Apocalypse is easily one of the most recognisable X-Men villains from comics and the cult-classic animated Tv show of the 90’s. But the Ancient Egyptian is also one of the more enigmatic and complicated nemesis that the Mutant team have ever faced.
So with Oscar Isaac stepping into the shoes of the title villain for the first time on the big screen this coming May. X-Men: Apocalypse director Bryan Singer and producer Simon Kinberg sat down with IGN and a handful of press to hype up their next movie in the growing X-Men franchise.
“He’s the most powerful mutant we’ve ever had in one of these movies and that he would be an unbeatable foe for any individual mutant in these X-Men movies,” explained Kinberg. “One of the things they do in the comic and the cartoon is you notice he has multiple powers. It’s not just one, he has a power suite. We do that in the film. He has various abilities and powers, one of them, like [Apocalypse actor Oscar Isaac said during the Comic-Con panel], is the power of persuasion, and part of why that’s necessary is he needs other followers to be his Horsemen, and some of them would be hard to persuade – Magneto, Erik being the hardest.”
It was revealed in the debut trailer for the movie that X-Men mainstay Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender) would be one of Apocalypses’ Four Horsemen alongside younger versions of Storm (Alexandra Shipp), Angel (Ben Hardy) and newcomer Psylocke (Olivia Munn). It was curious however as to why Magneto would join the elusive villain given that Erik has never been one to play well with others, a facet of Apocalypse which Kinberg elaborates on:
“It’s interesting, what’s a little bit, hopefully, complex in the movie, or even ambiguous, is how much he’s persuading his followers with a superhuman ability or just he’s like any cult leader who is really good at convincing people to follow him, so we don’t really ever make that explicit. It’s not like he’s putting people under a spell, but he is superhumanly persuasive.”
In a separate interview, director Bryan Singer who also wrote the film alongside Kinberg. Further explains the intricacies to the Cult Leader-esque villain and his wide array of powers. “He has a number of different powers he’s acquired over the years, as he moved from body to body, accumulating these various abilities. One of them is to imbue other mutants and to heighten their powers and abilities beyond anything imaginable,” a skill which is on full display when Storm uses her heightened powers to wreck havoc on a city in the trailer.
“Secondly, he can shield from psychic power”, explained Singer. “He can form shields so that it makes it harder for a psychic like Xavier to tap in and get to him. He’s not a psychic himself though. He can’t manipulate — he can amplify your power, but his ability to physically damage or destroy or build is in the non-biological world. That’s in the physical world. He can change the inorganic molecules of things. So these are some of the powers that we’re exploring in this one, and the epic things that he does towards the end of the picture.”
Singer further echoes Kinberg’s sentiments mentioning that “in the end, his greatest power is the power of persuasion, is the ability to know what he needs and who he needs it out of and to get it from them, as he does with the Horsemen, and as he has through civilization after civilization for tens of thousands of years.”
The filmmakers are also keen to emphasis that their Apocalypse is a charismatic leader, whose goal is to unite Mutants under his reign. This sense of entitlement comes from the villains origin story that he is the first mutant to walk the Earth, a part of the characters comic backstory that Kinberg reveals inspired their interpretation of the character:
“This Apocalypse of our film is an amalgam of a lot of different versions of Apocalypse from the comics and the cartoons. [-] But one of the things that interested us the most was the notion of his being the first mutant and coming from a time where mutants were treated as gods and what it would be like for someone who experienced a world in which he was treated as a god, go from that to a world where he was treated at best as an equal and at worse than less than, and how radical that would make that character in our modern world, so that was something that we talked a lot about thematically and emotionally for this character, this actor.”
Singer also recognised that this villain’s unique backstory would bring a different aspect to the Mutant franchise which fans have yet to see: “We always tread this theme of ‘mutants vs. humans,’ and Apocalypse has two aspects that make him such a different character than I’ve traditionally explored in the universe. One is that he makes no distinction between humans and mutants. He’s interested in the Earth as a whole, in the purity of civilization and the strongest. Secondly, it deals with ancient mutantism, or the origin of mutants, or the origins of gods and religion. The X-Men universe has never touched upon any of those things, and that stuff I loved when I was a kid. I read Chariots of the Gods when I was a kid, and I was fascinated with religion as a kid, and cults and things like that. So that stuff made this so appealing to do.”
The director also hinted that by the end of the film the landscape of the Mutant world would be drastically different, like erasing four or so films from the timeline such as his previous X-Men: Days of Future Past did. “It’s a global situation. He wants to make a massive global change. I don’t want to tell you what he’s going to do, but it’s visually unique. He’s going to do something really bad to the Earth that’s going to cause a lot of people to not live. [Laughs] And those that survive will be the strongest.”
X-Men: Apocalypse hits theatres May 27, 2016.
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