young girl’s word was glossed over, even though it appeared that Robbie, the accused, was elsewhere when the offence in question was committed.

Fast forward four years, and the rest of the film is set during the second world war. We see the effects of Briony’s lie intertwined with her attempts to atone for her behaviour.

I won’t spoil the plot by describing any more of its intricacies, but must mention the remarkable Dunkirk scene: a long tracking shot in which Robbie wanders, wounded, through the beach with all the horrors of that time around him. Hundreds of soldiers, horses, a beached boat with shredded sails, men singing in an old bandstand, all against a background of a Ferris wheel, combined to create a surreal atmosphere reminiscent of ‘Oh What a Lovely War’. At first I thought this too unreal and stagy, but then it struck me that it was not meant to be representational. The effect was highly emotional and, like Picasso’s Guernica, the surreal nature of the scene underlined the unimaginable horror of war.

In a final scene, Vanessa Redgrave plays Briony in old age, effectively bringing together loose ends. Beautifully done, but somewhat marred by a sugary final shot which bordered on cliché. Had director Joe Wright cut the film by 30 seconds, I would have believed it all.