Last Friday, 20th Century Fox dropped the X-Men: Apocalypse trailer. Through the judicious use of filters and reprocessing, it looks like Oscar Isaac’s En Sabah Nur, aka Apocalypse, is a lot less purple, and say what you will about the overall end product, Bryan Singer knows how to cut a trailer. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s below. The take-away first is that X-Men: Days of Future Past is, as suspected, a much harder reboot of the franchise, like J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek was. We are now in a timeline that is not what the first X-Men films (including X-Men Origins: Wolverine) established — though Charles Xavier could have met Jean Grey the way it was shown in X3, the very presence of Nightcrawler changes a lot.
We get our glimpse of Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), establishing precognitive abilities. It’s a stretch from Jean’s original abilities, but okay.
There’s Kodi Smit-McPhee as Kurt Wagner, Nightcrawler, sporting the same ritualistic scarring that Alan Cumming did in X-2. But that movie clearly established that Storm and Cyclops had not met him before. If there’s a mindwipe at the end of this, I’ll be annoyed.
…because he’s clearly one of Xavier’s X-Men here…
We have a clearer appearance of Jubilee (Lana Condor), a character teased in earlier films. (Maybe more so in X3, but I’m going to be honest… my mind is a blank through a lot of that.)
Evan Peters returns as Quicksilver… didn’t see that coming?
It will be interesting how this plays for certain audiences, because Apocalypse’s narration very clearly implies that he has been the source of the world’s religions. Dr. Moira McTaggart (Rose Byrne) makes it explicit: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (from the Book of Revelations) is based on En Sabah Nur’s plans.
Thus our first glimpse of Warren Worthington III, who had been so key in X3 as his wings first developed and played by Ben Foster, is now not as Angel, but Archangel. Now he’s played by Ben Hardy.
The narration implies that Storm (Alexandra Shipp) may be one of the Horsemen as well, but that may be a misdirect.
The voice-over makes it seem as if Magneto’s (Michael Fassbender) forces are allying with Apocalypse, but the IMDB notes two different actors as Plague and Death, who are not clearly shown here.
At least we know which side Jennifer Lawrence is on… and the Beast (Nicholas Hoult) follows.
And we get several decent shots of Apocalypse himself…
And just as I was asking myself, when is James McAvoy going to go bald, the trailer offers it up at the end…
Does he look like he’ll still grow up to be Patrick Stewart?
