X-Men: Apocalypse (2016)

By 2016, the X-Men film series had been running for sixteen years and had accumulated a continuity that was, to put it charitably, difficult to follow. X-Men: Days of Future Past had done the heavy lifting of wiping the slate clean, and X-Men: Apocalypse was positioned as the fresh start that would take the rebooted, younger cast into new territory. The story centres on En Sabah Nur, an immensely powerful mutant who ruled ancient Egypt and is awakened in the 1980s with predictably catastrophic intentions. It is the ninth film in the main X-Men series produced under 20th Century Fox, and arrives with the considerable weight of franchise expectation sitting squarely on its shoulders.

Behind the camera is Bryan Singer, who effectively built this franchise from the ground up with X-Men back in 2000 and later with X2. His return to the series after Days of Future Past made him the safe, familiar pair of hands for a studio trying to launch what was intended as a new trilogy. The production came out of the Donners' Company, Bad Hat Harry Productions, and Genre Films, the same producing infrastructure that had supported the franchise for years. At 144 minutes, it is one of the longer entries in the series, a runtime that would prove to be either a generous canvas or a liability depending on your patience for superhero world-building.

The cast assembled here is polished but, as some would argue, underserved by the material. James McAvoy returns as the young Charles Xavier, bringing the same warm intellectualism he established in X-Men: First Class. Michael Fassbender is back as Magneto, a character whose arc across these films has been genuinely one of their more rewarding threads. Jennifer Lawrence reprises Mystique in a role the film leans on heavily for its emotional core, while Nicholas Hoult is reliable as Beast. Oscar Isaac, a performer of considerable range and presence, takes on the villain En Sabah Nur, an ancient, god-like mutant bent on reordering the world in his own image. Sophie Turner and Tye Sheridan appear as the younger generation, Jean Grey and Cyclops respectively, characters who would carry the franchise forward. On paper, it is a formidable ensemble working within a genre that, by the mid-2010s, was producing multiple major releases every year and asking audiences to keep pace with increasingly tangled mythologies.

X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) is exactly what the title suggests, an average entry in a franchise that once felt bold and urgent. It’s loud, overstuffed, and draped in nostalgia, from synth-heavy music to shoulder pads and mullets, but beneath the retro aesthetic, there’s not much substance. The story follows the rise of En Sabah Nur (Oscar Isaac), the world’s first mutant, who awakens after thousands of years and decides humanity’s time is up. He recruits a team of corrupted mutants and sets out to cleanse civilization, while Professor X’s young students, led by a brooding Mystique and a reluctant Beast, must stop him. There are flashes of fun here (the Quicksilver kitchen sequence is pure comic-book joy, one of the most entertaining action scenes in the entire series) and Sophie Turner brings quiet strength to young Jean Grey as she begins to wrestle with the Phoenix force within her. She isn't the strongest actress though. But it’s all undone by bloat. The plot is thin, stretched across too many characters, and Isaac’s Apocalypse, despite his size and power, feels oddly hollow, a generic destroyer without real menace or motivation. The visual effects are often cartoonish, the pacing drags between set pieces, and the tone veers from apocalyptic doom to goofy teen drama without balance. It’s not bad, just forgettably mid. A film that plays like a checklist of superhero tropes rather than a meaningful chapter in the X-Men saga. Competent, occasionally exciting, but ultimately just another paint-by-numbers reboot sequel. Not the end of the world… just the end of the franchise’s momentum.

What stays with me, having sat with the film for a while, is the sense of a production that had all the component parts and somehow assembled them into something less than the sum of those parts. The Quicksilver sequence is genuinely worth your time, and I found myself wishing the film had the confidence to be more playful and less relentlessly portentous throughout. Fassbender, as ever, does what he can, and there are moments where you catch a glimpse of the film this could have been. But a two-and-a-half-hour runtime demands more than occasional flashes. For me, it sits as a reminder that scale and a familiar name above the title are no guarantee of a satisfying story. Sometimes the apocalypse is just a lot of noise.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 2016  | Watched: 2025-09-25

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) on YouTube

Where to watch

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