Dark Phoenix - The Movie That Finally Killed The X-Men

the x-men movies and I have kind of a rough history together and by rough I mean I feel like have been trapped in a turbulent an increasingly abusive relationship with them for the past 19 years things started off innocently enough with x-men 1 & 2 in the early 2000s they were charming but slightly goofy superhero movies from a time before the Marvel juggernaut really kicked into gear but then the series lost its way started drinkin and slapping me around with the last stand and x-men origins and I started to think we just weren't meant to be together I was all set to pack my bags and leave but then it pulled itself together hit the gym and managed to woo me back with first class The Wolverine and Days of Future past alright I felt like we'd found our groove again and rekindled the spark we were even experimenting with some guy named Deadpool who was a bit excitable and tried a little too hard to make people like him but was fun to be around but all too soon the old demons resurfaced and the series went on a three-day bender and gave me the beatin of my life courtesy of x-men apocalypse the writing was on the wall and so we come at last to Dark Phoenix the last half-hearted attempt at an x-men movie to be shot out by Fox before Marvel takes control and folds them into the MCU a movie marred by production problems reshoots and constant rewrites a movie the studio were so excited about that they delayed its release for a full year to try to fix this numerous problems so what the hell is dark Phoenix about well since we've no given up entirely on the original x-men cast in the present-day were once again seeking a journey back in time to tell a story nobody cares about it's no 1992 even though everybody pretty much looks the same as they did in apocalypse 8 years earlier I also think it's pretty funny that Professor X goes from James McAvoy to Patrick Stewart in just eight years not whatever so the x-men get a distress call from a space shuttle that's been damaged by a cosmic space fart or whatever and they all go up to rescue the astronauts even though Nightcrawler is the only one that's actually useful in this situation anyways Sansa Stark goes along with them and she gets trapped on the shuttle and hit by the cosmic space 4 and she absorbs all the radiation into her body and this makes her super-powerful instead of dead we're never seen this sort of thing before nah no idea anyway the spacebar unlocks her childhood memories that Professor X hid from her and she starts to remember all the bad stuff she did before she learned to control her powers like killing her parents so she goes nuts and destroys a party for the other x-men and then she passes out we've all been there son sir then she realizes her dad's still alive so she pops in to see him and the x-men go after her to bring her in but she's not having it because she's bad son so no mystique tries to talk her down but Sansa was losing her [ __ ] and begs her to leave and Mystique's like nah it'll be fine so Sansa kills her and then she's all sad so she flies away to Magneto's secret island for therapy or something now I have to confess that maths was never my strong point but if magneto was a young boy during World War two wouldn't that make him at least 60 years old by now Wow the years have been pretty kind to you sir you don't look a day over 40 but he doesn't want her there especially when the military show up to capture her and she attacks them with her space park powers and kills everyone what's this magneto trying to make a new peaceful life for himself only to have it shattered by the arrival of an unexpected outside force you're just blowing the gates of originality off their hinges now aren't you guys so Santa leaves the island and hooks up with Jessica Chastain who's of a shape-shifting alien risk that's been all but wiped out by the cosmic space for what the [ __ ] we shape-shifting aliens trying to manipulate a human female that's been imbued with cosmic space powers due to an unexpected accident this is looking very familiar nah whatever who cares at this point so Sansa said that she killed mystique but Jessica Chastain's like nah I'll be fine the upshot here is that basically everyone's pissed at son sir magneto and his mates want revenge for destroying their Island in the Sun and the x-men Sierra's a threat there has to be stopped one way or the other and in between are the humans looking for any excuse to go to war against the mutants so guess what they all converge in New York and they have a big Rumble and might meet you almost get killed by Sun Tzu's power but then a bunch of military guys show up and arrest them all what the [ __ ] so they're all put on a train to take them all to jail but then Jessica Chastain shows up and kills the military guys and tries to suck the cosmic space for energy out of Sansa Wow we'll never saw this diabolical plan coming who would have thought she was using Sun sir for her own ends all this time so Professor X tells Sun Tzu's to believe in herself for something and she unleashes all the cosmic space for energy and kills Jessica Chastain and flies away into space then Professor X retires and has a friendly game of chess with his old rival Magneto because that's not a thing that's ever happened in an x-men movie before and that's it that's the plot of this movie such as it is where do I even begin well I guess I should start by listing all the positives of Dark Phoenix the special effects are nice and Hugh Jackman has not been forced into a humiliating Wolverine cameo after giving his character the best send-off in history and that's pretty much it if you thought x-men 3 screwed up the Dark Phoenix storyline then well prepared to have your expectations subverted I guess once again they managed to get one of the most compelling x-men comic storylines completely wrong with a ham-fisted storyline that feels like it was written by throwing together three or four different scripts and just hoping for the best everything about this movie feels like all the fun and energy and creativity has been sucked right out of it the overarching plot is absolutely boilerplate stuff for the x-men universe mutants are distrusted and persecuted by humans there's dissent within the ranks of the x-men and the uneasy standoff between the two groups is broken by the unexpected wildcard of the Dark Phoenix characters go through the same exact arcs they've been through a hundred times before guys like Professor X Magneto and mystique are used and abuse so hard they must have resembled secondhand Russian sex dolls by the time they were done and believe me I know all about them this movie is nobody's finest hour and I think it's pretty clear the actors are only doing it because they're contractually obliged to be there it reminds me of going into an office where all the staff were about to be laid off people are SERT of their desks going through the motions but nobody's heart is really in it and they're just counting down the minutes until they can leave like Jennifer Lawrence who's publicly stated she'll be taking a hiatus from acting after this movie and judging by her performance here she probably wished she'd taken it sooner Jessica Chastain sleepwalks our way through a role that doesn't ask much of her and James McAvoy just looks confused and pissed off most of the time probably because the script keeps turning his character into a weak disrespected [ __ ] I'm with you on this one mate the only exception here is Fassbender as magneto and it's ashamed to see him putting so much effort into a movie that totally doesn't deserve him but the big standout of this movie is sophie Turner as Sansa Stark Oh I mean Jean Grey but probably not for the reasons she'd hoped I've never been enthusiastic about this actress and this movie has done absolutely nothing to change that impression she's tall and she looks pretty enough but she has absolutely nothing resembling charisma screen presence or acting ability she can play the frightened and vulnerable Jean because basically that's the exact same character she's been playing for nine years now on a certain other show but when she tries to go into badass dark Phoenix mode it just reminds me of Mark Zuckerberg trying to pretend like he's a human it's not fooling anyone I have to question the merits of the 8-year time jump - one of the few things that create captain marvel worth was given us a good sensor time in place by riffin on nineties culture and technology but Dark Phoenix makes no effort to do anything like that it could just as easily be 2002 or 2012 for all it matters the x-men's technology has always been lightyears ahead of what was actually available at the time so the result is a kind of bland generic look that could be just about anywhere or anytime a kena reminds me of x-men origins where it's supposed to be set in the 1970s but the clothes and hairstyles and Technology are totally out of sync so my point is why do this crazy time jump to set your movie in a specific place in time when you're not actually gonna do anything with it it just feels weird and like I've already pointed out the characters ages are now completely inconsistent with the actors playing them do these really look like two men in their early sixties so what are we to make of this boring a lackluster creatively bankrupt entry into the x-men Saga the answer is of course who gives a [ __ ] it's pretty obvious Marvel are gonna reboot the whole thing with new actors and storylines before they let the x-men anywhere near the MCU so really there's not much point in pondering where the series could go from here and to be honest I'm surprised it's taken this long the x-men movies always felt like kind of a throwback to yesteryear are charming but dated relic from a different time before comic book movies became the billion-dollar blockbusters they are today they might have been updated with modern special effects but they were always going to be shackled to the ridiculous convoluted storyline let's try to fix and reset itself so many times it just kind of tied itself in knots ultimately then if the x-men series up to this point has been an increasingly unstable and abusive relationship then Dark Phoenix is the final emotional breakdown followed by an uncontested divorce settlement rest in peace x-men you're in a better place now and that's all I have for today go away now

Channel: The Critical Drinker

Views: 1,930,700

Keywords: Jean Grey, Professor X, review, Sophie Turner, James McEvoy, Mystique, Jennifer Lawrence, Magneto, Beast, Charles Xavier

Id: JlH797qhkWo

Length: 10min 16sec (616 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 10 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/ded_a_chek]

They were already dead. This was the post-mortem until Marvel brings them back.

[u/twoBrokenThumbs]

Technically didn't she kill them twice? X-Men 3 and after they rebooted now they're killed again.

[u/Treknobable]

Aren't they called TransXpeople now?