X-Men: Apocalypse (PG-13)
20th Century Studios; IMDb; Marvel; Rotten Tomatoes; TV Tropes; Wikia; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon; Disney+; Google Play; iTunes; Movies Anywhere; Vudu; YouTube

This is the ninth movie in the X-Men franchise (and the seventh to include "X-Men" in the title). It came out in 2016, but I didn't see it until 2022. By this time I was somewhat fatigued of X-Men movies, so I wasn't sure how much I'd care about it. And I didn't end up caring a lot, but it was okay.

It begins in like 3600 BC, when a super powerful mutant named En Sabah Nur is undergoing a process to transfer his consciousness to the body of a younger man with a self-healing ability. (Apparently he has body-hopped like this numerous times before, always retaining the mutant abilities of all the bodies he has possessed.) But the process is interrupted by some people who want to kill Nur, calling him a false god. The pyramid in which it's taking place gets destroyed and Nur is buried alive, where he sleeps for thousands of years. Flash forward to 1983 (ten years after "Days of Future Past"), and we meet various characters. Scott Summers develops a super power, shooting intense laser beams out of his eyes, which he can't control. His older brother, Alex, takes him to Professor Xavier's school for mutants, and Hank makes him some special glasses to keep his power under control. At the school, Scott meets Jean Grey (Sophie Turner). Meanwhile, in Cairo, we see Moira MacTaggert investigating a cult that ends up resurrecting En Sabah Nur, who wants to take over the world or whatever, "cleanse" humanity of the "weak" (which I guess means non-mutants). The first person he meets is a petty thief, Ororo Munroe, whose power he enhances, and she becomes Storm (though I never heard either name mentioned in the movie). She becomes his first disciple, and he soon gathers three more, and enhances all their powers: Psylocke (whom I had heard of before but don't think I'd ever seen before in any media), Angel (obviously not the Angel from "First Class", and I also find it pretty hard to believe he's the same Angel from "The Last Stand"), and finally Magneto. Before that, we see that Magneto has been living in Poland under an assumed name, where he has a wife and daughter. They end up being killed, which enrages Magneto, so he's ready to return to his evil ways. In East Berlin, Raven (who doesn't want to be called Mystique anymore) rescues a young Nightcrawler, and eventually takes him to Xavier's school. She's heard that Magneto has resurfaced, and wants Xavier's help in finding him.

Well, lots of stuff happens that I don't want to spoil (and the day after watching the movie, I'm already starting to forget). I suppose I should say that Xavier had erased Moira's memory of him and the X-Men at the end of "First Class", so now she doesn't know him when they meet again. But at the end of the movie he restores her memories. And um... at one point we see Wolverine, who was being held captive by Colonel William Stryker and his anti-mutant team. His memories had been taken from him, too, and he was supposed to be used as a weapon (Weapon X), but he kills a bunch of guards and escapes, and Jean restores at least part of his memory. Then he runs off. But there's a post-credits scene set back at the base where he was being kept, where some guy from a company called Essex Corp. retrieves a vial of something that will surely be important in a later movie. There are also more cool scenes of Peter Maximoff using his super speed, though I was a bit less enthralled by that than I was in "Days of Future Past". Anyway... I'm leaving a lot out, and I don't want to say how it all ends, except that of course the good guys win. Definitely not a bad movie, and I'm glad I've finally seen it, though I don't expect I'd ever feel like watching it again.

Oh, but I did kind of want to mention one other thing. En Sabah Nur learns English (and presumably other languages) and pretty much everything about the state of the world in 1983 by basically absorbing the information through a TV set. And he doesn't like weak human nations being referred to as superpowers because they have nuclear weapons. I just kind of feel like it's interesting to have a mention of that kind of "superpowers" in a movie about people with real super powers, and to contrast the two. That's sort of like... I mean, I must have thought about that kind of thing before. So it's nice to know I'm not the only one.