After Bryan Singer’s previous addition to the X-Men franchise “X-Men: Days of Futures Past,” the director aimed to reboot the X-Men franchise and provide exciting new characters for the older characters to interact with. His newest addition, “X-Men: Apocalypse,” is the overstuffed follow-up to this franchise reboot. This film takes place in 1980s America, where Professor Xavier and his school of mutants face the threat of the world’s first and most powerful mutant.
The largest disappointment of this movie was the the underuse of the characters. The protagonists all had their moment in the spotlight but that was all. Everyone—besides Professor X, Magneto, and Raven—seemed in the movie only to push the plot forward. The speedster character, Quicksilver, was used in almost the exact same way as he was in the previous movie, making him feel more like a character the studio pushed on the film because he was loved in the first one. Not to mention the Magneto and Quicksilver family subplot. That literally goes nowhere. 
Also, this is one of the only two X-Men movies to not include Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) as the main character. However, he does make a brief appearance in this movie. It’s not as long as you would hope, but it’s there. It’s probably one of the better parts in the entire movie.
Apocalypse, the big bad villain of the film, has little to no character development. He wants to take over the world, kill everyone, and restart it from the beginning with mutants. After almost having done it back in Ancient Egypt, he is hungry to try it again. That’s his only motivation. His only connection to mutants is that he was the first one and can control them. Other than that, he seems like a highly underused character. Even his horsemen, four mutants he controls to do his bidding, were insanely underused.
The most redeeming quality of this film is its ability to set up plots for future films. This entire film felt like nothing more than building the X-Men extended universe. Given the success of “Deadpool,” an X-Men character, Fox aims to milk it for all its worth. That means you should expect to see Deadpool in a future X-men movie pretty soon, or even more X-Men in another Deadpool movie. With Hugh Jackman’s final Wolverine movie in production, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a real Deadpool versus Wolverine fight to make up for the absolutely horrendous fight they had in Wolverine’s first solo movie. 
Overall, this film suffers from the same thing “Batman v Superman” did: too many characters with too many plot details to efficiently cover in just two hours. I saw the groundwork for an amazing movie laid out within “X-Men: Apocalypse,” but what the film makes up for in potential future films, it lacks in being a film existing in the moment. “X-Men: Apocalypse” is not the superhero film of the summer I’d recommend seeing. “Captain America: Civil War” has almost double the number of characters this movie does, and uses every single one of them effectively.