The X-Men Cinematic Universe (General Discussion)

A) There's really no need to call people drones for disagreeing with you.
B) You still haven't provided a single logical reason why Magneto in this position was in any way good for the movie.
C) For formatting's sake, I'll leave the reasons to the end of this post.

Then, I guess, congratulations on making a blatantly obvious point that doesn't put the filmmaker's choices in a better light even slightly and is so generically applicable to so many characters beyond just Magneto (something you've failed to even acknowledge multiple times now) that it's utterly irrelevant to the entire discussion.

This goes back to heroes struggling as horsemen being the entire point of the horsemen. Ie, EVERY theoretical star horseman imaginable would provide that same dramatic possibility unless the filmmaker plays the horsemen as straight minions which would be grossly incompetent.

So, off the top of my head, the reasons I recall for why Apocalypse is not a good movie:

1. Apocalypse is not a good villain. His powers are inconsistent. His dust attack from the first scene could've automatically ended every other fight, but he completely forgets it exists. His visual design is poor and doesn't really fit his character. His motivation is utterly generic and most of his villain speeches are off the rack 'I will save you my children' diddies which mostly just make him sound like a more pompous Magneto. The character's trademark philosophies which make him unique and interesting in the comics were only barely mentioned once or twice and never once acted on. In the final fight, he just stands stock still while everyone shoots at him for like five minutes straight. Probably the most boring scene in the entire franchise. Also, his horsemen are terrible. We've already covered that Magneto made an utterly boring and worthless horseman. Storm wasn't bad, but she was barely in the movie. Psylocke was in the movie even less and was actually pretty poor in general. Angel was a complete and total waste which even the filmmakers themselves didn't seem to give a crap about, as he had no decent scenes, no name, and no personality.

2. The movie tries to give Scott character development by losing his brother Alex. Alex dies after a single abbreviated scene with Scott that didn't even come close to actually establishing a relationship between them and the whole thing is almost immediately forgotten.

3. Quicksilver is reintroduced by ripping off the exact same power sequence he already did in DoFP, but now it's totally lame (Pizza Dog! LoL!) and has zero impact. He then spends most of the movie dancing around the fact that Magneto's his dad, which everyone already knew before the movie even started. And after arguing for a ridiculously long time about whether he can tell Magneto thereby finally fulfilling the obvious plot advancement that this entire storyline exists to serve, he chickens out leaving his entire character arc just hanging in the wind while completely robbing Magneto's storyline of the only real dramatic potential it could have had.

4. Wolverine has no place in this movie and the entire Weapon x sequence serves no story purpose whatsoever beyond simply separating one group of kids from the rest, which could easily have been accomplished in hundreds of different, simpler, more plot relevant ways (including simply leaving them at the mall to begin with, which would also have made the movie better: more on that later). But, because Hugh Jackman Must Be Worshipped, the movie comes to a screeching halt for like 15 minutes just to indulge in Weapon X continuity porn. And also, having a *teenage* Jean Grey hold an intimate 'tame the wild beast' moment with her future flirt partner who is literally a hundred years old is just creepy.

5. Back to the movie's climax: Apocalypse unleashes the worst devastation in the history of the franchise on the world and it has no impact whatsoever because the movie is completely and totally divorced from all the regular people. There are no non-X-Men characters for the audience to care about (which could easily have been fixed by showing the teens interact with regular people in the mall instead of dumping them in Weapon X) and all that is left is just generic cgi of buildings collapsing with no emotional impact. Also, Magneto commits literal genocide is allowed to walk with no consequences. Also, Moira out of nowhere and for no particular reason casually forgives Xavier for basically mind-raping her like its somehow no big deal. Also, the movie acts like this was all just another adventure and everything will continue on as normal as if we didn't just see at least 25 percent of the global population murdered by mutant terrorists in a single attack.

That's what comes to mind off the top of my head. To sum up, my feelings about the movie are basically
that the casting of the new characters was good to great, except Psylocke and Angel, and the Mystique/Storm storyline was surprisingly interesting and worked well, and pretty much every other aspect of the movie was mediocre to bad.

 

I've been able to properly articulate why I didn't like the film, but you've laid it out pretty well here. Agreed 100% and ranks up there with The Last Stand for squandering so much potential with such complete shit. At least it tells me that the alternate universe where Singer did direct The Last Stand wasn't inherently great (Vaughn on the other hand...).

 

I often feel that Vaughn doesn't get enough credit. First Class is far and away my favorite X-Men movie. Vaughn seems far more comfortable with the emotional beats whereas Singer has a bit more of a clinical distance.

It's especially odd since I recall Singer saying in the commentary that he wanted to avoid a massive body count and explicitly citing Man of Steel as being the thing that he didn't want to do. (He mentions that, if you look really closely, you can see a bunch of children escaping from a school bus teetering on a bridge in one shot.)

I wonder if The Last Stand might have worked better if it had just taken a little more time to develop the Phoenix storyline. Keep in mind that The Last Stand is tied with the original X-Men as the shortest film in the franchise, which seems like a pretty bad idea considering how stuffed with characters and plot lines it is.

 

First Class is one of my least favourites. I just found it boring.

 

Well, you know what Luke Skywalker would say about that one!

They don't care about Moira?

It's right there in plain sight. You're ignoring it because... you didn't want Magneto in the movie at all.

If it's so blatantly obvious, how did you manage to miss it?

Yeah, we sure "covered" it. With a lot of fertilizer.

Well, that's what he does...

I have a hunch that the people he saved might feel differently.

I'm sure you've consistently had a problem with their age difference in context of the earlier films, and that this isn't at all a BS complaint invented just for this one movie.

 

A Scots housekeeper with an automatic weapon? I care.

 

So you're again going to ignore half of what I said, repeat the same bs while ignoring the entire context of the original discussion and try to pretend to hold some non-existant high ground.

Good to know you have absolutely zero interest in actually discussing any of this in good faith.

 

^ This makes more sense if it's read as though you're talking to yourself.

 

I think Apocalypse was toying with the heroes at the end, testing them to see who was weak or strong but I would have been happier if his powers had been better defined. He was actually pleased to see Jean manifest her powers.

I enjoyed seeing Magneto falling from grace but I saw no need to have Mystique in this one. She's great but to me, she's not an X-man and she steals valuable air time. The time to turn Angel into Archangel was after X3 when he's a familiar and sympathetic character. It's his most tragic and iconic storyline and they gutted the emotional heart of it for cool special effects, much the same as Phoenix in X3. I thought that making the Horsemen all X characters was trying too hard to emulate Civil War and I would have been just as happy to see the original horsemen from the comics (a character similar to War appeared in the Gifted recently and his powers would have worked great in a blockbuster movie). Cool as she was, Psylocke isn't even Psylocke; she was Kwannon.

Generally , apart from X3 and Days of Future Past , X-men films have been lacking something in their action finales. I think part of it comes from the characters lacking confidence and imagination in their abilities. I wasn't a fan of the them making Scarlet Witch telekinetic but by gum she is so much more competent than Jean and it makes for fun action scenes.

The mistake is too much focus on non X-men or repeatedly re-setting the team to keep them as amateurs.

 

Just saw Captain Marvel. Who do I have to screw to get Gemma Chan cast as Psylocke in the xmen reboot ?

 

They made Psylocke a white British woman again in the comics, though. And if they made her Asian then they'd have to make Brian Braddock Asian too since they probably wouldn't want to go through that mess of a story that made Betsy Asian in the comics.

 

I'd be fine if Betsy started off as Caucasian and British. The writers need to understand that a character is not just a look and suite of powers or a cool visual. Personality and background do matter and the more they screw with characters, the more exasperated fans become. I don't really have a problem with them tweaking Caucasian characters ethnicity to even up the numbers but Brian and Betsy were British aristocracy. If Asian Betsy isn't even British, then she's not Betsy at all, she's Kwannon.

 

Admittedly, there's always going to be a massive in-universe age difference between Wolverine and all of the female characters he's likely to meet. However, there is a BIG DIFFERENCE in how it looks when you have 30something Famke Janssen flirting with 30something Hugh Jackman vs. when you have a teenage girl flirting with a Hugh Jackman that's pushing 50.

 

I don't see any flirting, I see Jean using her power, that's it.

I see no reason for such an odd interpretation other than to find fault with the film.

 

According to Maisie Williams, the reshoots that were supposed to make New Mutants scarier never happened. "Who knows when the f*ck that's coming out?"

https://www.newsarama.com/44468-eve...j4kZgZa_OTvJ1X4pplAxmd5GWtz23LaoHO-G-MI7_ur9g

 

You know things are in pretty bad shape when even the cast doesn't know what's going on with a movie.

 

And openly losing patience with the production.

 

IGN has a detailed description of a couple of scenes from Dark Phoenix.
They both sound pretty good, the first one especially, but it can be hard to really judge the quality of this kind of stuff from a written description since so much of a movie's quality comes down to stuff that you don't get in writing.

 

Final trailer. They finally made this movie look intriguing to me with this one. I really hope it's good because I would love to see the X-Men movie franchise go out on a good note, but I'm skeptical. Nevertheless, I do plan to see it.