Dark Phoenix - Review Thread

X-Men: Dark Phoenix(6/6/2019)

I think I was the only person holding out hope for X-Men: Dark Phoenix. That might partially be because I generally liked the last movie in the series, X-Men: Apocalypse, more than most. It wasn’t great but it had some good X-Men fun in it and introduced a promising roster of young actors to play young versions of the second generation of X-Men at Xavier’s mutant academy. I also feel like a lot of the critics went into the movie a bit too wrapped up in their inside baseball knowledge about Disney buying 20th Century Fox and planning to reboot the franchise. It may well have been true that this franchise was doomed by business concerns, but the filmmakers probably didn’t know that when this went into production and were presumably trying to make a quality film that would get the franchise back on track. On some level I was really hoping they would prove the doubters wrong by knocking this out of the park and forcing them to keep the X-Men series I grew up on going. That wasn’t such a crazy thing to hope for, the franchise has bounced back from the brink in the past. Unfortunately the movie they produced was decidedly not a home run that would prove anyone wrong, but I also don’t think it’s a movie that’s as much of a disaster as people are making it out to be.

If there’s anything to complain about with X-Men: Dark Phoenix it’s that it’s a movie which tries nothing new and does nothing unexpected. It’s set about ten years after X-Men: Apolcalypse in 1992 but does pretty much nothing with that setting and it’s also still done basically nothing to make its chracters look like they’ve aged a decade (supposed Holocaust survivor Magneto still appears to be forty and isn’t starting to resemble Ian McKellen even a little). Once again the franchise is taking on the Dark Phoenix Saga and this time has Jean Gray becoming “the phoenix” by coming in contact with a sort of force while on a rescue mission in space (despite the previous movie and the still-kinda-canon X2 both suggesting that it’s actually something latent in her powers). So clearly there’s some sloppiness on display here but the movie generally isn’t, like, aggressively stupid and its tone is largely in line with what we’ve been seeing from the other movies in the “First Class” timeline of X-Men movies. I did enjoy getting another look at what these characters are up to and there is something of an underdeveloped but interesting conflict between Xavier and various other mutants who sort of view him as a conformist “respectability politics” sellout to the cause.

Reports indicate that the film’s final sequence was re-shot because what they had done turned out to be too similar to the finale of Captain Marvel, which was probably money well spent because the closing action scenes are some of the best parts of the movie even if they don’t exactly blow what other superhero movies have been doing out of the water. What’s odd though is that the film’s villains are also a bit too similar to some of the bad guys from that film and its opening scene is pretty similar to the opening scene from Shazam, and in general it doesn’t introduce any characters or concepts that we didn’t see in other better X-Men movies. In general this movie is kind of a victim of the general over-saturation of superhero flicks these days. If this had been X-Men 3 back in 2006 instead of the offensively botched X-Men: The Last Stand it would have been able to hold its own pretty well, but in 2019 specifically the standards are a lot higher. Still, my experience watching this movie was not a terrible one. It mostly passed the time effectively and in general I think its 23% Rotten Tomatoes score and will probably provide some thrills to fans of the series. Walking out of the movie I was about ready to give it a pass but then I remembered the critically reviled film from the last week which I also defended: Godzilla: King of the Monsters. That movie was all kinds of stupid, but the lower lows came with higher highs and the kind of thrills it offered were in much shorter supply than what we get from this movie, and I ultimately think that was a movie I’d be more inclined to go to bat for. This one? It’s not the hill I’m willing to die on.

**1/2 out of Five

It’s deeper than that. The villains were the Skrulls. I guess it’s a Quicksilver situation in which both companies owned the characters. So not only did they have to re-do the entire 3rd act but change the villains to the D’Bari.

Oof, this movie. It felt like it was X-Men 0.5, where you take the excitement and suspense and enjoyment of the other X-Men movies and cut it in half. There's nothing new, nothing original, nothing fun, the whole thing is just an exercise in dullness. Reading this thread it seems as though there were a few of us that didn't hate Apocalypse, it certainly has its problems but overall I enjoyed it, but after a movie about an immortal, all-powerful super villain who tries to enslave humanity you would think Dark Phoenix would take that up a notch, if even just a bit. No, on the contrary the 'Phoenix' doesn't even really do anything other than flip over some police cars and get into a really weird, unexciting tug of war with Magneto over a helicopter. This isn't the worst movie I've ever seen but it's just the epitome of lazy, phoned in filmmaking. Everyone involved including the fans deserved better.

This movie was just...fine.  Not good, but rather so middle-of-the-road.

If we're counting Logan as an X-Men film (which, why wouldn't we?), then that's clearly the best for me.