‘Dark Phoenix’ Review

This review contains spoilers for ‘Dark Phoenix’

I’m not the biggest X-Men fan in the world. I like some of the movies (namely Logan, Days of Future Past, and First Class), and growing up I occasionally watched X-Men Evolution and Wolverine & the X-Men, but I don’t have the same attachment to them that others do. What I’m getting at here is that I don’t really care that they made huge changes to the Dark Phoenix Saga. I’ve never read it (though I intend to one day) and I don’t have an inherent connection to Jean Grey or Cyclops. If they would’ve pulled off a great movie in their own right, I would’ve been ecstatic. Note the usage of past tense there. Unfortunately, Dark Phoenix isn’t a great movie.

However, I didn’t despise it like many people seemed to. The film starts off strong, setting up the new status quo where the X-Men are superheroes beloved by all and helping out the government. The president even has an X-Men equivalent to the Adam West bat-phone and it’s great. We’re also shown that there’s some tension between Professor Xavier and Mystique/Raven. Raven is not a fan of putting the X-Men in harm’s way just to appease the masses, but Xavier sees this as a means to an end to make them, well, not hated by every one. It’s a great moral discussion that’s reminiscent of this franchise’s best stuff. After the space mission, we have a nice scene where everyone’s having a party outside the school/mansion/whatever you wan to call it. The kids are using there abilities to make ice for drinks and just generally have fun and stuff, which is really cute. Also, DAZZLER IS THERE AND IT’S GREAT! Then Jean loses control of her powers, and it doesn’t take long for the movie to go downhill.

One of the biggest issues in this movie is that Jean’s Phoenix abilities are kind of vague. Is it just ramped-up telekinesis? Does it have limits? The answer to these questions is shut up. This vagueness gets worse when the aliens show up. Oh yeah there’s aliens in this movie. They’re called the D’Bari and they suuuuuuck. It’s immediately established that they can shape shift. Okay fine, that’s cool. But they also kind of have telekinesis? But they can only use it to…mess up people’s organs or something? Later on Jessica Chastain can just…absorb the Phoenix force from Jean, but only if they’re touching? How and why can she do this? Can any of the other D’Bari do this? Once again, the answer is shut up, but this time with a nice side of fuck you. Fuck me I guess.

This wouldn’t bother me as much if they were interesting characters. However, they have no personality and do pretty much nothing for a huge chunk of the movie, and then they suddenly become super important towards the end of the second act and are the main threat during the third act. They’re only in the movie for two reasons: one, so they can say this movie is different from X-Men: The Last Stand, and two, so they can say it’s more accurate to the original story. I would argue that they achieved the former, as this does have a lot of key differences from The Last Stand, but based on the YouTube videos I’ve seen on the original comic, they definitely didn’t achieve the latter. The D’Bari’s inclusion does absolutely no favors to the story, and the movie could’ve been much better without them.

To make this story work, Dark Phoenix either needed to be much longer, or there needed to be a film between Apocalypse and this one. They needed to do something to make us get to know Jean and the rest of the X-Men better. None of the tragic elements land because we aren’t really shown, or even told, how Jean was before she got the Phoenix force. We just know she’s changed and that she’s different now. As much as I love the stuff leading up to and just after the space mission, that time needed to be used to show us who Jean is. We needed to be shown how the Phoenix force really corrupted her, and what she’s like when she’s relatively normal. It wouldn’t have made the film perfect by any means, but it would’ve been a vast improvement. Right now, her fall from grace and eventual “death” means about nothing to us. The only characters we know well are Xavier and Magneto, and it doesn’t seem to hit them very hard. Sure, Xavier retires, but that seems to have more to do with him realizing he was too ~morally ambiguous~ than with Jean’s death. Magneto barely knew her, so he’s not shaken up by her death at all. As a matter of fact, he was trying to kill her since she accidentally killed Mystique, so there’s problem a part of him that’s glad she’s gone. Cyclops was the character who was closest to her, seeing as they were dating and all, but he continued to be sidelined. I mean, I get it Simon Kinberg, Cyclops sucks. But if you’re making a Dark Phoenix movie, Scott needs to be one of the central characters. He’s Jean’s boyfriend, and all he does is barge into a couple of rooms and get his ass kicked. Actually, that’s kind of hilarious now that I think about it. Logan would love this.

In the end, Dark Phoenix isn’t the disaster I was expecting, but it wasn’t the send off this franchise deserved. It starts strong, but lackluster character development, vague powers, and bad antagonists bog it down. With all that being said, I’d say it’s not the worst X-Men movie, but it’s nowhere near the best either. For the ideal Dark Phoenix experience, I’d recommend you stop watching once Dazzler goes away.