X-Men: Apocalypse

            I finally got around to watching Logan a few nights ago. There was a time, not that long ago, when I wouldn't have missed something like that in the theater, but then I saw X-Men Origins: Wolverine. And X-Men: The Last Stand. And The Wolverine. And, let's face it: Days of Future Past is kind of overrated. To my relative surprise, Logan is a dark, violent, funny, moving film, far better than it has to be—so good, in fact, that I started questioning my judgments of some of those other X-Men movies. Your attitude going into experiencing a piece of art (and for our purposes here, I'm defining "art" as anything from "Water Lilies" to The Dark Knight Returns to Their Eyes Were Watching God to Grand Theft Auto V to whatever Shia Lebeouf is farting into a freezer bag as I type this) can have a significant impact on your enjoyment. On that note, I knew I'd watched X-Men: Apocalypse at some point since it became available to stream, but I could not, for the life of me, remember a single thing about it other than a vaguely negative impression and that Oscar Isaac is four feet tall. The general consensus among friends and acquaintances I've talked to about it can be summed up as, "It's a fun movie?" with or without an accompanying shrug. Could it be, I wondered, that I watched Apocalypse at the end of a long day, or in a particularly bad mood, and was unduly harsh in my evaluation?

            Short answer: no. This movie is garbage. This movie makes X-Men: The Last Stand look like Return of the Jedi and X-Men Origins: Wolverine look like The Godfather Part II.

            Longer answer: seriously, this movie is so bad. Like, through every scene I was shaking my head and wondering how something so many talented people worked on could be so shoddily constructed. There are a thousand plot holes, both large and small. It's never clear why any of the characters are doing anything; Apocalypse has so many powers he's functionally omnipotent, but we don't know what they are and they're never really explained, so despite the fact that the FATE OF THE WORLD is in the balance, it doesn't really feel like there's anything at stake; and for a big budget summer action movie, it looks kind of shitty. There are five writers attached, fourteen characters who have starred in comics of their own, and they're adapting threads of… I don't know for sure, so I'm just going to estimate 10,000 storylines from those comics; if too many cooks spoil the broth, well, in this case they turned it into diarrhea.

            We open in "Nile Valley – 3600 B.C.E." It looks like a cartoon, but there are some live-action extras in shapeless tunics chanting something incomprehensible, which I know from being a 40-year-old virgin (don't tell my wife) is "En Sabah Nur," Apocalypse's "real" name. Inside a pyramid, some kind of ceremony is going on involving a blue troll in sci-fi armor (that's Apocalypse) and L'il Oscar Isaac, into whom the life essence (or "jism") of Apocalypse is being transferred. Some guards in mascara make sex eyes at each other, after which they execute a trap, bringing the pyramid down on the ceremony and dropping Oscar Isaac, who has been transformed into the blue troll, into a pit so deep that an entire scene happens while he's falling. How did they dig a pit so deep using Bronze Age technology? How did they manage it without anybody knowing about it? Why are they rebelling against Apocalype? And why does it all look like an episode of Power Rangers circa 1992? I don't know, and like most questions relating to character, logic, and basic continuity, I don't think it ever occurred to anyone working on X-Men: Apocalypse to ask.

            Then we jump forward to a high school in 1983, where Scott Summers (Tye Sheridan), whom you may recall from the original X-Men trilogy as Cyclops and/or James Marsden, is being a dick. This will continue throughout the film, as Scott, like most everyone we'll meet, is less a character than a single, easily identifiable trait to be harped upon ad nauseam. That—and he has laser eyes. Scott might actually be one of the better-rounded characters in that he gets a trait and a superpower. As far as I can tell, Angel's (Ben Hardy) characterization is "has wings," and Moira McTaggart's (Rose Byrne) is "got psychically roofied in X-Men: First Class."

            That, by the way—you know, James McAvoy's Charles Xavier using his powers to make this woman forget months of her life—is played mainly for laughs. They'll walk into a room, and she'll be like, "This rooms seems familiar," and the other characters will share a knowing smile, like, "Ha ha, you don't even know that we erased your memories without your knowledge or consent, or even a quick discussion first." At the end, when Xavier, for literally no reason other than the fact that the movie's over, returns her memory, she just smiles at him. Like it's no big deal that our "hero" stole her memory against her will and then left it that way for decades.

            Anyway, after 45 seconds of Scott being a dick, we cut to Germany, where mutants are being forced to perform in cage fights. Angel, whom you may recall "has wings," is the reigning champion. He fights Nightcrawler (Kody Smit-McPhee) who, as one of the primary characters, "teleports" and "is Christian." The fight is broken up by Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), who rescues Nightcrawler, but not Angel. I know I'm beating a dead horse, but there's no absolutely no reason for Angel to get left behind except so he can become a villain later.

            Then we cut to Poland, where Magneto (Michael Fassbender) is working in a foundry under an assumed name. He has a human wife and a daughter who talks to animals. Anyone who's ever seen an X-Men movie will know that his family can't be long for this world, because Magneto's long-standing characterization other than "magnet stuff" is "haz a sad." And, true to that, the wife and daughter die in the next scene they're both in, impaled by a single arrow while they're hugging (the… irony?).

            The movie goes on like that for another two-plus hours, introducing way too many characters, bouncing them off each other, and occasionally checking in with the plot, which can be succinctly summarized as "Apocalypse wants to kill everyone," which takes a while to get going because he recruits a bunch of underlings he doesn't need. Why does he bother with hench-people when he spends most of the movie warping reality by pointing at things? Because that's the plot. Why does he want to kill everyone? Because that's the plot. Why does Quicksilver (Evan Peters) get involved? Because his scene was the best part of Days of Future Past, and also because that's the plot.

            Credit where it's due: Quicksilver's big action scene, in which he saves everyone in the Xavier School from an explosion at super-speed, is once again a standout. Even that, though, is predicated on a plot hole so big you could fly a Blackbird through it. He sees Magneto (his biological father, depending upon whether you ask someone from Marvel or Fox) on TV and goes to find Charles Xavier so he can ask him Magneto-related questions. (The TV he's watching, by the way, is a flatscreen, which nobody on set appears to have noticed despite the fact the film's only visual motif is IT'S THE EIGHTIES.) When he arrives on the outskirts of the school grounds, a good ¾ of a mile away, he cocks his head like a beagle hearing a peanut butter jar being opened somewhere in its home, somehow sensing that the school is about to explode so he can start getting everybody out.

            There are countless contrivances like that, and the 10,000^th time (again, just an estimate) something doesn't stand up to even cursory scrutiny, you start wishing you could ask, "Do any of you even want to be here? Was anybody really champing at the bit for an Apocalypse movie? Are you already starting to miss Hugh Jackman? I know I am."

            While I'm acknowledging the positive, or at least less negative, aspects of the movie, Fassbender and McAvoy do rise above the material to some extent, and I'm pretty sure Rose Byrne would do so as well if Moira McTaggart had any reason to be in the movie beyond the "hilarious" "comedy" of having had her agency stripped away by a man she trusted. Among the younger generation, Kodi Smit-McPhee is working his ass off to make Nightcrawler work and largely succeeds, and Alexandra Shipp is likable as Storm, despite the great big nothing-burger they both have to work with. Hugh Jackman shows up for 90 seconds as Weapon X Era Wolverine, and even with no dialogue and the world's worst mullet wig, he almost manages to steal the show. Special credit to Evan Peters, who, except for his signature scene, seems to know he's in a piece of shit and relaying his lines sarcastically.

            I could go on, but I'll leave you with this, because I think it perfectly encapsulates how little of a shit X-Men: Apocalypse gives. There's a post-credits scene in which a bunch of janitors are cleaning up the blood, bodies, and shell casings left after our heroes toured the Weapon X facility (all the characters go to Weapon X for a while, just so they could include that 90 seconds of Hugh Jackman, I think). But then, what's this? A nerdy science-type walks through carrying a steel briefcase! He walks down a few hallways, then goes into what I suppose must be the employee break room, where he opens a mini-fridge and pulls out a comically large vial labeled "WEAPON X DNA" in what appears to be Comic Sans.

            Fuck you, too, X-Men: Apocalypse. Fuck you, too.

The Far Cry 5 Chronicles: Part One: Jacob Seed

            Given the wide range of review scores, not to mention my lukewarm response to Far Cry: Primal, I wasn't expecting to like Far Cry 5 as much as I did in the first few hours. Of course, what seemed to bother a lot of people was the story; or the juxtaposition of the dark, serious tone of the story and the almost wacky, "anything can happen" tone of the side missions and gameplay; or the story's refusal to take a hard stance on the sociopolitical causes and ramifications of a right wing Christian cult staging an armed takeover of a county government in our current political climate. And there isn't much story in the beginning.

            For the first time in a Far Cry game, the player character has no voice, no backstory, not even a name, so when I was dropped into a tense situation: the arrest of Joseph Seed, leader of the Project at Eden's Gate, it didn't inspire a lot of thoughts or feelings beyond, "Joseph Seed looks like Matthew McConaughey with a man-bun—they have to have done that on purpose, right?" Obviously, the arrest doesn't go as planned, and then it's a mad dash through a forest at night/tutorial, including an impromptu defense of a cabin in the woods and a car chase. None of that is fun, exactly, but it got me acquainted (or reacquainted) with the ins and outs, and it was over pretty quickly.

            After that had played out, I was fished out of a river by a mysterious stranger and woke up in the underground shelter of—I shit you not—"Dutch Roosevelt," a man who sounds exactly like T-Bone from Watch Dogs and looks exactly like my grandfather if he'd gotten spooked by the 2008 financial crisis and decided to go off the grid. Dutch was so impressed by how I handled myself in those scripted tutorial sequences that he decided to make me the tip of the spear in his ongoing effort to reclaim Hope County from the "Peggies" (that would be P.roject at E.den's G.ate-ies).

            This is where the game gets fun. Dutch might have given me a little backstory, I can't remember, but essentially he handed me some guns and a map, said, "Why don't you kill some Peggies and blow some shit up," and ejected me back into the wilds of Montana, where armed zealots lie in wait every fifty feet or so, gossiping about Joseph Seed and waiting to unload their flamethrowers and belt-fed machine guns into anything that moves; where packs of normally docile grizzly bears get into the cult's hidden stash of ecstasy and start murdering everyone they see; where simple, salt of the earth folk wait for a hero to rise, the type of man (or woman, but I'm playing as a man because I'm a man and also because of unconscious sexism, probably) they can count on to drive a stunt car through a series of checkpoints while it's on fire, or steal back their late father's big rig—the one with the battering ram and mounted machine guns—or fetch the decorations for the annual Testicle Festival.

            You know, listing that stuff, I'm beginning to realize just how much faith Dutch is placing in me, especially when you consider that I've never spoken a word to him. He doesn't even know my name. I guess I just have a trustworthy face.

            Running (and driving, swimming, and occasionally flying) around Hope County, helping people with their chores and getting into pipe bomb fights with passing maniacs, I was reminded of how much fun I had playing Far Cry 3, my first in the series. I had less fun with each subsequent installment, despite the fact that in terms of gameplay, the Far Cries are just very slight variations on a strong theme. I can't identify what's making the difference, but whatever fairy dust they sprinkled onto Far Cry 3 is back, and I was happy, at any given moment, just to be running across a wheat field, picking off distant goons with arrows to the face and blowing up the manure silos they were guarding. The side missions are mostly fun, too, and the named NPCs are well-written and performed. After somewhere between three and five hours, I was honestly befuddled by the lower review scores.

            Then I made enough progress in the story to get to the first major boss fight.

            Actually, first I did a mission to recruit a companion character named Nick Rye. Nick is a pilot, the third generation to run his family business, with a very pregnant wife. The Peggies stole his plane, and he wanted me to get it back for him. The plane was in John Seed's actual compound, which was crawling with goons, so I held off until I was nearly done with the region. When I stole the plane, Nick name on the radio and talked me through a bunch of aerial maneuvers to make sure the Peggies hadn't cut the brake-lines or whatever, and while I was doing that, he talked about his family—his father and grandfather, his love for his pregnant wife and unborn child, his struggle with the decision of whether to stay and fight for what's his or leave to protect his family—and by the end, I was thinking, "What a great mission!"
            Then I landed.

            What had started as a balls-and-dick-out, pedal to the metal action movie and resolved (or so I thought) into a relatively quiet moment of introspective character-building turned back into Rambo III. The Peggies were swarming Nick's property! They were going to kill his wife and burn down his house! HALP! So I got back to killing waves of cultists, made it through a checkpoint or two, and got killed just as Nick called me to defend the hangar. I respawned, hustled over to the hangar, and… nothing. There were no bad guys there, no Nick, no nothing. So I restarted at the checkpoint… nothing. I thought about restarting the game, but the flying part of the mission, lovely as it was, took a long time, and I didn't want to do it over. After about a half hour of fiddling, I gave up and went to bed frustrated (Michael Scott told me to tell you that that's what she said).

            I had already built up enough Resistance Points (I'd explain, but who cares) to take on the final battle with John Seed, so the next time I played, I bit the bullet, headed to Fall's End, and went to the church, where I was hit in the face with a rifle butt and treated to a five-minute cut scene. I awoke to find John Seed tattooing my sin, "WRATH," onto my chest. After he inks it onto a sinner, he cuts off the flesh with the tattoo, thus unburdening the sinner of their sin—easy peasey! He'd already completed the process with the local pastor, and I watched him do it to Nick Rye, whose sin was greed—because he didn't want the cult to steal his sole source of income, I guess?—but when he was about to do it to me, I grabbed the pistol the pastor had hidden in his Bible and shot off his ear. This led to another gun battle, after which I jumped into a truck's turret so that we could chase Seed down and kill him. I died in a rain of gunfire almost immediately, the game reloaded at the point just after I'd climbed into the turret, and…

            Nobody was around. No enemies, no NPCs, and nobody to drive the truck. I tried to get out of the truck, but I couldn't. I did a manual reload and ended up in the same place with the same problem. So I quit the game and started the mission over, which was when I discovered that the five minute cut scene of John Seed monologuing and cutting off people's skin is un-skippable. I used the extra time to fight the almost overwhelming urge to throw my Xbox in a fire, and I managed to get through that dog shit turret sequence without getting killed, which was when the game told me that John Seed was escaping in a plane and I had to shoot him down. My total experience flying planes to that point was the Nick Rye mission I couldn't finish (which'll become even more frustrating in a minute), but I got in a plane and took off, figuring, "How hard can it be?" After all, until this point in the middle of this mission, Far Cry 5 has never presented flying as anything but an optional activity, so it would be crazy to make this more difficult than, like, a 3 out of 10.

            It turns out that it's very hard.

            I got shot down again and again and again. I looked up strategies for the fight online and found that tons of other people were having the same issue, and that most people had gotten past it by calling in flying ace Nick Rye for assistance, which I couldn't do because the mission had bugged out. After literally an hour of this shit, I went to a gun store, put a grenade launcher in my inventory, let John Seed shoot me down, and then shot him from my parachute with a grenade. I hadn't tried this earlier because the game kept emphasizing that I had to shoot him down from another plane. But now, at least, one of the worst missions I've ever played in a triple-A game was over.

            WAIT, WHAT?

            John Seed also had a parachute, and he happened to parachute down right on top of his underground compound. "You have to kill him again!" the game told me. I landed in a crouch, snuck up behind him, and shot him with the grenade launcher, just to be sure. Success! Another cut scene! And now, it's finally—

            Oh, hey, there's more.

            John's "underground compound" was a repurposed missile silo, and now that I had his keycard, I had to go in and rescue another deputy. Working from the naïve assumption that the game's designers would recognize when it was time to leave well enough alone, I sprinted in like an asshole and got gunned down by the hundred faceless goons still hanging around. I respawned outside of the compound with the keycard in my hand, and all of John's guards up top respawned, too.

            Mother. Fuck.

            Over the next 346 hours (subjective time), I fought my way to the bowels of the missile silo to rescue the other deputy, fought my way back to the top of the missile silo to blow it up, fought my way through fire and explosions and waves of bad guys to get to a helicopter on the roof, and by the end my only satisfaction was that it was over.

            That there are persistent mission-breaking bugs in main missions on a console version of a triple-A game at all is incredible, let alone this many. Kirk Hamilton wrote an entire article about the turret bug, an article that was published on Kotaku, one of the highest profile gaming sites in the world, two weeks ago. How does nobody notice and fix that?

            But even without the bugs, that John Seed "boss fight"—and all the accompanying nonsense—was the worst. One of Far Cry 5's greatest strengths is the sandbox aspect, and even the parts that offer the illusion of freedom are basically on rails. I don't mind the story aspect. John seed is well-acted (by Detective The Irish One from Castle, as I discovered after the fact), and I find the Far Cry universe's style of pseudo-philosophical nonsense consistently entertaining, if not necessarily thought-provoking. The fact that I couldn't skip the cut scene after the first time fits what I'd expect from the people who create Far Cry's pseudo-philosophical nonsense, but when it's paired with the mission bugs it's almost unforgivable. Either this game was shipped before it was ready or there's a fundamental disconnect between the people making the game and the people playing it (or, going by what little I know about video game production in the 21^st century, probably some of both).

            As much as I like, even love, a lot of the component parts of the game, I understand the mixed reviews now. If the parachute/RPG gambit hadn't worked—had I not been lucky enough to have it work on the first try—I would have quit, and I don't think I would have gone back.

            Will this pattern of high highs and abysmal lows continue as I travel north into Jacob Seed's region? God, I hope not.