After X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the studio recognized that something wasn’t working with the X-Men movies, and went back and did a soft reboot / prequel trilogy, casting James McAvoy as young Charles Xavier and Michael Fassbender as young Erik Lehnsherr, alongside Jennifer Lawrence as young Raven Darkholme, a.k.a. Mystique.
I had seen and enjoyed the first two movies, X-Men: First Class and X-Men: Days of Future Past, but this time around was my first watch of X-Men: Apocalypse, widely regarded as a disaster. It was interesting to compare the prequel trilogy with the original three movies; on the whole, I think they were better, but they definitely have some of the same bad habits as the originals, especially the second two, which were directed by a returning Brian Singer. First Class, directed by Matthew Vaughn of Kingsman, did copy some of those bad habits, but I noticed them less in that movie, and it also set up the really strong relationships between Xavier, Magneto, and Mystique that carry through the entire prequel trilogy and provide most of the emotional core.
X-Men: First Class
This was my favorite of the three movies and definitely better than any other mainline X-Men movie. I’m even putting it above X2. It’s close, but First Class has brighter, more vibrant visuals and a sense of fun. It plays around with its 1962 setting, using the history, the visual appearance, and the music to subtly place itself in that time without getting too cheesy. The story conceit that mutants were involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis is the best kind of comic book alternate history; it effectively establishes the stakes for the final battle and makes sense within the world.
First Class also had my favorite character writing of the prequel trilogy. It does a great job setting up the relationships between Mystique, Xavier, and Magneto, making us understand where they’re coming from and why they do what they do. Nicholas Hoult’s Beast was also great, and the subplot between him and Mystique was so well executed. Mystique is tired of having to hide who she is, her natural blue form and her identity as a mutant, behind a fake beautiful Jennifer Lawrence face. She yearns to be herself all the time and for people to find her natural form as beautiful as they do her Jennifer Lawrence form. When she meets Beast and sees his weird feet, she thinks at first that she’s found someone who will understand her and accept her, but she finds out that unlike her, Beast is ashamed of his physical appearance and wants to hide or change it. Magneto is the first person she’s ever met who encourages her to be her blue self all the time, and she’s drawn to him for that reason, even though she still loves Charles as a brother, and part of her seems to know Magneto is bad news. The friendship between Xavier and Magneto feels organic and real, but you can also see how their upbringings made them into very different people, and gave them both good traits and bad traits. Xavier’s childhood as part of a rich family made him kind, trusting, willing to see the good in people, but also sometimes naive and overly trusting. Magneto’s time in a Nazi concentration camp and the trauma he suffered there gave him a strong will to survive and a keen sense of justice, but also made him hard and ruthless, quick to blame and slow to forgive. Charles can see the good in him, and always tries to guide him towards his better nature, but sometimes he succumbs to his demons, and there are times where he’s right and Charles is just too naive to see it. My one complaint about the Xavier / Magneto dynamic, which we see a lot more in the next two movies than in First Class, is that since the movies are still popcorn blockbusters, they often vindicate Charles too easily, and don’t focus enough on the times when Magneto was right and Charles should have listened to him.
I’ve seen a few complaints online that the movies blow Mystique’s part way out of proportion to her importance in the comics and introduce a lot of changes in her character, like being Charles’s adoptive sister, but it really didn’t bother me. The writers saw an interesting story they could tell with this character, so they told it, even though it meant changing things from the comics. At their best, I think that’s what a movie adaptation should do. The comics aren’t constant about stuff like this anyway; when Emma Frost was introduced, she was a minor villain whose purpose was mostly T&A. As time when on, she became a much more developed character who was sometimes good and sometimes not.
Speaking of Emma Frost, the villain in this movie is the Hellfire Club, and Emma Frost is in it. The actress who plays her looks the part, but doesn’t do a great job delivering lines. Kevin Bacon as Sebastian Shaw, though, is a pretty good villain. He’s not a lot like his comics counterpart, which is a bit of waste since the Hellfire Club could make great villains in the current zeitgeist. (They’re a bunch of ultra rich guys who think ultra rich guys don’t get enough appreciation in the modern world and want to return to an earlier time when ultra rich guys were more appreciated. It’s like they were made to be villains in 2018.) But Bacon gives a suitably villainous performance and definitely comes off as a real threat to the heroes.
The other bad parts of this movie: there are some weird looking effects, and the younger mutants don’t get a ton of development. The original trilogy was guilty of that as well: it would introduce characters and then take no time to develop them at all. Havok gets a little bit of development, but the rest are pretty blank. I also don’t think there was any reason to make the CIA agent Moira MacTaggert. She’s nothing at all like her comics counterpart, so it didn’t add any depth to the story; it was an “in name only” version of her. These are all minor complaints, though.
X-Men: Days of Future Past
Brian Singer came back for this one, the only time I can think of when a comic book movie used the same kind of convoluted timeline reboot that the comics themselves use all the time. We see a horrific dystopian future where mutants have been hunted to extinction in a holocaust, and then, like the comics story of the same name, someone’s consciousness gets sent back in time to change the future and prevent it from coming to pass. In the comics, Rachael Summers sent Kitty Pryde into the past; in this movie, Kitty Pryde sends Wolverine into the past, because Brian Singer doesn’t know how to make an X-Men movie where Wolverine isn’t the main character. (Though it turns out to be kind of a bait and switch here; Wolverine actually has a fairly minor role, and the main story is propelled by the young versions of Xavier, Magneto, and Mystique.)
I liked this movie a lot, but it’s not as good as First Class. For one thing, they timeskip ahead eleven years, from 1962 to 1973, but no one looks eleven years older than they were in First Class. It starts throwing in pointless little callbacks to the previous movies, like the presence of Stryker; in this movie they’re just little things, but they develop into problems in Apocalypse. Every character from First Class except for Xavier, Beast, Mystique, Magneto, and Havok is killed offscreen. It continues to pretend like this timeline will somehow lead to the timeline of the original movies, even though there are a lot of details that don’t connect. The biggest one is Mystique. In the original movies, she was just a sexpot spy who spent her free time fawning over Magneto. There was no indication that she knew Charles. In the prequel movies, her relationship with Magneto is much more complicated and Charles is probably the most important person in the world to her, despite their disagreements. Speaking of which, I thought Rebecca Romijn was better at playing that sexpot spy version of Mystique; when Jennifer Lawrence tries to do it in this movie, it’s somehow unconvincing. Jennifer Lawrence is great as the younger, more conflicted, wounded Mystique that we saw in First Class and see in a good portion of this movie. This movie also contains the only time in the series where Xavier admits that Magneto was right: in the dystopian future, with Patrick Stewart Xavier and Ian McKellen Magneto. Of course, the movie goes on to still vindicate Charles when the government kills off the Sentinel program after Mystique saves Richard Nixon (which is morally problematic in other ways, but whatever, the characters had no way of knowing that).
There’s still a lot to like about this movie, though. Xavier and Mystique both have great character arcs. The 70’s setting is used just as well as the 60’s setting of First Class: it infuses a bit of style and helps get us grounded in the time period, without being obnoxious. The Quicksilver scene is awesome. Bolivar Trask is a surprisingly good villain. He has kind of an Ozymandias thing where he thinks that uniting humanity against mutants will end war and suffering in the world, and him being a little person adds an interesting dimension to his belief that it’s all right to persecute a minority group for the greater good. The action scenes in the dystopian future are great; they have a scale and intensity that we never got in any of the previous movies, where the heroes weren’t allowed to kill anything and there were always civilians and property around to be careful of.
Also, it erases The Last Stand from the timeline. So that’s good. When I saw this the first time, it had been so long since I saw The Last Stand that I didn’t really think about how its ending would have led into the dystopian mutant holocaust future, but now it’s pretty obvious how it happened. Magneto attacking Alcatraz and causing a giant battle between mutants and the army seems like a pretty obvious trigger for that sort of thing. It still doesn’t jive with how the 1973 timeline led into The Last Stand, though. For one thing, Mystique is still alive and running around menacing humanity in The Last Stand, whereas in Days of Future Past they tell us that in the timeline which led to the mutant holocaust, Mystique was captured and experimented on to create the morphing Sentinels. After watching this and even more so after Apocalypse, I pretty much decided that this trilogy was a reboot, not a prequel trilogy. It just incidentally ends with Patrick Stewart playing Xavier and Ian McKellen playing Magneto. I don’t think we can assume the original three movies as we saw them happened at all in this timeline, though we do know that Logan still had to kill Jean for some reason since Xavier sees the scenes from The Last Stand in his mind.
X-Men: Apocalypse
Definitely the worst of the three reboot movies, but I enjoyed it more than The Last Stand, though it shares that movie’s main issue: it’s crazily overstuffed. There are some good ideas and a lot of good actors here, but there’s so much material to cover that even if they’d focused, they never would have been able to do it all well, and the movie distracts itself with all kinds of pointless fandering that doesn’t advance the main story.
Here is a list of all the new characters that are introduced to the reboot timeline in this movie: Cyclops, Jean Grey, Nightcrawler, Angel, Storm, Psylocke, Jubilee, and Apocalypse. That’s eight major characters, each of which has a backstory and needs screentime to be developed. They also have to share the movie with Xavier, Magneto, Mystique, and Quicksilver, as well as Moira MacTaggert, William Stryker, and Wolverine, who shows up during a pointless middle section that tries to establish why he’s in love with Jean. I’m amazed at how well the movie actually does balancing all these characters, but it’s still not good enough; while we do get enough of all of them to get some sense of what they’re like, we don’t hear about anyone’s history in any depth and none of them gets a real character arc in this movie. In fact, the only characters I’d say do kind of get arcs in this movie are Magneto, who realizes by the end that he actually does care for Xavier, and Mystique, who realizes she could do some good with her newfound fame and help teach younger mutants what she wishes someone would have taught her when she was young. No one else develops. There just isn’t enough time, with all these new characters.
There are also way too many subplots going on in this movie. Magneto, who has escaped after his attempt to kill Richard Nixon and gone into hiding, is working at a foundry in his native Poland and has a wife and daughter whom he loves. They exist only to get killed, when a group of scared police officers accidentally fire a bow at them somehow. (It seems pretty hard to accidentally discharge a bow the way the guy does in the movie. Like, he has the string pulled back and then somehow accidentally releases it. It’s not like a gun where your finger can slip or whatever; it takes a lot of strength to hold a bowstring pulled back. You will be aware that you’re doing it.) Apocalypse, an ancient Egyptian mutant played by a squandered Oscar Isaac, is gathering his Four Horsemen, launching nukes into space, and creating pyramids for some reason. Scott and Jean are meeting for the first time and hanging out with Nightcrawler and Jubilee. Quicksilver is trying to tell Magneto that he’s his son. As I mentioned, there’s an entirely pointless scene in the middle where Stryker captures Mystique, Beast, and Quicksilver and locks them up for no reason, so Scott, Jean, and Nightcrawler have to come rescue them and free Wolverine in the process. The movie is two and a half hours long, just like the Marvel movies, and there still isn’t enough time to cover everything satisfactorily, because there’s enough material here for three movies.
Apocalypse skips ahead to 1983, and at this point the timeskips just become ridiculous. Nobody who was in First Class looks over twenty years older than they did in that movie. Havok, especially, was young and should have aged a lot, but he didn’t. Quicksilver too; not only did he not age, he’s still living in his mom’s basement after 10 years. (They lamely cover this by having him say “Yep, I still live in my mom’s basement. I’m a loser.” at one point.) I also don’t understand why they didn’t just make Xavier bald in this movie and imply that he lost his hair naturally. It would have made him look older, and it would have let them have a comics-accurate bald Xavier without the pointless fan-pandering scene at the end where a psychic struggle against Apocalypse somehow makes him bald.
Unlike The Last Stand, though, there are some good ideas here. I like the idea of Magneto trying to live a quiet life and find peace with a family. But that’s too big a change from what we saw last time to be covered in ten minutes of a movie with four other plots going on. I like Mystique’s character arc, where she realizes she can do some good by embracing her fame and the admiration young mutants feel for her. I like the idea of Magneto realizing he cares about Charles too much to directly attack him, even if they’ll never see eye to eye on other things. I like a lot of the actors: Alexandra Shipp is a good Storm, much better than Halle Berry, and Kodi Smit-McPhee is a great young Nightcrawler. Sophie Turner (a.k.a. Sansa Stark) is a decent young Jean Grey. Tye Sheridan is okay but not very exciting as Cyclops. I also don’t like how they wrote Cyclops. He does at least have a personality this time, but it’s almost the exact opposite of his comics counterpart—he’s rebellious and sneers at authority, instead of being upstanding and authoritative himself.
Funnily enough, I think X-Men: Apocalypse would have worked better if they’d cut out Apocalypse. His story was the second most pointless after the Stryker scene, and took up a lot of time. The whole movie probably would have worked better if Magneto were just the villain again, and only the young X-Men subplot, Mystique subplot, and Magneto subplot were covered. Mystique could have just recruited Storm to the young X-Men team, or Charles could have like he does in the comics. With how many characters there are, a smaller, more character-centered story would have been a better fit than the overly ambitious attempt at a giant, world-ending battle that we get.
Still, Apocalypse did have some aspects I liked a lot, and compared to The Last Stand there was nowhere near as much stuff that just felt stupid (“I’m the Juggernaut, bitch”, “I don’t respond to my slave name”, stuff like that). The main one is the scene where the young X-Men walk out of Return of the Jedi complaining about how bad it is; fricking nobody in 1983 was walking out of Return of the Jedi complaining about how bad it was. (Okay, someone probably was, but not four random teenagers. I don’t buy it.) So it’s my second least-favorite of the six main series movies, but it’s a lot closer to X-Men for me than it is to The Last Stand, despite the similar problems it has.
Conclusion
I liked the reboot trilogy a lot more than the originals. They had fun, color, music, comics-accurate costumes (except in Apocalypse when their costumes were just random flight suits they picked up at a military base, that was dumb). They had great actors (to be fair, so did the originals) and great character writing. They actually tried to focus on characters other than Wolverine. I’m still slowly working my way through the Claremont run of Uncanny X-Men comics, and these reboot movies did a pretty good job capturing the spirit of those comics. There’s fun and color and weirdness and jokes, but there’s also a serious core to it, with more complex themes than you’d typically see from characters like Spider-Man or the Fantastic Four.
It does concern me a little that they’re already trying to redo the Dark Phoenix story from the comics in the next movie. A huge part of that story’s power came from years of following the ups and downs of Jean Grey’s life, ever since Uncanny X-Men #1 in the 60’s. We barely know Sophie Turner’s Jean Grey yet; she got the most development of the young X-Men in Apocalypse, but it still wasn’t a lot. I don’t understand why movie studios develop these fixations on specific comics storylines. Yes, the Dark Phoenix saga was great, but it’s not the only good X-Men story ever told, and the other stories that came before it provided much needed buildup that helped make it so good. Let’s see a movie about Proteus. Let’s see a movie about Genosha. Even if an exact adaptation requires too much continuity to work as a movie, it’s still possible to take elements of these stories and make them into something that works for a movie. It’s the same with The Killing Joke, and The Dark Knight Returns, and Year One: those are all good stories, but they’re not the only Batman stories ever told, and the other stories provided buildup that made them as good as they were.
