X-Men Ending Credits

Who was that Egyptian dude at the end of Days of Future Past?

That pale skinny dude at the end of X-Men Days of Future Past is about to blow every other superhero movie out of the goddamned water. I spent a decent chunk of my childhood in what can best be described as a jungle house, and I’m not saying this just to impress you with my hip bohemian childhood. It is to illustrate that as a young precocious boy I chose the X-Men cartoon over a literal jungle to explore. Shit was totally rad.

There is quite possibly nothing on this earth that makes me as happy as that damn song. Just by linking it there I had to listen to it for the better part of an hour. The X Men blew my mind. Simple as that, they were superheroes that weren't really superheroes. The villain wasn't a lunatic bent on conquering the world for the hell of it or hopelessly insecure about his receded hairline, he was a smart man that had seen the horror of mankind’s inhumanity and refused to let it happen again.They didn't run around New York City saving little old ladies and getting their picture in the paper. They were outcasts and weirdos. They had secret identities not because they wanted to keep dating cute red heads, but because we were hunting them. Their own parents would turn them in. They had a short hairy dude that gargled acid, a woman who hurt everyone she touched, and certain Cajun man that incites feelings in me that I am still not totally comfortable with. We didn't hoist them on our shoulders or see them as pretty blatant Christ analogues; we put them in camps, branded them and drove them into hiding because they were different because they made us feel small. Despite that every episode they put on their yellow and blue spandex and fought some nefarious evil to keep us safe. All because that beautiful bald bastard believed in us. He stood up, unfortunate word choice there, not just for the persecuted but for the persecutors. He firmly believed and fought for the best possible outcome no matter how impossible it seemed, and he had a sweet ass floating chair made of gold. The X-Men weren't about good triumphing over evil, it was a clash of ideologies, and then Apocalypse came along.

That dude’s voice alone still haunts my dreams. Not to mention the dude was a giant blue guy in a robot suit with really indescript powers. I still have no idea what mutant power he had. He could grow really big, fire lasers from his hands, and turn his appendages into guns which in retrospect does seem a tad redundant considering the whole lasers from the hands thing. But hey you got to sell action figure accessories somehow. The fact that you had no idea what this giant blue man was capable of  made him all the more terrifying. Apocalypse was an insurmountable force without any conceivable limits. He didn't want to rule us; he wanted to eradicate us because we were unfit. He is a force of nature, the unrelenting march of time personified. We are obsolete compared to them and sooner or later we will fade away. We are the neanderthals huddled around the cave fire hiding from the new southern invader. Whether it happens this century or in a billion years eventually humanity as we know it will cease to exist. He is that inevitability made flesh. He is no more evil than an asteroid or the Ice Age. He is progress. He is Apocalypse, and we can only delay him.