Étiquette : Comics

There’s a scene during the first half of Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Apocalypse that is so emotionally resonant, so well put-together, and so quiet that you might briefly forget you’re watching a superhero film. It involves a raid by some Polish officers in the remote forest where Erik Lehnsherr, a/k/a Magneto (Michael Fassbender) — the powerful mutant antihero and sometimes villain of this series — has been living incognito with his wife and young daughter. Magneto can control metal, so the men wear no badges and carry no guns. They come under cover of night, carrying bows and arrows, and the resulting, subdued face-off — full of silent glances, hesitant actions, and ultimately tragic consequences — serves as a reminder that the makers of comic-book blockbusters don’t have to abandon subtlety, character, performance, and film grammar completely. After the Everything’s-a-Metaphor! sledgehammering of Batman v. Superman and the jokey flab of Captain…