X-Men: Apocalypse

By the time 2016 rolled around, the superhero bubble wasn't just stretching; it was showing some serious structural cracks. We were smack in the middle of a "vs." era—Captain America was fighting Iron Man, Batman was trying to spear Superman—and the X-Men decided the best way to keep up was to go prehistoric. I watched this while sitting on a couch that smells faintly of my dog’s refusal to bathe, which, honestly, added a layer of gritty realism the CGI-heavy climax was desperately missing.

Bryan Singer returned to the director's chair following the high-water mark of Days of Future Past, but where that film felt like a clever, time-bending puzzle, X-Men: Apocalypse feels like a Saturday morning cartoon that accidentally stumbled onto a $178 million budget. It’s a movie that wants to be an epic biblical disaster film while still maintaining the "cool teacher" vibe of the 1980s-set school for mutants. The result is a film that’s occasionally brilliant but mostly just the cinematic equivalent of a loud, expensive shrug.

A Literal God Complex

The big bad here is En Sabah Nur, played by Oscar Isaac. Now, I would watch Oscar Isaac read a menu for two hours, but the man is absolutely buried under pounds of blue prosthetic latex and high-heeled boots. He looks like a Power Rangers villain on a champagne budget, which is a crying shame because he’s trying his hardest to be menacing behind all that purple-blue contouring. His plan is the standard "wipe the world clean and start over" trope that we’ve seen about a dozen times since the first Avengers movie.

The plot kicks off when Apocalypse wakes up in 1983 and decides the modern world (well, the 80s world) is weak. He starts recruiting "Four Horsemen," which includes a grieving Erik Lehnsherr. Michael Fassbender is, as always, the best thing on screen. The scene where he loses his family in a Polish forest is genuinely gut-wrenching, but I’m starting to feel like the writers have a 'destroy Magneto's soul' punch card they’re trying to finish. How many times can we watch this man lose everything before he turns into a human horseshoe magnet?

Quicksilver Saves the Day (Again)

If there’s one reason to actually hit play on this, it’s Evan Peters as Quicksilver. His "Time in a Bottle" sequence in the previous film was a cultural moment, and Popcornizer fans know that lightning rarely strikes twice. Yet, the "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" sequence here is arguably even more ambitious. It’s a two-minute masterclass in visual storytelling and practical-meets-digital effects, showing Peter Maximoff rescuing students from an exploding X-Mansion. It’s funny, it’s stylish, and it’s the only time the movie feels like it’s having any fun.

The rest of the action is a bit of a mixed bag. We get a glimpse of the "all-new, all-different" X-Men, including Sophie Turner as Jean Grey and Tye Sheridan as Scott Summers. They do their best with the material, but they’re often overshadowed by the sheer volume of falling debris. The final battle in Cairo is a whirlwind of sand, lasers, and floating metal, but it lacks the tactile weight of the earlier films. When James McAvoy’s Charles Xavier finally goes bald (yes, we finally get the iconic look), it’s meant to be a momentous occasion, but by then, I was mostly just wondering if the CGI team had forgotten what a real building looks like.

The Bloat of the 2010s

What’s fascinating—or maybe frustrating—about watching Apocalypse now is seeing how it struggled with the "franchise fatigue" that would soon become a common complaint in the MCU. It’s caught between being a character-driven period piece and a massive IP-builder. There’s a mandatory Hugh Jackman cameo as Wolverine that feels like it was filmed in a different movie entirely, and Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique looks like she’d rather be literally anywhere else. Her character spends most of the film out of the blue makeup, which was a point of contention on social media back then, but I can’t blame her—that stuff looks like a nightmare to sit through.

Apparently, Oscar Isaac hated the suit so much he had to be hooked up to a cooling mechanism between takes just to keep from passing out. You can almost feel that discomfort radiating through the screen. It’s a movie of immense scale—the box office was a healthy $543 million, but that was a significant step down from its predecessor. It signaled the beginning of the end for this specific iteration of the X-Universe, leading us toward the even more divisive Dark Phoenix.

X-Men: Apocalypse isn't a disaster, but it is a mess. It’s a collection of really great moments—the Quicksilver run, Michael Fassbender's raw intensity, and a solid score by John Ottman—floating in a sea of generic CGI destruction. If you’re a completionist or just want to see some 80s-inspired mutant fashion, it’s a decent way to kill two hours, but it lacks the soul of First Class. It’s a blockbuster that tried to reach for the heavens but got bogged down by its own heavy prosthetics.