SDCC: X-Men: Apocalypse

SlashFilm: The secret that wasn’t really a secret at all for this year’s Comic Con was that Fox would assemble the full cast of Bryan Singer‘s X-Men: Apocalypse on the stage in Hall H. It seemed like nearly everyone was here for other films already, so as long as they could get Michael Fassbender on a plane things would be good to go.

Fassbender was there, smiling broadly, along with nearly everyone else in a major role in the film: James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, Oscar Isaac, Tye Sheridan, Sophie Turner, Alexandra Shipp, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Evan Peters, Lucas Till, Ben Hardy, Lana Condor, and Olivia Munn.

Singer also showed off about five minutes of footage from the first weeks of the film’s shoot. Now, the footage! Keep in mind that this was said to be footage from about five weeks of shooting, without effects. We see very little in terms of powers in this footage — it’s almost all interactions, character stuff, and building suspense.

They showed off the first ever teaser trailer, which revealed the iconic Marvel Mutants who will fight at Apocalypse's side as his very iconic Four Horsemen. These mutants have been brainwashed and manipulated into serving as the villain's personal guard. They become Death, War, Pestilence and Famine. We already knew that Angel, who becomes Archangel, will be one of the four, presumably Death. The character is played by Ben Hardy. The other three are Olivia Munn's Psylocke, Michael Fassbender's Magneto and Alexandra Shipp's Storm. This explains why we saw Cyclops fighting Storm in early concept art.

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The footage begins with the opening of a familiar X-door, revealing the silhouette of what appears to be Famke Janssen’s Jean Grey. But after a quick montage of weather and disaster-type shots, we see those images are being dreamed by the new young Jean Grey, played by Sophie Turner. “I saw the end of the world. I could feel all this death.”

She’s in bed, and Charles Xavier (with a full head of hair) is sitting nearby speaking to her. “Jean. It was just a dream.”

Fade to a flyover of a very old city. There’s voiceover: “I’ve been called many things over many lifetimes. Ra, Krishna, Yaweh.”

Then Moira Mactaggart. “Ever since the world found out about mutants there have been secret societies, cults, who see them as some kind of second coming or sign of god.”

We see a hooded figure walking into a room. It’s pretty clear this is the first voiceover narrator. We’re also pretty sure it’s Oscar Isaac as Apocalypse. “I was there to spark and fan the flame of man’s awakening. To spin the wheel of civilization.”

Moira: “I was tracking one of them, they believe that tens of thousands of years ago an ancient being was born. The world’s first…” Finished by Xavier: “mutant.”

Amid this, we’ve got shots of Raven looking worried, Beast, in furry fanged form, looking like he has some sort of problem. There are some close of shoots of the hooded guy, and a pan up what, on second viewing, can be seen to be Apocalypse’s chestplate, with a small version of the signature ‘A.’

The hooded figure again. “You are all my children. And you’re lost. Because you follow the wrong leader.” (In here, overlaid, there’s some additional dialogue that is hard to make out.) “Everything they’ve built will fall, and from the ashes of their world we’ll build a better one.”

Also cut into this footage are quick shots characters including Magneto, shorn of costume, Nightcrawler, and Storm. By the way, Storm looks aweome, like a nearly perfect realization of the mid ’80s white-mohawked goddess. And as the lines above are spoken, we see that she’s with Apocalypse.

That dialogue leads into a shot of Magneto, in a factory of some kind, or perhaps a mill, where he seems to be working. He turns. “Who the fuck are you?”

And then there’s the full reveal of Apocalypse, he’s big and armored, and blue-purple. He looks nuts, and pretty fantastic. He also looks surprisingly like the classic early visions of the character. His response to Magneto: “Come and see.”

Shots in here of Cyclops, a brief shot, and we briefly see Psylocke, also with a very classic-looking costume. We see Quicksilver a couple times, once running, wearing a Rush band t-shirt.

“Mutants are being hunted, living in fear,” says Raven.

Xavier is trying on Cerebro, and we see shots progressively moving in on him. “He can control all of us,” he says.

Other dialogue, about a storm approaching, and a fight.

Close up on Xavier in Cerebro, “I’ve never felt power like this before.”

The final shot is a full view of Xavier in pure classic form: in a suit, in the wheelchair, totally bald. McAvoy looks great.

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ComicBook.com: The cast of Bryan Singer's X-Men: Apocalypse dropped by Conan O'Brien's show, which is filming at San Diego Comic-Con, and Olivia Munn described how she squeezes into her Psylocke costume.

The 34-year-old actress had her cast mates and even the redheaded talk show host blushing as she explained the process she goes through to put on her X-Men costume. She says it involves two women applying copious amounts of lube to her body so she can fit into her tight superhero suit that is made of latex.