Reevaluating ‘X-Men: Apocalypse’ and ‘The Last Stand’: A Decade Later, Which One Truly Stands Out?

“At least we can all agree the third one’s always the worst.”

This quip comes from Jean Grey (played by Sophie Turner) as she exits a showing of Return of the Jedi alongside her fellow mutants Cyclops (Tye Sheridan) and Jubilee (Lana Condor) in a scene set in 1983 from the film X-Men: Apocalypse. The remark is a clear nod to cinema’s tradition of trilogies, but who is the joke really aimed at? The most likely target is X-Men: The Last Stand, the third film in the X-Men series, which premiered roughly a decade before Apocalypse, on Memorial Day 2006. At that time, director Bryan Singer had stepped away to work on Superman Returns, leaving Fox to advance without him. They initially brought Matthew Vaughn on board, but after his departure, Brett Ratner was recruited to complete the project under tight constraints.

The outcome was a film that visually mirrored Singer’s earlier X-Men movies but carried the distinct feel of a Brett Ratner production. It was a movie that seemed hurriedly assembled, as if in a race against time to conclude the series as a “trilogy” within two hours. Despite its rushed nature, The Last Stand achieved commercial success, fueled by the popularity of its predecessors. This success allowed the franchise to expand, with Wolverine spin-offs and a prequel series that eventually combined different casts in the acclaimed Days of Future Past, marking Singer’s return to the series. Vaughn, meanwhile, later contributed to the franchise by directing the well-received prequel First Class. Apocalypse was Singer’s continuation after Future Past and, as the third movie centered on the younger portrayals of Charles Xavier (James McAvoy), Magneto (Michael Fassbender), and Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), it was a threequel in its own right—something the filmmakers surely noted.

Was Singer poking fun at himself under the guise of criticizing a film he didn’t make? Was it a smug remark he assumed wouldn’t apply to his work? Perhaps it was a joke even he didn’t fully understand, especially given his reputation for erratic behavior and frequent absences. Whatever the intention, the line clearly held significance, at least to someone involved. The X-Men: Apocalypse Blu-ray release includes a deleted mall montage set in the ’80s, a charming sequence omitted presumably due to time constraints. Yet, the chosen snippet to represent the kids’ mall outing was a brief moment dedicated to disparaging threequels.

Regardless, Cyclops’ observation is largely accurate—though perhaps not about Return of the Jedi. X-Men: The Last Stand indeed stands out as the weakest of the initial X-Men trilogy, and X-Men: Apocalypse was considered the least impressive of the prequels up to that point. However, the ’90s-set Dark Phoenix, which confusingly reattempts a storyline tackled in The Last Stand, was yet to debut and would ultimately earn the dubious honor. If revisiting The Last Stand a decade later seems like poor taste, it might simply be compensating for the film’s fortunate circumstances, where strong box office returns and a plethora of superior X-movies prevented Ratner’s effort from becoming a prime example of superhero movie missteps.

In the back half of the 2000s in particular, X-Men: The Last Stand never seemed to garner as much fan disdain as Sam Raimi’s overstuffed (but mostly quite good!) Spider-Man 3, the shlocky Nicolas Cage version of Ghost Rider (the sequel kinda rules!), or those Fantastic Four movies. And, OK, it’s more watchable than Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, because this is still a movie where Hugh Jackman plays Wolverine, Halle Berry plays Storm, Ian McKellen plays Magneto, and so forth. The movie also adds a pre-transition Elliot Page as Kitty Pryde, who gets a fun chase scene with Vinnie Jones as Juggernaut. As far as bad movies go, I’ve seen X-Men: The Last Stand a lot of times, swept up in various X-Men series rewatches.

That’s how I know this movie deserves worse than its middling reputation. It’s a Ratner-fied all the way, coarsened at every step. Character deaths are hasty and, in the case of Cyclops, left so far offscreen that they become unintentionally ambiguous; a plot turn of cosmic grandeur (Jean Grey resurrected as the all-powerful Phoenix) is staged largely in a generic forest; thorny, complicated issues like a “mutant cure” (adapted from a strong then-recent comics storyline) are raised and discarded carelessly. A series that thrives on little grace notes temporarily opts for scenes where Japanese tourists gawp in confusion at fantastical X-Men antics, or control-room government dumbasses quip “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” about Mystique betraying Magneto. Everything is just a bit dumber and cheaper; it’s a classic case of a sequel costing more than some of its predecessors, and looking worse because it has no time or interest in character development, mood, or thematic underpinnings.

X-Men: Apocalypse is nearly as ill-regarded – maybe more so, because it wasn’t nearly as big a hit and has a certain Saturday morning cartoon garishness that was pretty far out of style eight years into the MCU. But this also means the movie – whether via the since-disgraced Singer, his production sub Simon Kinberg, or second-unit director Brian Smrz (a veteran of the X-series action sequences) – is unafraid of bright, bold colors that sometimes appear to be banned (or least frowned upon) by modern Marvel. Apocalypse positively glows with the pink-purple power set of Psylocke (Olivia Munn), the orange radiating highlights in a scene at the factory where Magneto (Fassbender) works under a new identity, and four-different blue-skinned (or blue-fur) characters, including the titular ridiculous villain played by Oscar Isaac. Compare the high-contrast lighting, negative-space framing, and cross-location cutting in a scene where Charles Xavier (McAvoy) communicates telepathically with Magneto – basically just a dialogue exchange – with any given equivalent scene in Captain America: Civil War, which came out a few weeks earlier in all its cement-shaded glory. I’m not saying X-Men Apocalypse is a master class in any of those filmmaking techniques (and like The Last Stand, it was directed by someone credibly accused of sexual predation), but it’s sure a lot more interesting to look at than much of its competition.

Thematically, X-Men: Apocalypse doesn’t have the same kicky directness as the civil-rights-themed freedom-fighting of the earlier movies. But it does have an ambitiously bonkers take on the nature of superpowers. Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac) wakes up in the late 20th century, absorbs talk of the U.S. and Russia as “superpowers,” and immediately wants to use his own superhuman abilities to reclaim and reshape the world he sees as one gigantic failed state. At one point, he encourages Magneto, whose family was killed at Auschwitz, to exercise his power to level the place, no longer a monument to mankind’s moral failing but a smoking crater to be rebuilt in a grander image of mutantkind. If superhero movies often boil down to power fantasies, this is a strange and provocative one.

Granted, it’s not really as relatable as mutants asserting their right to live free from persecution (and using concentration camps as a reference point in this particular sequence is arguably in pretty bad taste). Apocalypse’s favored techniques also result in a whole lot of CG debris-swirling that mars the climaxes of so many superhero movies. (Later this same summer, Suicide Squad would call itself out for doing the same damn thing.) But Apocalypse at least has inventive ideas about the crazy stuff that overpowered mutants might do. To make another comparison, put the extremely comic-book-y sequence where Apocalypse and Xavier battle it out inside Xavier’s mind against the big action sequence from The Last Stand, where mutants mindlessly charge at each other on a gravel beach. Also, I cannot stress this enough, McAvoy wears a fantastic purple shirt and Jennifer Lawrence’s human-disguise hair looks incredible. (And they aren’t even the characters who get the Apocalypse-sanctioned supervillain glow-up.) It may be a bubblegum version of the ’80s, but again: This is a movie that gives you neat stuff to look at. Why don’t more superhero movies have any discernible aesthetic?!

X-Men: Apocalypse does suffer from a common 2010s addiction to ending movies with the triumphant set-up of an exciting status quo that the series doesn’t have time to actually depict. Daniel Craig “becoming” James Bond several times and then repeatedly attempting to retire; the rebooted Star Trek’s five-year mission; the X-Men forming a publicly known and uniformed superhero team. These are all symptoms of franchise overconfidence, prequeled-out narratives, and a bunch of other stuff that was particularly wrong in Hollywood circa 2016. Would that it were so simple as crafting a trilogy where maybe the third and final installment is slightly disappointing! The Last Stand was a clear demonstration of how outmoded that thinking was, that the vastness of the X-Men world could and should be cut off by some arbitrary rule of threes. The overstuffed and gloriously entertaining X-Men: Apocalypse was a part three, or part six, or part eight for a time of superhero overkill, and at this time in the genre’s history, few were overkilling it better.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.

Stream X-Men: Apocalypse on Disney+