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X-Men Apocalypse
The “first mutant” En Sabah Nur is revived in a ruin in Egypt and proceeds to recruit four mutants to be his Horsemen in ushering in an Apocalypse. Can the newly-reformed X-Men stop him?
Continuity? Feh, we don’t need continuity. We’ve rewritten the timeline! But on the other hand, that actually allows this movie, despite being somewhere between the sixth and tenth in the series, to stand on its own and build the cast is it sees fit. If you ignored the first three X-Men movies entirely, you’d miss essentially nothing.
We get new younger versions of most of the “core” X-Men, with several of them switch sides from their usual roles. Sophie Turner gets to do things other than look anguished as Jean Grey! Angel is basically a badass dick the whole time, as is Psylock. Mystique, on the other hand, is at least as much of a hero as Wolverine ever was. Quicksilver—who gets another awesome slo-mo scene—is a loser who lives in his mom’s basement but totally jumps at the chance to be heroic.
Poor Cyclops, though. The movies have never been terribly kind to Scott Summers, as this really isn’t an exception. His whole purpose seems to be as a barely-controllable blast-cannon, where virtually every other character manages to demonstrate some utility value of their powers.
I’ll admit to not really remembering which powersets Apocalypse has in the comics, but this movie gives him the grab-bag of “everything he needs to make the plot go”. He can: Transfer bodies to steal mutant abilities, enhance mutant abilities, teleport, shape anything he wants out of sand, regenerate, mentally hijack Xavier/Cerebro remotely, and probably some kind of persuasive/empathic manipulation too. At least there’s the implication that most of these powers originally belonged to other mutants and he amassed them over the years.
For the sequel(s), we’ve got the stinger than references Mister Sinister, we’ve got Psylock coming back with a grudge, we’ve got Havok’s death (which is classic “they never found the body;” he could easily be back brainwashed and crazy), we’ve got a memory-fragmented Wolverine out in the Canadian wilderness somewhere, and we’ve got Jubilee as a background character who they never used.
Overall: Don’t think too hard about the timeline—or physics, or the concept of “scale”—and this is plenty of fun. Watching First Class and Days of Future Past is helpful, but not strictly necessary.
Continuity? Feh, we don’t need continuity. We’ve rewritten the timeline! But on the other hand, that actually allows this movie, despite being somewhere between the sixth and tenth in the series, to stand on its own and build the cast is it sees fit. If you ignored the first three X-Men movies entirely, you’d miss essentially nothing.
We get new younger versions of most of the “core” X-Men, with several of them switch sides from their usual roles. Sophie Turner gets to do things other than look anguished as Jean Grey! Angel is basically a badass dick the whole time, as is Psylock. Mystique, on the other hand, is at least as much of a hero as Wolverine ever was. Quicksilver—who gets another awesome slo-mo scene—is a loser who lives in his mom’s basement but totally jumps at the chance to be heroic.
Poor Cyclops, though. The movies have never been terribly kind to Scott Summers, as this really isn’t an exception. His whole purpose seems to be as a barely-controllable blast-cannon, where virtually every other character manages to demonstrate some utility value of their powers.
I’ll admit to not really remembering which powersets Apocalypse has in the comics, but this movie gives him the grab-bag of “everything he needs to make the plot go”. He can: Transfer bodies to steal mutant abilities, enhance mutant abilities, teleport, shape anything he wants out of sand, regenerate, mentally hijack Xavier/Cerebro remotely, and probably some kind of persuasive/empathic manipulation too. At least there’s the implication that most of these powers originally belonged to other mutants and he amassed them over the years.
For the sequel(s), we’ve got the stinger than references Mister Sinister, we’ve got Psylock coming back with a grudge, we’ve got Havok’s death (which is classic “they never found the body;” he could easily be back brainwashed and crazy), we’ve got a memory-fragmented Wolverine out in the Canadian wilderness somewhere, and we’ve got Jubilee as a background character who they never used.
Overall: Don’t think too hard about the timeline—or physics, or the concept of “scale”—and this is plenty of fun. Watching First Class and Days of Future Past is helpful, but not strictly necessary.