With the theatrical release of X-Men: Apocalypse one month away, Fox released the final trailer for the blockbuster, hoping to amp up anticipation even further. As should be the case, this third and final trailer looks the best and even indicates that maybe some of the shots we saw in the first two previews — especially with actors clearly standing in front of green screens — weren’t quite finished. The special effects look better rendered and more detailed this time around.
By this point, we should have a pretty good idea of what this movie will be. The world’s first mutant, En Sabah Nur or Apocalypse (played by Oscar Isaac, Star Wars: The Force Awakens), has awoken and wants to place the superior species on the top of the food chain by wiping out humanity. It’s kind of the same thing Magneto always wanted to do, but Professor Xavier and the X-Men were powerful enough to stop him. Apocalypse presents a far different adversary.
The story follows younger versions of characters seen in previous X-Men films — such as Jean Grey, Cyclops, Nightcrawler and Storm — as Fox effectively attempts to reboot this franchise for a whole new bunch of movies. That reboot was set up by the last movie, 2014’s X-Men: Days of Future Past, in which the timeline for these characters was essentially reset, allowing the chance to start over (and forget that films like 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand and 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine ever happened). It’s a very comic book thing to do, admitting when stories are too convoluted and characters need to go back to what made them successful, and hitting the reset button.
OK, but this trailer does include something different from the previous two. It’s the trump card that the X-Men franchise almost always plays. Who’s the most popular X-Men character, the only one who’s headlined his own films? Well, he’s going to be in this one too. Check out the new trailer:
At some point, the X-Men movies have to move on from Wolverine, if for no other reason than Hugh Jackman is getting too old to play the role. (He’ll play Wolverine in at least one more solo film.) But there have been rumors that the character would be a part of this new film, probably needing the boost to stand out against superhero competition like Batman v Superman and Captain America: Civil War.
If producers have recast the main players with younger actors, it doesn’t quite make sense to bring back Jackman to join them in the cast. (Even if Wolverine ages much slower and is close to immortal because of his mutant ability to heal from any wound.) Not to mention that a big part of the previous X-Men films was the triangle between Wolverine, Jean Grey (then played by Famke Janssen) and Cyclops (James Marsden). That storyline would appear to be difficult to carry out with this new cast.
But maybe writer Simon Kinberg and director Bryan Singer have figured out how to pull that off. Or maybe they just don’t care because they’re starting this whole thing over again, reportedly with eyes on getting one storyline right (the Dark Phoenix saga) that this franchise messed up the first time.
Jennifer Lawrence is now a huge star, thanks largely to the Hunger Games franchise, much more famous than she was when she joined up with the X-Men franchise in 2011 for X-Men: First Class. To no surprise, she’s been put in a far more prominent role, with her Mystique effectively the leader of this new, younger X-Men team. Whether or not she survives this story to continue that role (presumably with a much more lucrative contract) is the question.
X-Men: Apocalypse opens in theaters on May 27.
