Movie Review: X-Men: Dark Phoenix

X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019)

It's really sad when a movie that is already struggling in its production ended up just getting kicked over and over again because of circumstances out of this control, because there's no other way of going about this -- Dark Phoenix was a massive trainwreck, and I'm not saying that because two different sorts of trains got absolutely fucked in this movie's action scenes. 

Even before the whole drama with the Marvel/Disney merger and acquisition of Fox, and the signal of the end of Fox's X-Men movies, Dark Phoenix was already fighting an uphill battle. Its previous movie, X-Men: Apocalypse, was met with utterly underwhelming reviews and was criticized for being just all style and no substance. There are neat X-Men action scenes, but that's about it. The fact that the continuity in the X-Men movies are kind of a doo-doo mess doesn't help, either. But then when the announcement came that the follow-up movie was going to adapt the Dark Phoenix arc once again, remining fans of the pretty dire and messy X-Men: The Last Stand, and it doesn't look good. 

And then came the Disney/Fox merger, Fox's complete apathy towards marketting this movie (and poor, poor New Mutants, if that movie will ever see the light of day) and Dark Phoenix being pushed off to a later date, almost half a year late of its original airdate, while reshoots were done to accomodate changing the movie to what's supposed to be a finale... and honestly, the movie's backgroud drama was kind of disastrous. 

And having watched this movie... wow, what a mess. And I don't mean that it's messy in an entertaining way that X-Men: The Last Stand was. Because as messy as Last Stand was, all of the actors are earnest, and even if you have no idea what the fuck was going on, every scene at least attempted to move the combination of the Dark Phoenix and mutant cure plotlines forwards, and Wolverine, Magneto, Jean Grey and Professor X to some degree ended up getting relatively cohesive character arcs. 

Not so in Dark Phoenix. Ostensibly, focusing solely on the Dark Phoenix subplot instead of making it a random tacked-on B-plot in an already full movie should have given it the gravitas, character focus and depth that The Last Stand severely lacked, but instead all it did was made the Dark Phoenix movie so god-damned boring and so hard to be invested in. Hell, the changes made to fit with the original comic book arc ended up making the character of Jean Grey feel even more muddled, because they didn't really go all the way into actually exploring what made the comics' (IMO overrated, but still better than this movie) Dark Phoenix arc captivating in the first place -- the fact that Jean Grey was so intoxicated with the power of the Phoenix Force that she straight-up blew up an alien planet and essentially has a bit of a god complex. 

Not so here. And while Sophie Turner seems to at least give a bit of an effort, Jean's character arc in the movie is messy and I'm never really sure what they're trying to tell. After the pretty laughably stupid space rescue mission (more on that later), Jean absorbs the massive giant alien cloud of flames (not to be confused with other terrible CGI comic book movie aliens like Parallax or Gah Lak Tus), she starts accidentally causing her powers to be unleashed, which, in turn enhances her mental powers so much that she ends up remembering a memory that Professor X has repressed -- the fact that Jean accidentally caused the death of her mother in a car crash due to not being able to control her young powers, and also her father is still alive but doesn't want anything to do with her. 

And as Jean meets her father, she goes into a full-on angry tantrum, feeling betrayed by her adoptive father figure and her biological father, and goe so crazy she accidentally kills Mystique (more on that later too) in the most anticlimactic way ever. Subsequently she gets rejected even by Magneto's mutant outcast colony because, well... she tries to straight-up murder a bunch of military men who arrived to arrest her. Again, we're never actually given any real, conclusive explanation on whether this is actually a split personality, or Jean succumbing to her powers and desires, or Jean just not being able to control the sheer amount of power, and the movie itself sort of goes back and forth about this, making things even more muddled.

And then Jean meets Vux, a member of the D'Bari alien race, who wants to utilize the Phoenix Force to terraform Earth because, well, evil aliens, I suppose. They just honestly show up with minimal explanation, and are terrible stand-ins for either Skrulls or the Shi'ar. Vux ends up playing as a weird corrupter figure for Jean Grey, eventually revealing her true colours in trying to straight-up steal the Phoenix Force from Jean... and, again, the wequence of dialogue and events that lead to this point really felt wooden and stiff and just there because the plot demands it to happen. Jean being just kind of confused about everything that's going on around her really doesn't help matters out either. We never know if the Phoenix Force is possessing her, or if it's amplifying Jean's suppressed anger, or anywhere in between. Sophie Turner acts as a confused character which is pretty accurate to how Jean must be feeling, but the surrounding movie really only tells us "what" the Phoenix Force is (alien smoke magic thing) without covering the who, why or how. 

So after a brief multi-way battle between the X-Men, the Brotherhood, Jean and Vux, as well as the MCU (the Mutant Control Unit, although the acronym has to be on purpose), all the mutants are taken on a train to a detention center, only for a massive, massive army of J'Bari to show up and lead to a long action scene. Thanks to the power of a motivational speech, Jean ends up being completely good and being in control of the Phoenix Force, saving everyone, killing the remaining aliens, and then carrying Vux out into orbit and blowing up because she... uh... has a handle on her emotions or something? And throughout it all I can't feel that they had a decent storyline in their hands, but end up absolutely squandering it by giving an absolutely bland performance, not helped by atrocious pacing and muddled motivations. Her death felt like it just happened, yknow? We don't quite spend enough time knowing who this Jean is as a person that snuffing her out after a movie of her being a bland background character and another movie of her being half-possessed-maybe... it's nowhere equal to some of the more tragic and audience-gripping deaths in other superhero movies.

The secondary characters don't really help out either. Quicksilver, easily one of the most powerful mutants in the established X-Men team, get knocked out after the first act and just straight-up sit the entire movie out. We don't even get any definitive conclusion -- not even a throwaway line -- to the fact that Magneto's his dad! Storm, Nightcrawler and even Cyclops to some extent are just there, showing up to show off their powers in action scenes, bu also the first to get jobbed and taken out in quick sequence by the villain of the action scene. Nightcrawler gets a slight attempt at characterization when he finally gives in to his anger when a soldier he befriends gets killed by the soldiers, but other than Nightcrawler going on a rampage in killing the aliens with a blade and teleporting them in front of trains, we don't get much of a payoff. Cyclops is just there as handsome-love-interest that has even less personality compared to his mind-controlled couterpart in X2.

Meanwhile, Mystique is... I'm not sure how much of the writing aroud her is based on actor Jennifer Lawrence's own insistence, or the script writers going all out in trying to capitalize on keeping the popular-thanks-to-Hunger-Games actress in a heroic heroine role. She's essentially unrecognizable in this movie as Mystique, either the version from the comic books or the evil-mutant-with-the-willingness-to-be-good deal that she was supposed to be from the old trilogy as well as First Class. She's essentially a generic superhero team leader, and is there to rant at Charles Xavier a bit in an honestly poorly-scripted argument. That "X-Women" line was completely out of the left field and is the clumsiest way ever for a movie to go "haha look at how progressive we are, right?" mostly because it doesn't even fit the conversation. 

Mystique also ends up dying after the first act, probably because the writers really have no ide what to do about her, and the fact that she was the character killed by Jean accidentally while giving a long, long speech ends up... not really panning out, huh? Jean and Mystique share maybe two or three sentences together throughout this movie and the previous one. Compare it to Jean's accidental murder of Cyclops and Xavier in Last Stand. As poorly done as that movie was, at least I felt more when Jean's attempt to be happy with her lover ended up poorly due to her lack of contrl of her powers. Here, Jean and Mystique's closeness is an informed attribute, and I feel absolutely nothing from that scene. Mystique's death is essentially there to motivate Beast and Magneto, I feel, and since we never actually got any proper payoff to Mystique's whole "flirt the line between good and evil" and we just take the most boring way to handle this, it's a pretty lame end to this version of the character, particularly with her actress really visibly not giving a shit about what's going on.

Magneto himself basically goes through the exact same story arc that his character went through in Apocalypse. He tries to live peacefully (in Genosha instead of a cabin in the woods), then a tragedy happens (Mystique instead of his wife and daughter), and he goes super duper crazy and murderous, and then thanks to a Speech(TM) he fights with the good guys in the end. His arc in Dark Phoenix, however, was so phoned in and bland that it's easily the worst Magneto's been over the different Fox X-Men movies that he feels as much of a distraction as the aliens themselves. 

Xavier, meanwhile... I felt like they were trying to do something with Xavier, y'know? With Mystique and later on Beast expressing doubts about Xavier's capacity to lead, him definitely being all ego-happy and too prideful about the fact that the X-Men have became celebrity superheroes, as well as the revelation that he repressed Jean's memories... it feels like we're about to dissect the wise old Professor Xavier as a well-meaning but flawed individual, emphasizing on the flaws like his ego and his control freak. Which is a great direction to take the character to, because I've always felt like Xavier in the comics was pretty damn flawed as a character. But then... they sort of... also abandons this halfway through the movie? He apologizes to Jean for the repressed memory (which turns out to be a-okay because Jean's dad is scum anyway) and everyone else just kinda-sorta never really mentions his sins again? It's like they initially wanted to do something brave and set up Xavier as a bit more of a more flawed character, but then went back and made all of his scenes from the midpoint onward completely heroic. It's weird. Likewise, the argument that Xavier is only 'using' his students ends up being sort of... bizarrely thrown in? Sure, he did take more risks than is advisable, and nearly damn well killed Jean, but it's sort of for the greater good, and his risk-taking isn't even really punished at all. I dunno. It's just weird all around. 

Hank, meanwhile, is just... there. I sort of understand that he's driven with grief and guilt and anger at what he perceives to be Xavier's failure as well as Mystique's death, but going straight into working with Magneto, hanging out with his little murder squad and snarling and jumping around and causing havoc in the streets? It's one thing to attack Jean, it's another to do the honestly pretty stupid looking "rawr lookit me I'm an angry monster" act in the streets. His brief betrayal and willingness to murder one of their teammates is also utterly swept under the rug and never mentioned again. 

We get a bunch of random background mutants introduced -- Selene and Red Lotus, who act as Magneto's henchmen. They basically show up to fight the X-Men in the streets and that's neat, but then quickly get killed by the J'Bari in the train fight. Oops? Selene, at least, has absolutely nothing in common with her comic book couterpart, so eh? Also, Dazzler makes a brief cameo in the X-Mansion performing, which is funny. None of the other mutants that Apocalypse hinted at was going to show up -- Psylocke, Wolverine, Jubilee, Caliban -- ended up even being mentioned here. 

And... credit where credit's due, at least the action scenes when Magneto's group and Xavier's group attacked each other to try and reach Jean is pretty cool. And the train battle's pretty awesome, particularly when Magneto starts crushing train cars and whatnot. But then the rest of the movie is just so underwhelming. The Phoenix Force is just a mass of glowing clouds and it's not interesting at all. That particularly long scene in Genosha with Magneto and Jean trying to push away a helicopter is laughably hilarious thanks to the two actors clearly just trying to pantomime wacky effort faces. The final scene of Jean in full control of her powers is just bland and boring. 

And that space scene... yeah, the execution was neat, but honestly, they had Quicksilver there. Why wouldn't they teleport Quicksilver and Jean into the shuttle on their second run through? Why wouldn't Quicksilver do the same zippy-instant-astronaut-suit on Jean? I dunno. It just feels particularly contrived. 

Honestly, with the exception of the two larger action scenes, the whole movie is very, very bland. I can easily say without hesitation that this is the weakest and blandest of all of Fox's X-Men material, and, yes, I'm including Last Stand, Origins: Wolverine and Apocalypse in that ranking. With all of those movies, we at least get the sense that the writers were trying to tell a story with the characters. We get the sense that things are happening. In Dark Phoenix, characters just sort of do whatever, the plot just does whatever, and the movie itself ends up just being such an underwhelmingly boring and bland mass of confused directionless mess. Jean, Xavier and Hank's storylines are all over the place, Magneto's story is a carbon copy of his past couple of movies, Mystique is redundant, the aliens are redundant, and the secondary characters could be removed with minimal change to the movie. 

And... and honestly, it's pretty sad that the X-Men movie franchise ended up with not a bang, but a sad, sad whimper. I realize that part of it is due to a lot of studio mandates and general behind-the-screens drama thanks to the acquisition, but man is this movie bad. Ignore this movie, and pretend the Fox X-Men movies ended with the positive, excellent movie that is Logan.