realMyst: Masterpiece Edition

realMyst: Masterpiece Edition (5/5)

When I was about twelve years old, the family of my best friend owned a copy of Myst that we would occasionally fire up and try to play. I’m not sure who else actually played the game, but someone must have, because whenever we loaded the latest saved game, more progress had been made. Unfortunately, we could never really get anywhere with Myst, and mostly we just sort of pushed buttons and wandered around while enjoying the view. At the time it was the video game equivalent of a walk through the woods or a lazy Sunday drive through the countryside. Despite not actually doing much, there was a certain appeal in just spending some time exploring the world of the game.

The fact that my friend’s family owned a copy of Myst speaks to its position within the evolution of technology and culture in the 90s. During that decade, computer tech was becoming mainstream, moving from the world of geeky hackers seen in films like Wargames into an aestheticized product sold by Apple as much for what their products could do as for how their products looked. At the time, Myst’s graphics were quite impressive, and families bought the game as much to play as they did to showcase their swanky new PC’s abilities. In this sense, Myst became an item of bourgeois respectability, something that probably hurt the game’s reputation in the long run.

I never beat Myst back in the 90s, but since I first aimlessly moseyed around its abandoned landscapes, I became a fan of adventure games, starting with LucasArts’s run of 90s classics and later moving on to today’s incredible indie game riches in the genre. I recently decided to return to the adventure game classic, which held the title of best selling game for nearly a decade. Instead of playing the original, however, I picked up realMyst: Masterpiece Edition, a revamped sort of director’s cut. RealMyst boasts of improved graphics, weather, cycles of day and night, a flashlight, an extra world to explore, and, perhaps most excitedly, the ability to walk through the worlds of Myst rather than just click your way through like a slideshow.  But if you prefer (and I did), you can choose to click your way around the environments like in the original release. But even if you choose to navigate the old fashioned way, you can see the camera repositioning itself instead of just being replaced with a new scene.

You start Myst on a small island filled with mysterious objects and structures, including a sunken ship, an observatory, a clock tower, a library, and a rocketship. There are no instructions, no prelude that tells you what to do and how to do it. Instead, you must play around with various machines on the island in order to figure out what next steps to take. What thin narrative that does exist in the game involves two brothers, Sirrus and Achenar, who have been trapped within a red book and a blue book, both of which you discover in the library. Speaking through static, each brother claims that the other is responsible for their father’s death, and in order to release them from their prison, you must collect pages littered throughout various lands that connect to Myst Island.

From here, you’re off, using the various buildings and machines on Myst Island to find books that connect to various other lands, or ages, where you must search out red and blue pages to bring back to the brothers as well as discover the exit from each age back to Myst Island. The set up for the game is actually reminiscent of the original Legend of Zelda where you returned to the main map after discovering a piece of the triforce in each dungeon. This simple quest structure shows some of the game’s age. For instance, you can’t carry both pages, so once you’ve returned one page to one of the brothers, you have to head right back into the same age to retrieve the second page, retracing most of your steps. When you do finally return the pages, the brothers don’t really provide you with much more backstory. They mostly repeat what they have already said and, like an addict, beg for more pages.

We learn most about brothers Sirrus and Achenar from their rooms you find in each age. Achenar’s rooms are filled with images of death and torture. And while Sirrus’s rooms at first appear to be the product of a more refined taste, you quickly realize that he has an insatiable greed and has been plundering each age where he has set up shop. But Myst isn’t about narrative. Sure, there’s a story and a fairly robust mythology if you’re willing to read through various materials, but the joy of Myst is exploration, the simple time it takes to wander around each world and solve puzzles.

This time around, I didn’t find the puzzles to be all that difficult. A steady diet of adventure games has likely made the game easier, and I’m hopefully a bit smarter today than when I was twelve. Most puzzles involve you futzing around with various machinery, figuring out how they work and interact with the rest of the world. That doesn’t mean the game is a breeze. It takes some mental sweat, and I resorted to hints on two occasions. Also, the Selenitic Age, whose theme is sounds, is still a pain in the ass. I used up one of my hints on its confusing labyrinth, the most dreaded of all adventure game puzzles.

As a mature adult, I found Myst’s puzzles more enjoyable than frustrating, but the real reason to play Myst are the landscapes. In addition to Myst Island, there are five ages, including the Mechanical Age, Stoneship Age, Channelwood Age, the aforementioned Selenitic Age, and the Rime Age (a bonus level tacked on to the end of realMyst). The worlds of Myst incorporate steampunk visuals. The Mechanical Age takes place on an island that’s also a giant gear; the Stoneship Age takes place on a jagged rock with a ship stuck in the center of it; and the Selenitic Age looks like the landscape of Mars from some 1950s b-movie. Overall, the technology of the worlds are decidedly analog.

My favorite age is Channelwood, which looks like someone took the Ewok village from Return of the Jedi and transported it to a Florida swamp. There are two levels in Channelwood, one a series of wooden walkways snaking their way among tall trees, and the other, reachable by hydraulic-powered elevators, a series of rooms and bridges among the tops of the treeline. Like most of the places in Myst, there’s something inviting about Channelwood. It’s the impossible treehouse you wish you had as a kid.

At this point, the ages and islands of Myst have become iconic, at least for gamers and children of the nineties. But there’s reason to suspect that the game will beat the test of time, becoming an enduring work of art. Every time you stumble on an perfectly balanced horizon or an achingly beautiful pink sunset, it’s not difficult to see Myst as a living painting. There’s a clear connection between Myst and the work of Thomas Cole, JMW Turner, or Claude Monet. Or you could link Myst to the nature writings of Annie Dillard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Gary Snyder, and Jack London. This is obviously high praise, but revisiting the game decades later, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration. Myst took a genre of video games and moved it forward in a way that seemed intuitive and yet also completely revolutionary. Today it’s DNA is present in a whole host of games, from Gone Home to Dear Esther to Firewatch, that put their own spin on what Myst first invented. And although others have plundered from Myst, there’s still something enduring about the original that, like a great novel, draws you back for another visit.

Cat People

Cat People (1942) (4.5/5)

Cat People begins like a traditional romance with a couple that meets cute at a local zoo. Having trouble sketching the likeness of a black panther, Irena keeps on throwing away her unsatisfactory attempts but each time misses the trash can. Another zoogoer, Oliver Reed. disposes of her trash and jokingly chastises her. But after they strike up a conversation, this Oliver fellow seems less concerned that one of Irena’s sketches, a badass image of a panther skewered on a sword, has slipped from her sketchbook and is left to muss up the city zoo. (This is before the EPA existed, so I guess people were a little looser about these things). Because we know this is a horror film, we also know that this relationship may not end well, and Cat People could be categorized as a horror-romance in the tradition of early gothic novels, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre, or later horror films like The Fly or Let the Right One In.

Irena and Oliver strike up a romance and eventually get married. It’s not clear how long they were dating before marriage, but in the film it goes by quickly. It doesn’t seem as if Oliver knows much about his bride before marriage, except that she’s has a deep connection to her Serbian roots. In her apartment there’s a statue of “King John” regally atop a horse with his sword held straight up impaling a large cat-like creature. This isn’t Magna Carta King John, as Oliver first guesses; it’s actually Jovan Nenad, a sixteenth-century Serbian military commander who established the last independent Serbian state prior to the takeover by the Ottoman Empire. According to Irena, her village was captured by the Mamluk people, and soon after, the villagers started practicing witchcraft, which gave them the ability to turn into cat creatures. King John retook the village and killed those cat people who didn’t flee into the neighboring wilderness.

Although my knowledge of Eastern European history is hardly encyclopedic, you can probably guess from the description Irena gives us that the King John was a Christian who drove out the Muslim Mamluks. (In fact, the Mamluks were a slave warrior caste that likely inspired George RR Martin’s The Unsullied). Like plenty of horror stories, Cat People is about fear of contamination. Irena symbolizes the immigrant to the United States who may not be as white and Christian as you think. The mismatch between Irena and her husband is further highlighted by Oliver Reed’s absurdly Anglo sounding name.

Over time, Irena comes to fear that she herself is contaminated and may be one of the cat people. Another Serbian woman who bares a striking resemblance to a cat approaches Irena during her engagement dinner and speaks to her in her native tongue, calling her “sister.” According to legend, if a cat person kisses someone, she will transform into a cat and eat her mate. Cat People was made after the implementation of the Motion Picture Production Code, which established strict censorship over Hollywood cinema, so the film can’t say this in so many words, but for the audience it’s pretty clear what kissing means in this context. In fact, Oliver even says something along the lines of, “You know, it’s kind of weird we’re married and all and we haven’t ‘kissed’ yet.”

Here it becomes clear the film also embodies the fear of female sexuality as well as racial difference. Even after he marries Irena, Oliver keeps up a flirtatious friendship with his coworker, Alice Moore, who expresses doubt early on about the viability of Oliver’s marriage. Like early film star and sex symbol, Rudolph Valentino, Irena’s appeal comes from her darker complexion, which marks her as distinct from her blonde rival Alice. (Although he was Italian, Valentino also played Muslims, such as the title character in The Son of the Sheik). When Oliver, Irena, and Alice go on a museum trip, Alice should feel like the third wheel, but in fact Oliver suggests Irena explore other parts of the building because unlike him and Alice, she must be bored with these English ship models they’re looking at. The implication, of course, is that Irena is racially, religiously, and culturally unsuited for Oliver.

Irena starts to become concerned that Oliver and Alice are having an affair, and at first it appears that the film is setting up Irena to be a paranoiac. When Oliver’s having a late night at the office, she tracks down her husband only to find him having a meal with Alice. She later stalks Alice late at night down starkly lit streets. This scene in particular is masterfully crafted, juxtaposing the sound of Irena and Alice’s increasingly frantic footsteps and ratcheting up tension until it is broken by the sound of a bus arriving at its stop. Anyone who has watched a horror film is familiar with the scene where we expect the killer to jump out of the shadows, but instead a friendly character or a cat jumps out instead. The technique apparently dates back to Cat People and is known as the Lewton Bus after producer Val Lewton. There’s also a scene where Alice jumps into a pool in order to escape from a large cat she’s convinced is stalking her, and I’m pretty certain this moment in the film inspired a similar scene in the indie horror film It Follows.

But Irena isn’t as crazy as she’s initially made out to be. In fact, Oliver is planning to leave his wife for Alice, and even gets the advice to annul the marriage, which is another indicator that the marriage was never consummated. In all honesty, Oliver is kind of a dick. I mean, dude, you married this woman who you barely knew and then won’t step up when she’s clearly having a difficult time. What’s more, you’re ready to jump ship now that times are tough.

That’s not to say that Oliver doesn’t try to help out his wife, but he does so in arguably the wrong ways. He’s convinced that Irena’s cat person fears are only in her head, so he sends her to a psychiatrist. [Be warned. There are spoilers ahead]. When watching the film, I felt like there was something off about this psychiatrist dude. It turns out, like Irena’s cat people phobia, this wasn’t just in my head. The guy’s kind of a creep, and at the end of the film, he tries to kiss Irena, which I don’t think would be looked kindly on by the APA. Until this moment, we’re not quite certain whether Irena’s cat people fears are legitimate or not, but sure enough, she transforms into a leopard and mauls her therapist.

It’s easy to see why Cat People has become a horror film classic. First off, director Jacques Tourneur drapes the film in shadows, a technique he would use in the film noir classic, Out of the Past. (If you ever wanted to watch Robert Mitchum walk into a room and knock out some schlub with just one punch, then you really should watch Out of the Past). Oliver works for an architecture agency, so Tourneur makes great use of underlit drafting tables to create incredibly stark, nearly abstract chiaroscuro. Second, the film is thematically rich. From issues of hybridity, race, religion, immigration, science and medievalism, Cat People contains a whole host of themes in its brisk seventy-three minute running time.

Ultimately, it’s difficult to reduce Cat People down to a single message. While it certainly embodies America’s fear of the other as present in our anxiety over immigration, it also seems more sympathetic towards Irena than not. After all, the men in the film, her husband and therapist, ultimately fail her. She’s a monster, but she’s also the character who’s easiest to identify with. It’s not surprising that producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur, both of whom are immigrants, would take the point of view of Irena, and it’s unfortunately not surprising that the film’s exploration of America’s fear of immigrants who come from the Muslim world remains timely nearly seventy-five years later.

Angel Olsen - My Woman

Angel Olsen - My Woman (4.5/5)

When I saw Angel Olsen in concert earlier this year, her entire backing band (five musicians in all) were decked out in blue, mid-60s suits while she sported a Beatnik inspired horizontally striped shirt. This stylish coterie looked like the perfect visual representation of Olsen’s latest album, My Woman. Olsen’s music has a buttoned up precision that’s periodically torn by the occasionally falsetto or guitar. It’s this tension between restraint and release that power Olsen’s latest.

My Woman cycles through an impressive array of genres, many of them plucked straight from the sixties. As much as she was pegged as a folkie early in her career, Olsen musical horizons aren’t so circumspect. In the album’s catchiest track, “Shut Up and Kiss Me,” she affects a pouty vamp for what’s essentially an early girl group R&B number. About a minute and a half into “Not Gonna Kill You,” the song shatters into a psychedelic Jefferson Starship song with Olsen doing her best Grace Slick impression.

Although Olsen clothes herself in different musical forms, her personality always breaks through. You can find snippets of 60s influence throughout My Woman, but they are integrated within Olsen’s songwriting rather than sublimating her own voice. For me, the nearly eight minute song “Sister” serves as the album’s highlight. The song starts off with a languid cadence but continues to build throughout. The song evokes the feeling of driving out West, past the flat prairies and parched deserts, until finally the Rockies burst upon the skyline. Olsen repeats the mantra “All my life I thought I’d change” in its final minutes, achieving some sort of transcendence.

The songs are helped by the simple fact that the album sounds pristine. You can hear each individual instrument in the mix, which gives Olsen enough backing for whenever she wants to lob her vocals into the cheap seats. The interplay between the players could only have been achieved by playing together and recording live by a talented backing band. My Woman is another entry into Olsen’s discography that showcases her interest in pushing her sound forward, often by churning over the past and making it sound new.

Hell or High Water

Hell or High Water (5/5)

Because of its ability to reflect many of America’s founding American myths, the Western genre has become inherently political. Whether it’s High Noon’s examination of civic duty and community or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’s look into the shaky line between judicial and extra-judicial violence, the Western seems to automatically circle back to questions of nationhood, politics, and economics. It’s clear early on that the bank bailout and Great Recession weighs on the mind of David Mackenzie, director of Hell or High Water, a modern day Western.

Hell or High Water begins with an impressive 360 degree pan of a small West Texas town, and we can make out some graffiti that says something along the lines of “Three tours in Iraq, where’s my bailout.” Mackenzie’s camera likes to linger along rusted out industry and those predatory advertisements for home loans you can find in depressed areas. The movie starts off with two bank robberies perpetrated by two brothers, Toby and Tanner Howard (Chris Pine expanding his career beyond summer spectacles and Ben Foster cementing himself as an important character actor). The two have been crossing the state robbing banks, only taking loose bills from the cashier till to make sure their gains are untraceable. They also rob only branches of Midlands banks.

You can probably piece together from this description that Midlands bank has screwed over the brothers’ family, and they’re extracting money in return. In this case, their late mother, suffering from some sort of illness, was forced into taking out a reverse mortgage under conditions she could not reasonably repay, which has delivered the family land into the hands of Midlands. The brothers plan on paying off their debt with the bank’s own money.

One of the many joys of the film is its refusal to bend to the familiar molds of the genre (which is only possible because screenwriter Taylor Sheridan is already minutely familiar with the heist and Western genres). For instance, of the two brothers, Tanner is clearly unhinged, but this doesn’t lead to the dissolution of their relationship or other obvious plot points. There’s an unspoken bond, or perhaps a bond spoken through the male language of quips and insults, that the two brothers will forgive each other for just about any slight or mistake.

This brotherly relationship is mirrored by the two Texas Rangers on their tale, Marcus and Alberto, played respectively by Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham. Bridges is as charismatic as ever, even if he has become less intelligible the more he stars in Westerns (in a few years expect him to turn in a performance composed entirely of grunts). Throughout Marcus chides Alberto, the insults themselves are usually aimed at his Comanche heritage. Just as with the brothers, these insults are a means to both cloak and convey affection. The film divides our loyalties evenly. We know we should side with the lawmen, but you can’t help and hope the brothers make it through with their plan.

One of the film’s centerpieces happens to be its dialogue. We’re given a few glimpses into the history of these characters, but their interactions with one another more clearly define these people than their backstories. (It’s become something of a lost art in film to develop characterization through choices and dialogue rather than a tragic backstory crammed into the story with the grace of a backhoe loader). The film is both confident enough to take little detours with side characters and yet eager enough to please to make these conversations fun for the audience. Some of the best lines of the film are actually given to two waitresses who have three scenes between them.

The politics of the film are clear, but there’s enough nuance here to make sure the message is more than window dressing. Hell and High Water is about banks screwing over the working class, but it’s also about intergenerational poverty and how streams of wealth flows away from the poor and working class. The film isn’t just about inequality; it’s about how inequality is produced by squeezing capital from those at the bottom into the maw of those at the top. During the course of the film we see the beautiful southwestern landscape alongside dried up towns, places where one character openly wonders how anyone makes a living there.

Hell and High Water delivers as an immensely entertaining genre flick in a year full of immensely entertaining genre flicks. (Those summer blockbusters may have let you down in 2016, but if you move down to low and mid-budget movies, then there have been some real treats). The film smartly handles the issues of inequality and the evaporating middle class, but even many years from now, when we live in a Star Trek-like utopia where money no longer exists, Hell and High Water will still entertain as a top tier modern day Western.

Please Be Honest by Guided by Voices

Please Be Honest by Guided by Voices (3.5/5)

How do you define Guided by Voices? Do you have to include members of the “classic lineup,” excluding everything after Under the Bushes Under the Stars (1996) and before the reunion albums (2012)? Is Guided by Voices even a “band” or is it just an outlet for Robert Pollard who decides to let other songwriters play in his sandbox now and again? Is it just a name? This leads us to a tautology: It’s a Guided by Voices album because it’s released under the Guided by Voices moniker. Robert Pollard, whose work has been released in a seemingly endless series of bands, seems to believe that an album is a Guided by Voices album simply because he has said so. Well, actually, he has said that the songs off the latest GBV release just felt like GBV songs, despite the fact that he handles all of the instruments on the recording.

I have to admit that while Pollard’s latest GBV album, Please Be Honest, put me into an ontological conundrum, he has a point about the songs feeling like GBV songs. I don’t think the latest GBV is up to the standards of the best of the reunion albums, but there’s enough here to satisfy those who don’t have the patience to sift through every Pollard-related album released in a year. And while Please Be Honest might be guilty of some of the common complaints about Pollard’s songwriting--unevenness and a lack of quality of control--it still offers up some great songs for GBV die hards like myself.

Please Be Honest opens with two killer tracks, “My Zodiac Companion” and “Kid on a Ladder.” The former builds out of a sparse guitar and off-key singing by Pollard but continues to layer on strings and drums until Pollard has fashioned a mini-epic in just over two minutes. Like the best of Pollard’s songwriting, “My Zodiac Companion” gives you just enough to want to return again and again. “Kid on a Ladder” is the first showcase of Pollard’s interest in playing around with drum machines, which make another appearance on “Unfinished Business” during the album’s second half. The former though is one of those perfectly crafted pop songs you can expect to appear at least once on any Pollard released album.

The rest of the album’s A-side is less successful. A fifteen-song album is short for Guided by Voices, which means you might have less patience for some of Pollard’s basement tapes noodling, especially when it comes to filler like “Sad Baby Eyes,” which might have worked on a masterpiece like Alien Lanes, but here just trips up the flow of the album. The exception is “The Grasshopper Eaters” (perhaps a play on the lotus eaters from The Odyssey). Here Pollard does a superb job of playing with atmosphere and tone, and the track is somewhat reminiscent of some of the best experimental work of another Ohio band, Pere Ubu.

Pollard hides some of the best songs on the album’s B-side. “Hotel X (Big Soap)” once again channels the Who by stuffing several musical movements inside of three minutes before a surprise ending made out of a sampled high school band. “Hotel X” is followed by two other major highlights, “I Think I’m a Telescope” and the title track. The album is capped by yet another great final track, which Pollard has become an expert in crafting at least since the 2012 reunion. (Each reunion album has ended in an appropriate blast of energy whereas earlier GBV albums often just sort of ended).

So the worst of my fears regarding Please Be Honest have not come to pass. Pollard did not just cynically use the GBV name to scare up some extra cash to buy Jose Cuervo and PBR. The album isn’t as strong as the last six under the GBV name, but it has its charms, and by whatever definition you choose to use, it at least “feels” like Guided by Voices.

X-Men: Apocalypse

X-Men: Apocalypse (3.5/5)

In order to enjoy the recent X-Men films, the first thing you have to do is completely ignore issues of continuity. These films don’t so much ask the audience to suspend disbelief when it comes to their fictional timeline as they ask you to wrestle your disbelief to the ground, lock it in a safe, and catapult it into the stratosphere. The same character reappears in different times at widely different ages, events from film to film are conveniently forgotten, and characters don’t seem to age over the course of decades. In X-Men; Apocalypse, for instance, Havok, who joined the X-Men twenty years prior in 1962, looks like he’s still in his mid-twenties. Maybe you can pass this off as some good genes, but then why does he have a brother, Scott Summers (Cyclops), who’s still in high school? You could go mad trying to diagram a timeline of the X-Men films.

But this wasn’t always the way. The X-Men movies are a fascinating example of how superhero films have evolved over the last fifteen years. Appearing after Blade but before Raimi’s Spider-Man, the original X-Men film attempted to take the sometimes goofy premise of the comics and ground it into something that resembles the world we live in. At the time this enraged the nerd community who were upset that Wolverine was too tall and the X-costumes were too drab. But it payed off handsomely with the general public and helped start off our current superhero obsession.

As time went on and people became used to the idea of people who had incredible powers and silly names and costumes to go with them, superhero films have embraced many of the elements that make superhero comic books unique. There’s less concern about grounding these movies in the “real world.” Currently, Marvel’s films are moving towards a match-up between its heroes and an evil man who sits in a throne in the middle of space collecting magic rocks. Likewise, the X-Men movies have embraced time travel and the idea that mutants had a massive impact on important historical events.

I’m all for increasing the insanity quotient in the modern superhero films because I think it’s what makes the genre unique. Sure, every now and again I want to watch a Nolanesque, semi-realistic representation of Batman, but when our characters can shoot beams of energy from their eyes, sometimes realism is overrated. So I don’t think Apocalypse would have worked as a villain in earlier iterations of the X-Men films, but an ancient mutant who convinces others to worship him as a God and transfers his consciousness from person to person to obtain immortality seems right at home sixteen years after the first X-Men movie debuted. Overall, X-Men: Apocalypse is overstuffed, overlong, convoluted, lumpy narratively, and the third act goes on for far too long. Which is to say, it’s a superhero film made in the past five years. Other than these common complaints, Apocalypse is an enjoyable ride that benefits from director Bryan Singer’s deft eye.

Subscribing to overt Darwinism, the film’s titular villain has an even more extremist view of human/mutant relations than Magneto, and he spends the film, naturally, threatening the extinction of all of humanity. For the film’s first half,Apocalypse gathers his “four horsemen,” soldiers who will aid him in his conquests. But as the film opens, we’re introduced to Apocalypse in ancient Egypt over five thousand years ago. This introduction plays like a little narrative itself, and one of the my favorite moments in the film is the first shot, which consists of a moving bird’s-eye shot that renders the Sahara Desert into abstract lines before the camera pans upwards to reveal massive pyramids. The intro ends with the betrayal of Apocalypse by his human worshipers who have devised a way to bury him deep in the ground. The events go by with few words, Singer preferring to tell the narrative visually.

Later in the film, Singer takes a meta-dig at the third X-Men movie, which was hastily directed by Brett Ratner. The well-crafted intro fully justifies Singer’s choice to throw some shade like a hip-hop MC. My suspicion is that of all the characters in all of the X-Men movies, Singer probably relates most to Quicksilver who had the showstopping moment in the previous entry, Days of Future Past, in which he moved so quickly that time appeared to crawl to a near stop. Once again, Quicksilver saves the day, this time from an explosion that tears apart the X-mansion. Sure, it’s a cover of an old favorite, but Singer manages to tweak the formula enough to make it just as fun and exciting as in the previous film. As a director, Singer also has similar control over the placement and movement of characters. Quicksilver is a representation of his near godlike power, a comment on the director’s mastery of the mise-en-scene.

Throughout the film, Singer brings a real director’s vision to the proceedings. As in Days of Future Past, he dabs splashes of primary colors in an homage to the film’s comic book origins. (Singer’s interest in use of light goes back to The Usual Suspects where he translated film noir’s chiaroscuro into expressionistic lighting). He also makes great use of both foreground and background. Nightcrawler, who like in X2 is a standout character, will often pop into the foreground of a frame disrupting the original focus of the shot. In one particular scene, Magneto confronts former coworkers who have outed him as a mutant only to be interrupted by Apocalypse. When Magento tells Apocalypse, who at this point he doesn’t know, not to try and stop him from killing these men for their betrayal, with the wave of a hand, Apocalypse simply melts these men into the floor. These victims who are slightly out of focus and in the background of the shot suddenly and unexpectedly fall to their death. The scene is visually surprising because it makes use of foreground and background and occurs in a single shot where another director would choose to cut. (The use of superpowers are particularly gruesome in this installment,)

While another 2016 superhero film, Captain America: Civil War, easily has a stronger script, there are times when Singer’s understanding of the visual language of cinema makes the Russo brothers look like they should go back to directing boring old television because they don’t quite have the chops to keep up. And about that script. The film is all over the place. There’s a moment where the newly recruited X-Men are captured by Stryker, the U.S. colonel responsible for Wolverine’s adamantium claws. This detour takes us away from the central conflict between Apocalypse and the X-Men, and in all honestly it seems like these events occur solely for a brief Wolverine cameo.

And while it would kill fourteen-year-old me if he heard me say this, Apocalypse just isn’t that interesting of a villain. When reading X-Men comics I thought he was a great villain because he looked cool and was incredibly powerful, but his motivations are mostly retreads of the more conflicted and thus more intriguing Magneto. And the only reason why Apocalypse apparently needs his four horsemen henchmen is because he’s named Apocalypse, which, come to think of it, was pretty much the same reason in the comics.

As the X-Men films have become more complicated, they have also become more unwieldy. But there’s still plenty to like about the latest X-installment. Sure, it doesn’t have the immediate hook of two generations meeting across time like Days of Future Past, but there’s enough to set the film apart from the current glut of superhero films that I’m curious to see where we go next.