Pete Messum Reviews...

' X-Men: Dark Phoenix ' the twelfth and penultimate installment of the X-Men film series, acting as a send-off to the main series whilst next year's ' The New Mutants ' has ended up as an unexpectedly standalone coda. The entire franchise has been cut short by Walt Disney Pictures, who during post-production acquired the assorted assets of 20th Century Fox and made the decision to end this run of X-Men films to make way for a new rebooted series as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, making ' Dark Phoenix ' the exciting (?) finale to twenty years' worth of films. Until that next film comes out...eventually. The film has been re-tooled into a satisfying finale during post-production, and the marketing has leaned more towards nostalgic love for the X-Men films as a whole as opposed to building excitement for this entry. The new marketing push has even produced a new, more comic book-inspired poster to sell the film, but despite their best efforts, it...

After being delayed from it's November 2018 release and rumours circling of a straight-up cancellation, Fox has finally reaffirmed that X-Men: Dark Phoenix will be released on 14th February 2019, and have unveiled the very first trailer for the film. They've also confirmed that the US title will simply be Dark Phoenix , while the UK title will actually include the X-Men main title, which is...confusing. I mean, this is clearly an X-Men movie as opposed to a spin-off. What's wrong with including the X-Men label? Regardless of Fox's strange title decision, and a whole ten months after Entertainment Weekly previewed it for its November 2018 release, the trailer is out and...it's a teaser. I don't think Fox have really made it clear that this is a teaser trailer, but that's essentially what it is. Lots of slow moody shots, vague ominous dialogue, no exciting reveals and very few visual effects shots. Saying that though, didn't this movie finish shoo...

After a terrific first season last year, FX's 'Legion' returned for a second, eleven-episode season, following on directly from where Chapter 8 left off. David returns from his imprisonment within the mysterious Orb to find that a whole year has passed for everyone else, and that the future is in grave danger... For those reading this who haven't seen 'Legion' at all - go and watch it, both seasons. Seriously, it's the most original superhero show on TV, and the sort of show that if you can get your head around it, becomes quite addictive. The cliff-hangers are so irritatingly good that you just have to keep watching to find out what happens next and what everything actually means. Right, seen it? Cool, because I'm probably going to ruin both seasons in their entirety with this review. The second season of 'Legion' is much more linear than the first, as the events actually play out in chronological order. No longer are we trying to work o...

Created by Noah Hawley and based upon the Marvel comic book series, 'Legion' is the first television addition to the X-Men film franchise, following the David Haller (Dan Stevens) as he struggles with what he thinks as a mental illness, but what government agency Division 3 and the mysterious mutant Summerland group believe to be special telepathic and telekinetic abilities. Told from David's perspective as an unreliable narrator, the series manipulates time, space and even reality itself as it tells the story of a man struggling to find himself. First things first: 'Legion' is not for everyone. It's narrative isn't so much convoluted, but is told in such a way that at points makes it difficult to understand. If you're willing to watch a mystery series that actually makes sense once it resolves itself, you probably won't have any real problems with this method of story-telling. 'Legion' isn't convoluted...but that doesn't mean it...

You know when you think "how bad can it be?" Well, I ended up learning this lesson the hard way with Josh Trank's 2015 disaster Fantastic Four , or, more commonly known as Fant4stic . How bad can it be? This bad. Fant4stic is a terrible, terrible movie with as many redeeming features as there are actual colours in the film. That is to say, few and far between, and so dim when they do show up that you really have to be searching to find them. Fant4stic now seems to have reached the point of circulation, now added to Netflix with a TV network premiere probably imminent. Don't watch it. Just don't. There is so little to enjoy here that you'll just want to switch it off anyway. And even if you do, for whatever reason, still want to give it a go to see how bad it can be... Batman and Robin is hilariously bad. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is overlong, overstuffed and frankly a bit boring. X-Men: The Last Stand is dull, humourless and utterly forgettable....

It's easy to think that after 16 years the X-Men movies would run out of ideas, but oddly enough the latest instalment - X-Men: Apocalypse - vows to change up the typical X-Men formula with a brand-new baddie in En Sabah Nur, also known as Apocalypse. Formally an Egyptian God who spread from body to body to gain various mutant powers over the centuries, Apocalypse (played by Oscar Isaac) awakens in 1983 to find that the world as he knows it has changed. Recruiting the help of the Four Horsemen - consisting of Storm (Alexandra Shipp), Angel (Ben Hardy), Psylocke (Olivia Munn) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) - Apocalypse vows to destroy the Earth using Professor X (James McAvoy)  and start afresh with mutants as God-like beings. The only people who can stop him are Xavier's mutant students - Cyclops (Tye Sheridan), Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee), Quicksilver (Evan Peters), Beast (Nicholas Hoult)  and leading mutant figure Mystique (Jennifer Lawre...

Honestly, I'm not very well acquainted on the character of Deadpool. Aside from his appearance in the much-hated X-Men Origins: Wolverine , I've only become vaguely familiar with Deadpool since this movie was announced. Therefore, I find myself looking at Deadpool completely objectively with no prior knowledge about the character. Deadpool follows ex-soldier Wade Wilson, who is diagnosed with cancer, persuading him to leave his girlfriend and join the Weapon X program. However, leader of the program Ajax performs a variety of experiments on Wilson to awaken his recessive mutant genes, giving Wade super-healing abilities but also charred skin. In an effort to try and fix himself, Wade escapes the facility and hunts down Ajax, now with the name Deadpool... Put simply, Deadpool is unlike any superhero movie we've seen before. Not only is it one of the few 15-rated ones, but it is also the only one to break the fourth wall. Deadpool constantly acknowledges the audience...

Instead of a written reaction, here's my live reaction to the 'X-Men: Apocalypse' trailer, complete with a very bizarre thumbnail courtesy of Harry P Green.

X-Men: Days of Future Past in 2014 was a brilliant film, proving to be the best of X-Men franchise so far, as well as being my 2nd favourite film of last year. X-Men: First Class before then was fantastic as well, even with some poor villains, and The Wolverine (2013) was also great, so even after X-Men Origins: Wolverine and X-Men: The Last Stand, the franchise has kept going. Days of Future Past seems to have reinvigorated 20th Century Fox's hopes for this franchise o get even bigger, with Fant4stic being sold as from the studio who brought you X-Men: Days of Future Past, Deadpool and Gambit spin-offs coming next year, Wolverine 3 and Fant4stic 2 in 2017, X-Men: Apocalypse (the subject of this reaction) and Fantastic Four vs X-Men movie planned for 2018. Whoah. That's a hell of a lot of movies. Anyway, the SDCC trailer for X-Men: Apocalypse has been leaked online, so I decided to watch it and see what it was like. I was really surprised - Apocalypse looks brilliant. The...

Ten years ago we had Fantastic 4 - a film adaptation of the popular comic book family consisting of Reed Richards, Susan and Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm, who suffered space radiation alongside the suspiciously-named Victor Von Doom and became the Fantastic Four and Dr Doom, who became pitted against each other. This was followed by Rise of the Silver Surfer back in 2007, and the franchise died quickly. Ten years later, we have a reboot - Fantastic Four - with a sequel scheduled for 2017 (ten years after the sequel to the last franchise). This film has been kept close under wraps by Twentieth Century Fox, but today, at long last, the first poster and trailer were revealed...only they revealed very little. While the trailer did seem to start off akin to Interstellar (but please can it be a lot better), it did work in teasing this new movie, even if it does seem to have come at least a month too late to do so. The visual FX musn't be anywhere near finished yet, although what...

Go see - NOW!!! The X-Men franchise has been a bit of a roller-coaster over the years. It's honestly surprising that it's usurped Spider-Man in the number of films, and yet none of them have actually been reboots (even if they retcon previously known facts). The X-Men franchise seemed to hit a dead end at The Last Stand, and Origins: Wolverine was simply a money-grabber at the end of the day, so the fact that First Class and The Wolverine have lead to this shows why the X-Men franchise should be still around after fourteen years. While the plot itself it cliched - character is sent back in time to avert dystopian future - it's simply a framework for the story to come off of, and at the end of the day it's quite possibly the most character-driven film I've seen since Gravity. The enormous cast is there to not only appeal to fans but show the sheer scale of this epic blockbuster. This film is really about the characters - Charles Xavier, Erik Lensherr, Raven and ...

I'm not exactly a massive fan of the X-Men franchise. It's certainly had its ups and downs, and thankfully, this prequel film is a definite up. I can see why people hate this film, but I can also see why people - and even critics - love it. The film begins in 1944, showing how Charles Xavier met Raven, and how Erik Leshnerr became the man he is. This is an interesting set-up, but its clear that the writers knew exactly what they were doing, as this scene ties in with Erik and Shaw's final confrontation at the end of the film, bringing the plot full circle. The plot then delves into the Cuban Missile Crisis, as Charles forms the X-Men in an attempt to prevent a Third World War, and to persuade the humans that mutants are there to help. Erik doesn't believe this at all, and is simply there to kill Shaw who tortured and experimented on him as a child, to the point where he calls himself 'Frankenstein's Monster'. Michael Fassbender, despite his ever-changing...