The X-Men are an allegory for their times. In the sixties it was all about the heat of civil rights. AIDS in the eighties. Today, their story tackles a new, important issue. In these adventures with Apocalypse they shed light on the bristling experiences of a new share-economy.
All the world is run into the ground and everyone has moved your furniture. It’s the blind mouse living in a house upside-down. Someone has come along and punched a new sunlight in your bedroom and now it’s time to right the wrongs of letting these visitors run amok.
Ten years on since the past particle of Days of Future Past for the band of mutants and the humans around them and, to paraphrase Professor X, they haven’t aged a day. It’s the equivalent of reviewing profiles of a prospective guest wherein they use a photo from years back in the day and you can’t tell if they’re the one in the middle, the side, or the person taking the shot. But in they come to eat the food, prop their feet up on the table and make themselves far too at home in yours.
X-Men: Apocalypse no doubt tells the story of what an Airbnb (also four syllables) host may find themselves standing in when they leave their abode to the option of passers-by and those wandering through. And, after seeing the destruction and utter trash left in their wake, it’s nothing to hold you back from tapping into their network, stalking them and chasing them down for retribution.
So you band together a group of friends, acolytes, followers or horses, and set about on a world tour with the dual goal of neck-stomping yet still getting a full five star review. They’ll come back with their own friends and soon you’re in a courtyard metres from each other punching the lights out until someone knocks out the gas lamp and torches the place.
The police are no match here and will be of no help as it’s far beyond their jurisdiction. The laws are barely catching up. You’re left standing in the mire of whatever has come to this. And what this is is a dressing down of movement and leaving the party a little too late. It’s a respectable amount of violence, but then it turns around to feature quite the set of posturing and standing, kicking, about the rubble that there isn’t much to do than wait for the next scene.
For getting to that tonal atmosphere where it’s Quicksilver’s interpretation of time, it’s pointed. There is a lot of standing around with awkward talks. That kind of chit-chat that aims to start a conversation, or to breed itself into a gauge of how the other party is. The drag is palpable many times. But then a brief few minutes talking about the weather is no indication they’ll treat your living room with any kind of respect or stand by your side when the rebar falls.
To wit, X-Men: Apocalypse is however you want to spin it as the gloss of the profile photos go up against the wide-angle marketing shots of the interior. Not only do you have to come to terms with being bested by the floaters, those who would use your bathroom in hellishly destructive ways, these mutants have the audacity to trounce about into a surer look of themselves in attire closer still to the comics.
Did all the nuclear warheads float away?
Reviewed on Sunday, 5 June 2016