Climbing the Dark Tower: The Drawing of the Three

SPOILERS BELOW

All right, now it feels like our quest is actually getting started. Having caught the man in black last time, our gunslinger learned what he must do to reach the tower. But he won't be doing it alone...

X-Men: Apocalypse: A Review

MINOR SPOILERS BELOW

I was not as over the moon for X-Men: Days of Future Past as other people seemed to be. I didn't think it was bad, and it was cool to see the original cast for one last hurrah, but it wasn't particularly spectacular. That film didn't even live up to the potential of its predecessor, X-Men: First Class, which was an amazing reboot of the franchise which could have gone in some interesting directions. But Days of Future Past seemed to squander that potential for something more familiar and less ambitious. And I'm sorry to say X-Men: Apocalypse continues the series in that direction.

To describe Apocalypse in one word, I would have to choose cluttered. There are so many different subplots going on in this film, it sometimes feels like an entire season of a television series crammed into two & a half hours. The catalyst of everything is En Sabah Nur (Oscar Isaac), a supremely powerful mutant from Ancient Egypt who has reawakened in the 1980s (Apocalypse carries on the period piece tradition started by First Class) and has decided to destroy civilization and rebuild it with himself as a god-king. To do this, he travels around the world and recruits several other powerful mutants to act as his henchmen. This includes Magneto (Michael Fassbender), who has been living in secret and raising a family in Communist Poland since the previous film. But life likes shitting on Magneto, so his family dies and En Sabah Nur convinces him to turn evil again. All this world traveling catches the attention of both Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) and Professor Xavier (James McAvoy) and forces them to reconcile their relationship after the hardship of the previous films. If that plot synopsis sound complicated, the movie only makes it slightly more coherent.

Climbing the Dark Tower: The Gunslinger

SPOILERS BELOW

Much like the titular gunslinger himself, we begin our long journey to the Dark Tower with the first book in the series. It was a strange introduction to a strange world but it promises to be an interesting journey. More in depth thoughts after the jump...