X-Men: Apocalypse Creators Talk the Villain’s Powers
When it comes to mutants in the X-Men universe, their powers vary from the small, to the physical, to the imbued, to the godly. The latter is definitely the case for Apocalypse, who’s had almost innumerous types of powers in the comics and TV shows he’s been in. But with X-Men Apocalypse, how will the film show off the powers of the first mutant? IGN talked with producer/writer Simon Kinberg and director/writer Bryan Singer about this, and their answers are both different, and intriguing.
First, Simon Kinberg:
“He’s the most powerful mutant we’ve ever had in one of these movies and that he would be an unbeatable foe for any individual mutant in these X-Men movies,” Kinberg said. “One of the things they do in the comic and the cartoon is you notice he has multiple powers. It’s not just one, he has a power suite. We do that in the film. He has various abilities and powers, one of them, like [Apocalypse actor Oscar Isaac said during the Comic-Con panel], is the power of persuasion, and part of why that’s necessary is he needs other followers to be his Horsemen, and some of them would be hard to persuade – Magneto, Erik being the hardest. It’s interesting, what’s a little bit, hopefully, complex in the movie, or even ambiguous, is how much he’s persuading his followers with a superhuman ability or just he’s like any cult leader who is really good at convincing people to follow him, so we don’t really ever make that explicit. It’s not like he’s putting people under a spell, but he is superhumanly persuasive.”
This was added upon by Bryan Singer:
“He has a number of different powers he’s acquired over the years, as he moved from body to body, accumulating these various abilities,” Singer said. “One of them is to imbue other mutants and to heighten their powers and abilities beyond anything imaginable. Secondly, he can shield from psychic power. He can form shields so that it makes it harder for a psychic like Xavier to tap in and get to him. He’s not a psychic himself though. He can’t manipulate — he can amplify your power, but his ability to physically damage or destroy or build is in the non-biological world. That’s in the physical world. He can change the inorganic molecules of things. So these are some of the powers that we’re exploring in this one, and the epic things that he does towards the end of the picture. But I have to say, in the end, his greatest power is the power of persuasion, is the ability to know what he needs and who he needs it out of and to get it from them, as he does with the Horsemen, and as he has through civilization after civilization for tens of thousands of years.”
Just how this will be played out will be shown when X-Men: Apocalypse arrives May 27th.