Dark Phoenix Review

So, I was one of the people who watched this movie.

All the art for this movie is gorgeous. It's a shame this level of creativity never makes it into the movie itself.

I try not to spoil anything in these reviews, but you probably shouldn’t see this movie anyway so, eh. I’ll give a brief section where I talk generally, spoiler-free for those who want it, and then I’ll dive into the deeper stuff. I should open this with an anecdote about how my friend and I went to get tickets for this movie, in IMAX, just after opening weekend, four hours before the screening. They were pre-seated tickets. The theatre was completely empty. When we sat down to watch the movie, there were at most a dozen people in the theatre, including us. So, that should tell you a decent amount about this movie from the start.

This has always been a dodgy franchise. The first two movies are some of the most definitive movies in the growth of the superhero film. X-2 is still fantastic. X-Men: Last Stand, however, tried to take on the Phoenix arc as well as five other arcs and it was a disaster. First Class was fantastic. Origins: Wolverine was a travesty. Days of Future Past was a fantastic way to tie everything together. Wolverine was okay. Apocalypse was worse. Logan was a brilliant and satisfying conclusion. But, now we have this. Also, we have New Mutants coming out, maybe, eventually. The advertising and social media push have emphasized this movie as some grand finale of the franchise and… that’s not what this is. This isn’t some seminal masterpiece, some culminating work, it’s just kind of another story. And not a particularly great one. There’s little in the way of resolving character arcs, or plot points. In fact, it kind of ends on an uncertain note. You want the movie to at least tip its hat to this weird, goofy franchise, but the movie seems entirely unconcerned with continuity of any sort.

The movie insists on moving forward to the 90's, but doesn't do anything interesting that couldn't have been done back in the 80's. There's vaguely 90's fashion (that looks practically identical to modern fashion) and that's about it.

What else can I say without spoiling anything… I don’t know what this movie is trying to be. If you’re looking into this movie for cool superhero action, you’ll get some. The opening and closing sequences are pretty creative. I actually really liked the first fifteen minutes of the movie, with the X-Men actually acting like X-Men. Then that gets interrupted by the plot and it becomes a really dull drama for the next hour or so. If you want compelling character arcs… this movie certainly tries. But none of the arguments of the characters feel earned, everyone is just sort of overreacting in over-dramatic fashion to everything. The status quo wildly moves around on a whim in reaction to small issues. Character arcs do complete 180s with no real build-up. And, for the most part, ‘character arcs’ in this movie means two people yelling at each dramatically about a trivial mistake, and one of them arbitrarily being right. None of this is helped by the fact that the movie wants to have both end-of-the-world stakes, and small contained family-unit stakes. It fails at both. There are attempted emotional moments, but none of them really land. Tye Sheridan is given the permitted F-bomb of the movie, which is clearly meant to be an emotional punch, but wound up being the greatest (unintentional) laugh of the film. More than anything, this movie just feels bland.

I dig the Phoenix effects; this movie has some good visuals, but little to sustain them.

The script isn’t great. There’s some neat direction, and some colourful imagery, but the plot and the writing cannot hold the movie together. The actors all do their best. Sophie Turner gives it all to try to make Jean Grey a compelling character, and McAvoy and Fassbender both show up as usual. Jessica Chastain is wasted with a villain who is dull as chalk. She was basically told not to be compelling in any way. Her character wants the Phoenix force? Or wants to destroy it? I honestly don’t know. Evan Peters is easily the most fun part of this movie, so naturally, he gets waved off into the corner. Jennifer Lawrence cashes her paycheque. Other actors are there. Hoult does a decent job with his awful character direction. But none of it goes anywhere. No arc feels very fulfilling, if they make any sense at all. It all just sort of leads to a mostly-entertaining climax, and then fizzles out into the final credits. Fox’s X-Men franchise ends not with a band, but a whimper.

…Alright, spoiler time. Let’s go to work.

Again, I actually liked the first bit of this movie. I was hopeful for a while. We’re treated to a decently compelling prologue featuring Jean’s origin, which does well to tap us into a narrative of a tortured girl growing up with insane powers. She’s riding in a car with her parents, how powers freak out, and her parents die in the car crash while she survives. Xavier takes in Jean, promising to protect her. And then we jump to ‘modern’ times. The X-Men are a legitimate operation and get called on by the president to help with crises. They blast off in the X-Jet and save an astronaut team. It’s all really fun squad action, with powers interacting. This is what the franchise ought to be. Why can’t we get more of this? Anyways, things go wrong and Jean sucks the Pheonix force into herself, along with the explosion from a space shuttle. It’s all very pretty. They get back to the mansion and Beast quickly looks over Jean’s vitals. He says that they’re off the charts… but Jean feels okay so he lets her go. She just sucked up an explosion. She’s not okay. Put her in quarantine, or something! When did Beast become an idiot? And stop wearing Hault’s face all the time!

I also love seeing the team in anything resembling a classic uniform. If they made a whole series that was these first twenty minutes, I would be there every single time.

We cut from this to an X-Men party with the teens. These teens are now around thirty in the timeline established within this movie, but the movie continues to treat them like teens so just, ignore that, I guess. And yes, Xavier and Magneto are around 60 in this movie’s timeline. No, they don’t look anything like Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen yet. This movie’s plotline operates with writer/director Simon Kimberg leaning over your shoulder and whispering ‘no, just don’t think about it.’ Uh, anyways. Dazzler makes a cameo, which was fun. These movies keep peppering in the fun characters like Dazzler, Jubilee, and Gambit, but then never actually let them do anything cool. Even Quicksilver takes a hit to his head like, twenty minutes into this movie and isn’t mentioned again. Did you want any resolution to his arc with Magneto? Not happening, sorry. Still, the best part of these movies has always been teens doing regular teen stuff with their powers, and we get a decent bit of that here. Then, Jean goes crazy and blows up the forest. She breaks through some of the mental blocks Xavier put in her head and escapes to her old home. If you’re confused, thinking this sounds exactly like the plot to X-Men: The Last Stand, that’s because it basically is at this point.

I ought to note that before this, Mystique yells at Xavier for a bit. See, I mentioned that the X-Men are finally on good terms with the government, but for some reason, Mystique sees this as a bad thing. I guess we’re trying to make her a villain again, or something? I don’t know what they’re doing with this character. She acts like Xavier is being petty for wanting everyone to be at peace, and the movie seems to agree with her, even though that’s insane. The entire goal of these movies has been unity between mutants and humans, people accepting what is different. And then this movie treats that like accepting others is a betrayal of ideals or something. It’s really muddled. Mystique also tries to make it a gender issue because ‘the girls seem to be saving all the men around here,’ even though the previous sequence mostly focused on Nightcrawler and Quicksilver saving all the astronauts while Storm and Jean kept the ship intact. Like, if you want to have a discussion on gender norms, go ahead, but you should start by actually setting that up in your story? And then she makes an ‘X-Women’ joke, which doesn’t land. It’s like Simon Kinberg was checking off a list of ‘representation’ without actually looking up what anything meant. The rest of the movie will feature women being fridged and struggling with their power by going to men for advice. So, yeah. Good work there, Kinberg. Anyways, none of Mystique’s arguments matter because Jean kills her in the next sequence, and it all gets unceremoniously dropped.

Jean Grey wears a lot of grey in this movie, because subtlety.

I mean, strictly speaking, that isn’t fair. What happens is that Jean goes home because she learns that Xavier lied to her, and her dad is still alive. Once she gets there, however, she realizes her dad hates her, and the Phoenix force takes over again. Or she loses control, or something. This movie never is really interested in explaining what the Phoenix force is or what it does. It’s just alien goop that’s bad and makes people bad and also blow things up. And so Jean fights the X-Men because she’s angry on Phoenix juice. This is about as much explanation as we get for how the Phoenix affects Jean, it just ‘turns everything up’ and makes her angry and she has trouble controlling it – until she doesn’t. The movie wants her fall to be tragic and sympathetic, but she’s never actually allowed makes any tragic choices. It’s just all forced on her, and she winds up being a puppet of the plot. It’s not something insidious like the One Ring, where your latent greed and power are bent to a purpose. Jean just yells ‘I can’t control it,’ and then starts acting evil and blowing things up. In any case, Xavier sends Mystique to talk to her because Mystiques ‘specialty is with people,’ which is utter trash. Mystique is supposed to be a quiet self-focused assassin with Starscream goals, not a friendly team mom. Jean accidentally kills her, and everyone is surprised except the audience. Jean’s response is to float up in the air and go away – something she’ll do many times in this movie. The X-Men go home, and Beast is all mad at Xavier because somehow this is his fault? Like, Xavier put up mental blocks to help reduce Jean’s trauma, and then she got possessed by alien goop and those blocks broke down. So, Xavier is to blame for Jean going crazy, apparently. Not the alien goop. Which is directly responsible for Jean’s actions. And everyone is okay with this thesis. The government suddenly decides the X-Men are too dangerous to co-operate with because Jean sort-of wrecked a suburban home. This is emphasized by the president deleting Xavier’s phone number. Everything in this movie is Xavier’s fault even though it makes no sense for it to be. Jean is obviously an isolated incident and the sensible course of action is to get the X-Men to contain her. But everyone everywhere has decided the X-Men are collectively too dangerous to trust. Including Beast, who is so mad at Xavier that he packs up and leaves. Beast, who was the only one of the X-Men to stick with Xavier in Days of Future Past, and was previously in favour of the whole ‘keep-the-peace’ shtick. He has some line of ‘Raven was right,’ and leaves. For what is supposed to be a tragedy about Jean, this movie is awfully focused on attributing all of her actions to Xavier.

This scene is exactly as goofy as it looks. This still looks like it doesn't have effects added in, but this is literally the shot.

Jean then flies to Magneto, who has for all intents and purposes established Genosha. But, the movie is intent on never, ever calling it Genosha, because that would make fans happy or something. Magneto’s top lieutenants are a psychic and a guy who can use his dreadlocks as whips. I am serious. There are at least a dozen more interesting characters we could be using here. Is Toad still around? A quick look through the internet tells me the psychic is supposed to be Selene, as in the Black Queen of the Hellfire Club, the foil to Emma Frost. Why the heck is she being wasted as a Magneto goon? Why doesn’t she look remotely like Selene? What are you doing, movie? Selene is one of the coolest and most powerful X-Men villains, and she’s relegated to some goon who takes orders from Magento? You can’t… you can’t stuff in a line about female power and then strip the agency away from every female character in your movie. That’s not how this works. I’ve spent too much time talking about the character-devoid henchmen. Jean goes to not-Genosha and asks Magneto how he ‘stopped killing people,’ which is kind of a weird question. Magneto does his best before the military shows up, and Jean fights them. This includes a part where Jean is trying to blow up a helicopter while Magneto is trying to keep it together, and then he tells the soldiers to get on the helicopter, and then he kind of yeets it out of the way? It’s odd. Then Jean floats away again. Beast shows up later and offers his services, and tells Magneto that Jean killed Mystique, which makes him mad. The dominant reaction to news in this movie is to be mad.

I see we're back to the X-Men looking like an edgy boy band. Excellent.

Jean then meets up with Jessica Chastain, who is an alien. She is one of a group of shapeshifter aliens who are definitely not Skrulls but are basically Skrulls. They want something with the Phoenix force – it destroyed their planet? And now they want… revenge? Or to use it to rebuild? I think both? It’s irrelevant. Jessica Chastain tracks down Jean and can see through her psychic defenses because of ‘plot.’ Again, plot just happens to Jean in this movie, she isn’t allowed to make any choices in her downfall. She goads Jean into using the Phoenix Force more but also plans to steal it if Jean is bad at it. The aliens’ motivations are very vague. As Chastain gets started, everyone arrives at their doorstep in New York. Tensions are hot. Cyclops laughably swears at Magneto. Xavier says that he’s scared of causing a scene in the middle of the city, which is probably why he brought… Cyclops and Storm. The most destructive, obtrusive mutants on his roster. An okay fight breaks out in the middle of the street, featuring Xavier refusing to use his powers to stop things quickly because the plot must happen. Magneto pulls a subway car out of the ground to block a door when he could have used all the cars around him. He confronts Jean, who defeats him. Xavier also goes to confront Jean, and she uses her powers to… drag him out of his chair and walk him up the steps? It’s supposed to be scary and evil, but it’s just kind of weird and uncomfortable and a little goofy. Like, this is the big evil thing that Jean does. She walks a crippled guy up the stairs. This is a weird movie.

More boy bands images. For the record, the girl on the right is Selene. In the comics she is a powerful mutant, 'the' Black Queen. Here she's a generic goth character with only a couple lines and less personality.

So, this scene ends with everyone getting arrested. And at this point, I sat back and said, ‘wait, are we ending already?’ Because I knew the big train scene was the grand finale of this movie, and that the team being arrested meant we were leading to that, but nothing of substance had happened yet and it seemed way too early to wrap things up. Jean hasn’t done anything particularly destructive. Like, she killed Mystique, but the audience doesn’t care because Mystique hasn’t been a consistent character for the past several movies. She did a little property damage, pushed some helicopters, and made Xavier walk. This isn’t the peak of this tragedy where Jean falls into evil. This is maybe the first episode. The whole appeal of the Dark Phoenix arc, and the advertising of this movie, is a purportedly beloved main character falling to evil. It’s a tragedy. But at no point does Jean feel evil, or that she’s made any logical choices to lead her towards evil. The Phoenix just makes her mad a couple of times, and the X-Men try to calm her down. But we get to the train and suddenly everything is wrapping up. And I mean suddenly. Xavier all of a sudden is apologizing to Magneto and Beast and Jean – who is unconscious – with nothing in the movie establishing a change of heart. He has steadfastly insisted that he did what needed to be done but now he’s apologizing, even though nothing has changed. The not-Skrulls attack the train to get Jean, and then Magneto stands up to help the X-Men. When confronted about it, Magneto literally says ‘I had a change of heart,’ which again was not built up whatsoever. And Beast just sort of forgives Xavier, I guess. There’s even a moment when a soldier is injured, and Nightcrawler freaks out and goes on a revenge rampage for a bit? Like, it’s a whole moment; he bears his teeth and goes feral. But nothing in the movie has set up an arc where Nightcrawler has been wrestling with his morality or a darker side. And the soldier who dies isn’t particularly important? Nightcrawler has a weak character moment with a guard before this, but they’re two completely different guards. There’s no set-up for any of these character shifts. Anyways, one-by-one the shapeshifters knock out the X-Men until Jean wakes up and kills all the shapeshifters. Xavier reminds Jean of the family that she has. She has a one-on-one fight with Jessica Chastain and then has a big Phoenix moment and they both die. Chastain says “you’re too emotional, it makes you weak,” and Jean replied, “no, it makes me strong.” She’s able to control the Phoenix enough to destroy herself and Chastain. I guess the moral is something about Jean protecting her family? The power of love makes her not evil anymore? Or not susceptible to the alien force anymore? It’s all very nebulous.

Sophie Turner reflecting on the work she put into trainwreck of a movie.

This is a problem. The whole climax and culmination of this tragedy is Jean taking control of the Phoenix for a final sacrifice, but nothing about it makes sense. First, Xavier has this whole speech about family. The idea is that her old family rejected her, but she has a new family now. But nothing in this movie has attempted to set up a family dynamic. The X-Men are constantly fractured and fighting with each other. The closest moment we get to a feeling of everyone getting along is the ‘teen’ party, which itself ends with Jean wrecking things. Any nods towards a theme of ‘family’ are all tragic in nature, Mystique was Xavier’s step-sister, and she rejects Xavier’s goals. Beast and Magneto both ‘loved’ Mystique, and so seek out revenge. Family isn’t really viewed as a happy unit until the movie’s end. As for emotions making one strong… the entire movie is built around Jean’s emotions being a problem. The Phoenix Force ‘turns up’ her emotions, leading to dramatic outbursts. Every time this happens, she feels like she’s losing control. Yet, apparently, the answer to controlling the Phoenix is to be more emotional? Not to mention the obvious problem that the movie’s primary characterization of its lead female role is that she’s ‘emotional,’ while also trying to present itself as some feminist message. If you’re going to try to make a message, commit to it and actually understand what your message is. This movie is constantly contradicting its own themes and backing itself into a corner.

The movie ends. Xavier retires, because he was wrong and therefore can never lead again, I suppose. The school is renamed after Jean Grey, the woman best known for killing Mystique and making Xavier walk up the stairs that one time. Beast is the new head professor, because him switching to Magneto’s side for a bit was totally cool. Magneto shows up at a café to find Xavier and they play chess one last time, because all their conflict and murdering has to end with them being buddy-buddy again. I don’t think the government arc is mentioned again? Like, I have no idea if they’re good with the president or still hated. This is arguably the biggest shift of the movie and it’s just disregarded. Then there’s a narration from Jean about how this is a ‘new beginning,’ which is either a reference to the MCU taking over, a nod to how rehashed this plot-line is, or a false hope that this franchise is continuing with the new cast. Then there’s a flash of a Phoenix in the sky. So, I guess Jean isn’t dead? So, she didn’t actually sacrifice herself? The one big sort-of choice she makes is revoked? It doesn’t matter anyways, we aren’t getting any more of these movies.

Quicksilver's apt reaction to this movie, and to his middling screentime.

And then the credits roll. Honestly, although my tone is pretty critical, I didn’t hate this movie. More offensive movies exist. More offensive X-Men movies exist. It was just boring. A lot of the action is uninspired, and the plot is just meandering drama. Way too much of this movie is people arguing over weird mistakes. Xavier is blamed for everything and Jean isn’t allowed to have any agency. Mystique is sort of reduced to a martyr figure, but her points don’t make any sense. Beast’s arc doesn’t make sense. Magneto is trying to be peaceful until he isn’t and then is motivated by revenge until he isn’t. Nightcrawler’s rampage is never commented on or elaborated on. Storm and Cyclops both run through this movie, but neither have anything interesting in the way of characterization. Quicksilver is fun but is shelved. The team dynamics are fun but are disrupted by the dull drama. Everyone is just so dramatic about everything. That’s the movie. That’s the grand finale of the X-Men Fox franchise. People yelling at each other over minute details. I don’t hate the movie, I’m just exhausted by it. I don’t understand what Kinberg was going for. Again, there’s a vague theme about the importance of family, but so much of the movie is focused on people yelling that we never get time to feel out any sort of family dynamic. It all just feels lazy. No one gets any substantial character work. Jean Grey feels undeveloped. Everyone does their best with the script, but ultimately, Dark Phoenix is just a less-schlocky take on X-Men: Last Stand. There are a few good laughs, and a few more unintentional laughs, and some fun action at the beginning and the end. But that’s all you can expect out of this movie. Unless you’re really dedicated to seeing this franchise through, Dark Phoenix is just probably not worth the effort.