It’s become apparent through the years that even with a sabbatical from the franchise, director Bryan Singer is, and has always been, the man to direct X-Men movies. With “X2” and “X-Men: Days of Future Past” he not only made the two best X-Men movies, but he also created two of the very best films of the genre. Save for his 1995 Oscar-winner “The Usual Suspects,” those two movies are the crowning jewels of a hit and miss career, one that has also seen him deliver a mixed bag of movies including “Valkyrie,” “Apt Pupil,” “Superman Returns” and, perhaps most regrettably, “Jack the Giant Slayer.”
Even if he’s moving to other projects next (“20,000 Leagues Under The Sea”) and seems to need an X-Men break, Singer knows the characters like the back of his hand. However, trouble has been brewing recently as fans have been complaining about Singer’s upcoming “X-Men: Apocalypse,” but more specifically the titular villain. Diehard nerds have been questioning what they perceive to be the “inauthentic” look of Apocalypse and the unintended resemblance to Ivan Ooze, the villain of “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie.” If you’re making a Marvel franchise film the last thing you want to be connected to is Haim Saban and Shuki Levy‘s unintentionally comical live action animated TV series.
To make matters worse, once the latest “X-Men: Apocalypse” trailer dropped nationwide, a backlash occurred concerning Apocalypse’s size, and more importantly his voice. Oscar Isaac plays the villain, and his own voice is prominent, but X-Men purists know that Apocalypse does not sound at all like the actor. In fact his voice is supposed to be inhuman, godly, almost monstrous.
Singer has had enough and has come out to clarify his side of the story/do some damage control. “What I’m doing is something very unique. It hasn’t been done before,” he recently told IGN in a long technical explanation about the sound of Isaac’s voice and how it’s recorded. “We’re rerecording his entire performance because the suit’s creaky and makes all kinds of noise, you can’t really use any of it anyway. But I want his performance. So he’s being recorded in ADR using a standard Sennheiser microphone, but also with a bass mic to his right cheek and a bass drum mic to his left cheek. These two microphones have the ability to pull vocal range out of his voice that the human ear cannot hear. And I can take that vocal range that I’ve now recorded, and I can pull it and use it to augment his voice – and that with a little digital magic can create a voice that’s both completely governed by his performance but is not natural.”
“It ebbs and flows and moves through the movie, and changes, so he doesn’t just have one single voice,” he continued. “He speaks with different voices depending on different moments in the film. So it’s really kind of cool. It’s the first time I’ve ever had the tools to sculpt a performance in post-production, that was already given to me on set and chosen in the cutting room.”
Satisfied, X-Men fans? “X-Men: Apocalypse” opens on May 27th.
