Released: June 2019
Director: Simon Kingberg
Rated PG-13
Run Time: 113 Minutes
Distributor: 20th Century Fox
Genre: Action/Science Fiction
Cast:
James McAvoy: Professor Charles Xavier
Michael Fassbender: Erik Lehnsherr/Magneto
Jennifer Lawrence: Raven/Mystique
Nicholas Hoult: Hank McCoy/Beast
Sophie Turner: Jean Grey/Phoenix
Tye Sheridan: Scott Summers/Cyclops
Alexandra Shipp: Ororo Munroe/Storm
Evan Peters: Peter Maximoff/Quicksilver
Kodi Smit-McPhee: Kurt Wagner/Nightcrawler
Jessica Chastain: Vuk
2019 will be remembered as the year when things came to an end, at least in film and television. This year, we saw the conclusion of the current iteration of the MCU with Avengers: Endgame. We also saw the end of the epic HBO series, Game of Thrones. Other film series are also coming to an end. Star Wars will see the final chapter in the Skywalker sage come to a close in December with The Rise of Skywalker. The final film in the Rambo films will debut in September with Last Blood. Some of these franchises have survived for decades. One of my favorite film franchises in the past 20 years has been X-Men. I’ve been watching these films since the original film in 2000. It’s a franchise that’s seen its fair share of ups and downs, just like any film series. I’ve been a huge fan of the rebooted films since First Class. Days of Future Past was a fantastic entry that combined both generations of films, but things started on a downward spiral with X-Men Apocalypse. Well, we now have the final film in the rebooted series: Dark Phoenix. Does the film bring the current iteration of the franchise to a solid and satisfying conclusion? In short……..no. Not even close.
The opening of the film sees young Jean Grey with her parents as she inadvertently causes an accident that ends up with the death of her mother. Professor Charles Xavier takes her to his school so she can be safe and learn to control her power. In 1992, a space shuttle is launched but encounters a mysterious cloud of energy, so the X-Men are called in to help deal with the situation. They succeed in saving the crew of the shuttle, but only because Jean Grey is using her power to hold the craft together when the energy cloud hits her full force. She awakens at the school with little memory of what happened, but soon she begins to manifest a new kind of power which brings the unwanted attention of otherworldly visitors. This isn’t the first time that film-makers tried to bring the Dark Phoenix story-line to the big screen. It was last attempted 12 years ago with X-Men: The Last Stand. How did they manage to screw up that story-line TWICE? I’ll tell you how: By handing directing, writing, and producing responsibilities to Simon Kinberg, who wrote the story for The Last Stand, funnily enough. The decision give a film of this size to an untested director was an extremely bad move. They couldn’t give it to Brian Singer, who has been dealing with….legal issues, but they couldn’t be bothered to give it to the guy that directed First Class? Dark Phoenix is one of the most poorly thought out and executed films I’ve seen in a long time, and with this being the last film in such an iconic franchise, it feels like I got slapped in the face with a cold, wet fish. There are continuity issues abound. We first saw the Phoenix manifest itself in Jean Grey in the previous film, but why was that never mentioned again? The subplot with aliens coming after Jean for her power seems very tacked on and pointless. The whole thing feels poorly put together.
The bad writing goes far beyond the main story-line. All the characters in Dark Phoenix are conspicuously one-dimensional, which bugs the hell out of me, because these characters are some of my favorites in the series. I don’t know how Kinberg managed to do it, but he managed to make me hate Professor X. I’m not lying. The character is a goddamned jack-ass in this film and his motivations for doing what he did to Jean are completely illogical. What’s worse, is that they pulled the same crap in The Last Stand. They made the character unlikable in that one too. Jean Grey doesn’t do much beyond complaining that she can’t control her power. Everyone else is pretty much pushed to the side and not given a whole to do. The villains in the film are easily the worst I’ve seen in a comic book movie. Marvel’s MCU may not have had the greatest villain line-up, but they were at the very least entertaining and more than one-dimensional. Here? Aliens. In the comics and the animated series, the X-Men have come up against multiple alien races over the years, but those races were at least interesting. Here, they are nothing more than one-note shape-shifting baddies with a predictable motivation: World domination. SERIOUSLY?!?! Magneto, in the previous films and mediums, at least had a legitimate reason for doing what he did, but these aliens? You could swap them out with a bunch of power-hungry Russians and the results would still be the same. The acting is what kind of saves the movie for me. For as much as I dislike Professor X in this film, James McAvoy nails it again, as does Michael Fassbender. I’ve actually liked Sophie Turner’s….turn as Jean Grey and she still does a pretty decent job here.
The estimated budget for this film is said to be around $200,000,000. Why the hell doesn’t it look like it? I’ve noticed that since First Class, some of the make-up effects and CGI have gotten worse. Look at Mystique, for example. Compare the make-up on her character to that of Rebecca Romijn in the original X-Men trilogy? The difference is night and day. The actual outfits that the heroes wear are also ridiculously cheap-looking. The CGI in certain parts of the film, especially on the train sequence at the end are laughably bad. Some of them are even worse than in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Yeah, I said it. This is the worst-looking X-Men I’ve ever seen. Action-wise, it’s clear to me that Simon Kinberg had no clue what he was doing. The cinematography is all sorts of wrong, the framing is off, and there’s a bunch of shaky-cam during certain scenes that really feel out-of-place. The worst sin that this movie committed, though, was that it was boring. For a film that doesn’t even run two hours, it felt like twice that. The musical score by Hans Zimmer is pretty damned good, though.
Apparently, there were a lot of extensive re-shoots in the film, especially the third act, because it felt too much like another Marvel film. Honestly, this film needed more re-writes and a better director. I can forgive X-Men: The Last Stand for having a lackluster story, because it still ended up being a fun action flick. I could even forgive X-Men Origins: Wolverine for being too ambitious and failing. It least it tried and I can respect that. Dark Phoenix doesn’t even try to rise above the banality of its own generic story, and that’s what the whole movie is: Generic. The Dark Phoenix story-line deserves better than what it got here. With Disney in full control of the property now, maybe something can happen, but it’s going to be a while before we see another X-Men. It’s just as well. I hate to come down so hard on a film that I wanted to like so much, but I have to be honest: Dark Phoenix is NOT a good movie. I’ve heard people saying that Phoenix is the worst X-Men film yet, I would agree. I honestly hope that maybe we get an alternative version of the film like we got with Days of Future Past, because this version of Dark Phoenix is one that shouldn’t have risen from the ashes.
My Final Recommendation: 4/10