Hello there ladies and gents, and welcome to Movie Discussions, a series I have on this blog that’s been kind of dead since… April 2015, holy shit. But this is where I ramble about theories and such I have regarding movies. And today we will be taking a look at this year’s “X-Men: Apocalypse”. So with that said, if you have not seen the movie then I recommend that you do first, because there will be some spoilers throughout. There, with that cleared up… let’s get into it!
So in this post we will be taking a look at the question… When is “X-Men: Apocalypse” set? Now, I don’t mean what year, because we do get told that it is 1983. What I mean is that I want to be more specific as to when in 1983 it is set… and I think I have managed to get a pretty good idea as to when, since it doesn’t say any specific dates in the movie, only the year. But with help from certain clues I found in the movie, I have narrowed it down a bit. So let’s talk about it.
The first clue as to figuring it out comes in the form of the scene when Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac) together with Psylocke (Olivia Munn) and Storm (Alexandra Shipp) goes to recruit Angel (Ben Hardy). In the scene we have a miserable and most likely drunk Angel, moping while listening to Metallica’s “The Four Horsemen”, which in itself is a fun nod toward Apocalypse and his four horsemen. But this actually realle helps narrow down the time quite a bit. You see, “The Four Horsemen” is a part of Metallica’s debut album “Kill ’em All”, which came out in 1983. To be more specific, it was released on July 25th of that year. So this basically eliminiates the entire first half of 1983. And logically speaking, Angel is probably not listening to that on the day the album came out, so we can most definitely eliminate July as well. And for those who are wondering, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”, which was featured in the amazing Quicksliver (Evan Peters) rescue scene, was released in ’83, but before “Kill ’em All”.
My next piece of evidence leans a bit more on speculation, but if you think about it I am making some sense. This isn’t necessarily from a specific scene, it’s more a general thing that could be gathered every now and then. In the scenes where we are at the X-mansion we are given a good look at the outside surrounding it. Based on information given to us from the writers of the comics and such, the X-mansion is supposedly located in the very northeast corner of Westchester county, which is part of the state of New York (because Marvel loves New York apparently). And in my research I quickly found out that Westchester county and the state of New York in general have really snowy winters. And looking at the area surrounding the mansion, we can see that there’s no snow, in fact it is quite green in the area. So that immediately eliminates December. And going back to it being green and even sunny, I’d argue tht November and October are out of the question too since that’s when shit starts decaying and becoming grey, AKA not green, AKA not this movie.
So after eliminating the first half of the year and the last three months of the year, we have managed to narrow down that movie is set around August or September of 1983. Would it be possible to narrow it down even more? Probably. At this point I can only really guess. The closest thing we have to a piece of evidence is Cyclops (Tye Sheridan) being in a High School classroom when we first meet him. And I’m pretty sure High School doesn’t begin until late August/early September in the states, but I could be wrong on that, especially since this movie is set in 1983 and not 2016. But if I’m right with that, the movie is most likely set in September of 1983. Again, this is mainly speculation. I won’t really lose any sleep if Bryan Singer or Simon Kinberg refuse to confirm if I’m correct or not with this. I just did this because I started thinking about it this morning and felt like I needed to write about it. And it’s fun to do another Movie Discussion again. But to conclude this: Based on evidence found throughout the movie, I have (probably) come to the conclusion that “X-Men: Apocalypse” is set in August/September of 1983!
What do you guys think? Am I making sense? Am I conjuring up total bullshit? Do you have any other theories? Leave any and all answers in the comments!
Have a good one!
TheMarckoguy 