X-Men's Bryan Singer Addresses Early Criticism of Apocalypse

If there's one thing that fandom internet can be counted on to do, it's to overreact to things, especially months before they're ever even released. Sure enough, that's exactly what happened at pretty much every stage of revealing Oscar Isaac as Apocalypse in X-Men: Apocalypse.

First there were images released of him in makeup - not with final effects or any film post-processing, just in makeup, and people reacted to those images, saying he was too purple, or too much like a Power Rangers villain. Then the first trailer hit, using just Oscar Isaac's voice, unaltered, and people said it wasn't powerful enough for the godlike character.

"[The first X-Men: Apocalypse trailer] was simply Oscar using his normal voice -- which is wonderful; his performance is fantastic -- but that was never the intention. We just needed those words to govern the first teaser. So people thought, 'Oh, wait, is that going to be his voice during the whole movie?' It's like, no, but to tell the story of the first teaser, we needed the voice, and I hadn't recreated the voice yet," director Bryan Singer told IGN. Sure enough, in subsequent trailers and TV spots, Apocalypse has a layered voice, almost as if he's speaking with multiple lives within him.

"What I'm doing is something very unique. It hasn't been done before. 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," Singer explained. "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."

So the multiple layers of voice are all actually Oscar Isaac, the director said, just recreated with the multiple microphones and digital effects. It will also shift throughout the film.

"It ebbs and flows and moves through the movie, and changes, so he doesn't just have one single voice. 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," he teased.

The initial coloration of him bright pinkish-purple, he explained, was really simple: there was a pink light on them. It made Storm look unnaturally pink and her suit much brighter purple than it was, and made Oliva Munn's Psylocke look bright pink as well.

"They maybe just should have taken the pink out of the picture – I should have taken the pink out of the picture. I'm going to take some blame for that," he said. Apocalypse, in the end, is blue.

The moral of the story is likely to be lost on much of the internet, who are simply going to go through all of this again many times in the future, but maybe at least try to wait for the finished product before casting judgement. If it's not your bag then, at least you'll be looking at something that's actually complete.

X-Men: Apocalypse hits theaters May 27, 2016, with a blue, multi-layered, size-changing Apocalypse.