In the modern comic books, the history of the Marvel universe exists in a continuously shifting decade. No matter how much time has passed in the real world, the history of these characters always happened within the past ten years or so. It doesn’t hold up to scrutiny(and it shouldn’t), but it’s an elegant solution that allows characters to never age, to remain static even as they move forward. A storyline from thirty years ago may be referenced, but within the context of the story, it was a far more recent event.
Some may see the ageless characters in X-Men: Apocalypse and think this is a deliberate reference to how these characters never grow old, but unlike the comics, the timeline here never shifts. X-Men: First Class took place in 1962. X-Men: Days of Future Past took place in 1973. And now, X-Men: Apocalypse takes place in 1983. This means twenty one years have passed for these characters. This passage of time is referenced time and time again in this movie. The history the X-Men and their enemies and allies have shared is vital to the plot. The passage of time informs countless decisions and more than a few character arcs.
So why does everyone look exactly the same? If Magneto was a ten-year old boy at Auschwitz, why doesn’t Michael Fassbender have grey hair or show any sign of aging? If Havok was was a teenager during the events of First Class, he would be in his late-thirties during Apocalypse, but Lucas Till still looks impossibly baby-faced. Why has Quicksilver not changed in the slightest in the past decade, with the scene-stealing speedster still living in his mom’s basement and still wearing the same clothes and looking and acting like he did a decade previously. There has literally been no effort to showcase wear and tear on these characters. There are no wrinkles and no white hairs. Nobody has changed in two decades and no number of cheeky references to characters looking good after all these years can make up for how weightless this all feels because of it. X-Men: Apocalypse constantly references the events that have taken place over twenty years, but it refuses to let its characters change from those experiences. It hits the rest button with the start of each film. It gives us the deliberate impression that nothing in these movies actually matters.
It ultimately feels like director Bryan Singer simply doesn’t care about the world he has helped build. Even when you take Days of Future Past’s timeline-altering climax into account, Apocalypse deliberately ignores the continuity of previous movies in ways that are frustrating and confusing. The X-Men movies don’t have to follow Marvel Studios’ path and build a complex, interconnected universe where the events of one movie always affect another, but it would be nice if there was some consistency to this world. How are we supposed to care about the journey of the X-Men when the people actually making the movies seem to care so little for there previous film they made?