I feel that Magneto was the only good part of Apocalypse. Apocalypse himself is one of the most meh villains in any superhero movie. All of the horsemen except for Magneto are wasted. Mystique has become a weight holding the entire franchise down with their insistence on making her the Superman or Captain America of the Foxverse. The teenagers aren't interesting. The ages of the characters from Magneto and Charles to the Summers boys make no sense. The Wolverine scene was a waste of time that could have been spent on characterization. Singer still has trouble with directing action scenes.

Magneto's story and journey was pretty good, but that's it. And it will also be wasted if he's used as a villain again.

Maybe if the movie was more fun like First Class or The Avengers I could forgive its flaws, but when even if all the plot holes and lame villains are forgiven it's still just meh. There's just little good about it.

Sure thing. First, as an 80s/90s era X-Fan, they just dropped the ball with the adaptation, and they completely wasted Apocalypse. His entire schtick is survival of the fittest/forcing evolution, and they just made him cartoonishly evil to kill everyone for no apparent reason. No motivation, no core value, nothing. Just a bad buy to be a bad guy. The horsemen were basically there just to be bad guys. Their inclusion was empty fan-service at best and made almost as little sense as Apocalypse himself. There was just literally no reason at all for the second half of the movie as it was to exist. 

The overemphasis on Mystique is annoying because she just isn't all that interesting. Giving Magneto a family just to kill them off felt unnecessary and heavy-handed, though the scene where he killed the soldiers after was neat. 

Mostly, just overall there was little to no plot, little to no character development, character motivations made no sense, and they dropped the ball with one of the more interesting, IMO, X-MEN villains. This was just wasted potential incarnate. A grade of B implies some level of good, and there just wasn't much really done well, so nothing to earn a "Good" great IMO. So, lack of good stuff in the movie plus the addition of actively bad things = below average for me, plus a bias deduction for pissing off a nerd fan, lol. 

This pretty much sums it up.

I actually didn't buy into Magneto's journey at all. The whole thing felt too formulaic. Maybe if they'd taken five more minutes to get the audience emotionally invested in his family life?



And cliche, and nonsensical.




Mostly.

Archangel was an absurd waste.

Psylocke at least looked the part and did some cool action stuff. And, to be fair, no fan of that version of Psylocke actually cared about her characterization. I'm just glad they didn't go all Jim Lee T&A with that actress.

Storm had serious potential. Liked the actor, loved having her as a young thief in Cairo. But yeah, they took absolutely no time to develop a character for her.




100% agreed. She was the biggest mistake of First Class, and they just won't let it go.






No, but they aren't bad either. The casting of the 2000 film was terrible. Wolverine aside, those characters were never going to be my X-Men. These casting decisions don't suck -- the script just doesn't do anything with them. I still have hopes that they can deliver in a better written sequel. X-Men Apocalypse is the first film in the franchise to give us a team that doesn't give me any reason to wince or wretch. That makes my standards pretty low, I realize, but I consider it a win here.




MacTaggart looking the same makes no sense, but the script even laughs at that.

McAvoy and Fassbender look older and world weary. A decade older? Hard to say, but I could stretch my disbelief and accept they're in their early forties. It will be a lot harder to accept their being in their fifties if the next film moves ahead ten years once more.

it's really just Havoc, still living with really young looking parents and looking like a 20-something, that doesn't make any damn sense.



Eh. It's gratuitous, but it also offers the first ever believable explanation for the Jean/Wolverine romantic tension that otherwise never made any sense to me, whether in the films or in the comics.



I truly LIKED the final battle, and I rarely enjoy drawn out action sequences. Each character's abilities were treated very differently, and it worked. No two characters fought the same or were conveyed the same by the camera.





It definitely had its flaws, but the X-Men have always been a more serious property, so I didn't need laughs to relieve the tension. The plot made no sense when you stopped to think about it, and numerous opportunities were wasted, but it held my interest, was visually enthralling, and I love all that it does to connect the X-Men of the 1980s to the best remembered aspects of the 2000 film without dredging up any of the disappointing aspects. While nowhere near the best X-Men film to date, I feel this film did more good for the franchise as a whole than any previous one, connecting all the dots and making it all feel important while discarding what didn't work previously. In a sense, it feels like the Bronze Age X-Men run in that respect, acknowledging the old, doing its best to make continuity work, and striving to improve itself without losing sight of its roots.

Oh, you'll get no argument from me on that one. I have no attachment to the comic version of Apocalypse, but his actions in this film still made no sense. What was his hurry? Take the time to carefully pick your four horsemen instead of grabbing the first three you find and THEN having enough common sense to teleport several countries away to find a powerful one. And even then, why not transfer to a new body BEFORE starting to destroy the world, or at least leave your body guarded while doing so. And I still have no idea why he needed to destroy everything in order to rule the world (itself a truly tired cliche).



Yup. I agree.



And that's where I have to disagree. There was a lot of good in this film, even if everything you just pointed out was spot on. I really enjoyed the action (which i rarely do in superhero films), thought the visual look of the characters was strong and comic-like, and most importantly feel this film "fixed" the franchise, offering a new viable team and direction for the series, even while romancing the old films in a way that made me nostalgic for films I didn't actually enjoy all that much the first time around.

I think of X-Men: Apocalypse as being like Star Trek III. It's not a film that ANYONE enjoyed, but its romancing of Wrath of Khan made that film seem far more awesome than it actually was and gave so much meaning and repercussion to what had been (in my opinion) a substandard script. No one chooses III as their favorite Trek film, but it was the one that made the franchise feel like a franchise, whereas the first two films sort of existed in their own largely unrelated and sometimes contradictory worlds.

I liked Apocalypse enough when I saw it the first time. Now, after having examined the series closely, I feel it was the fix the franchise desperately needed, even while it was so thoroughly lacking in many aspects that didn't injure the franchise as a whole.

I guess. If someone saved my life and then asked me to help them destroy the world, though, I'd have to politely decline.

See, I'm not even a nut about "The adaptation has to be JUST LIKE the source!" at all. I just look for them to take the overall theme, or the vibe, etc, and do your own thing. One thing I think the original X-MEN movie did very well was convey the essence of the X-MEN while changing the details enough that audiences wouldn't laugh it out of the theaters in the post-Matrix world. 


I actually thought they did an interesting twist on her in First Class and thought it was an interesting backstory, but they just doubled down with her, and there isn't that much there.




I will fight you! j/k

But seriously, I really liked the casting for Jean, Scott, and Xavier, and Rogue was fine. I'll grant you Storm, though...

See, it sounds to me like you are describing Days of Future Past.

The Wolverine cameos and the Quicksilver scenes have bene the best parts of the new prequel trilogy in my opinion.