TheRetroCritic

As the X-Men franchises continues its journey through time, Bryan Singer is back to direct X-Men: Apocalypse with Oscar Isaac taking on the role of the iconic titular villain. Set in the 1980's, the film follows the timeline of the last two movies and throws in some nods to the original trilogy. If there's one thing the pre-titles sequence promises it's a much bigger scale but also one of the most out-there X-Men movies to date. If you thought a time-travelling consciousness and big evolving robots were too much then wait till you get a load of this adventure which opens in Ancient Egypt and leads us to the world's near-destruction. With the exception of a cool poster (above), the marketing for this new X-flick was clumsy and, as a result, I had little hope it would be any good. The first pictures released of Apocalypse looked awful and the Internet soon compared him to Power Rangers villain Ivan Ooze, then the trailers made it seem like it was essentially The Je

After director Bryan Singer did his best to introduce Marvel’s team of multi-talented mutants to the world and develop their story further in a superior, if still somewhat restrained, second instalment, he eventually chose to leave the franchise opting for a chance to direct 2006’s  Superman Returns  instead. This was a blow to the series which, after that, underwent several changes in directors and cast members even threatened to leave the franchise. In the end, Brett Ratner, mostly known at the time for giving us the   Rush Hour  movies, took the job and completed a film which had already gone through a lot of messy rewrites. Not an easy feat, in all fairness. X-Men: The Last Stand  is one of those comic-book movie adaptations that gets a handful of things right but drops the ball on 90% of everything else. X-Men  lacked the scale it should have had and its plot revolved around the usual doomsday machine cliché. The sequel provided us with a bigger film, more villains, mor

Back in the day, I was crazy-excited about every X-Men movie release. A fan of the comics, I enjoyed the first film and was certainly looking forward to seeing more of my favourite characters in a sequel. Of course, all this positive anticipation for the franchise ended after (or actually, during) X-Men 3 but that's another story. I had forgotten how much better than the first film this second instalment was. It's ridiculously better. Not amazing or anything but certainly a vast improvement. For one thing, the scale was much more suited to an X-Men film. Also, you had a much better villain with a much better masterplan in Brian Cox's William Stryker with Magneto (Ian McKellen) and Mystique (Rebecca Romijn) given more interesting things to do this time around besides just being one-dimensional douchebags. It's a bit less of a cliched doomsday machine plot in that although Cerebro is a big part of Stryker's plan, it's not really all we get plot-wise from