Dark Phoenix is the seventh of the mainline X-Men films, not including the Wolverine trilogy or Deadpool spinoffs, arguably the first X-Men film with a female lead and due to the recent Disney-Fox studio merger, the final installment of the mutant franchise that began in the summer of 2000 and ignited the modern era of superhero comic-book movies. Much of the cast from 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse returns including James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender, Nicholas Hoult, Evan Peters, Alexandra Shipp, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Tye Sheridan and Sophie Turner as the eponymous Phoenix. Jessica Chastain joins as a mysterious shape-shifter. Simon Kinberg, who has been with the X-Men franchise as a writer-producer since 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand, makes his directorial debut from his own script.
In 1975, young Jean Grey accidentally causes a car accident due to her latent telepathy, leaving her an orphan in the aftermath. Professor Charles Xavier (McAvoy) takes her into his Institute for Gifted Youngsters. After the events of Apocalypse, the X-Men have earned the trust of humanity with Xavier sending the team into more and more dangerous missions as a public face for mutanthood. During a NASA mission that goes terribly wrong, the X-Men undertake their first space mission and Jean becomes exposed to the cosmic Phoenix Force. At first relieved by her unlikely survival, the X-Men must track down Jean once she goes rogue (no pun intended) and protect her from an alien threat seeking to control the Phoenix Force as their own.
Dark Phoenix has had a much-publicized road to the big screen, due to extensive reshoots and changes made post-merger. What was once a follow-up to a critically maligned entry became the grand summation of a veteran franchise and an unintended sendoff. The result is a film that lacks the grandeur and stakes of a big-screen finale, let alone the second attempt at “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” the most well-known and beloved story arc from the X-Men comics. First portrayed in The Last Stand, the saga was reduced to a subplot alongside a mutant cure and was handled clumsily. This time, even though it takes center stage and hews much closer to the source material, the saga is still handled clumsily and regrettably so.
The cast is in as fine a form as ever, with the core quartet from 2011’s X-Men: First Class (McAvoy, Lawrence, Fassbender and Hoult) giving Dark Phoenix some of the best acting they’ve done in this series. Lawrence seems much more involved compared to her phoned-in ennui in Apocalypse; she even gets the best line of the film. Perhaps it was the foreknowledge of this being her last, perhaps it was the absence of the controversial Bryan Singer. Whichever the case may be, Lawrence and the other three First Class vets have pushed their characters to darker, more intense places. Sophie Turner particularly has a difficult task in having to switch between the overwhelmed Jean Grey and the overpowered Dark Phoenix, a task she pulls off admirably. However, Kinberg’s script does neither Turner nor her cast members any favors.
Kinberg intended Dark Phoenix to be an apology for the infamous Last Stand as well as a course-correction from the abysmal Apocalypse, and by those two counts, this film marginally succeeds. The previous film set an extremely low bar to clear, an inexplicable degradation from the crowd-pleasing Days of Future Past, released in the summer of 2014. Having done the work of reintroducing fan favorites like Storm, Cyclops and Nightcrawler, Dark Phoenix was meant as a vehicle to have this younger cast shine. Except for Sophie Turner’s Jean Grey and the First Class quartet, the rest of the X-Men are nearly reduced to bit parts and special effects.
The team dynamic is thrillingly teased in the first act, but only given lip service. Tye Sheridan has as little to do as James Marsden did in the original trilogy, Storm and Nightcrawler have nothing to do outside of fight scenes and even fan-favorite Quicksilver is sidelined early on. Once again, Kinberg finds himself trapped between having to serve essentially two different casts (First Class, Apocalypse) but this time without the time-travel conceit of Days of Future Past. As a result, the Apocalypse freshmen get very short shrift. Even Jean Grey, the main character of the film who drives the entire narrative from start to finish, has very little agency and makes very few decisions of her own due to the uncontrollable nature of the Phoenix.
It seems as if lessons were not learned from mistakes past. Kinberg’s script all but ignores his own script for Apocalypse (?!), which gave hints of Jean’s rising Phoenix power that was previously enough to destroy the titular villain all on her own. Even the very first scene of Dark Phoenix hints at the dangers of Jean’s growing power left unchecked. “The Dark Phoenix Saga” ran for eighteen issues over a span of three years and distilling it into a two-and-a-half-hour film would require huge changes to the plot – changes seemingly set up in Apocalypse and discarded.
No longer a battle of inner torment, Jean is either controlled by the Phoenix or controlled by other malicious players in the field for the bulk of the film. The damage done in her uncontainable telekinetic bursts are not the actions of a godlike villainess but the contrivances of a script that wants to have it both ways: Jean Grey as a sympathetic lead and as a dangerous lethal antagonist. By taking the decisions out of her hands, up until the very end, Kinberg has made Jean Grey a bystander in her own film.
Dark Phoenix is frustrating on other levels as well. For every treasured callback to comic lore (the island nation of Genosha, the X-Men team uniforms, the 1992 setting hearkening back to the heyday of mutant mania), there is a baffling creative decision. Characters commit several strategic mistakes for the sake of the plot. Xavier, having survived the events of Apocalypse, inexplicably becomes a fame-seeking egotist. The ending, reshot due to similarities to this year’s Captain Marvel, is a truncated hemmed-in fight against alien enemies whose power levels are unclear throughout most of the film.
Even legendary composer Hans Zimmer turns in a repetitive, morose and uninspired score for Dark Phoenix. His work is usually the bright spot in some of the weaker films of his oeuvre; Man of Steel, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and The Lone Ranger especially are undeserving of their musical scores from Zimmer. Personally, I was looking forward to how the maestro approached the themes for the X-Men and these characters, and I was profoundly let down. I can only imagine that the composer felt the same way about the material he was given to work with.
Dark Phoenix, along with its cast and director, found itself tasked with wrapping up nineteen years of mutant heroics on a dramatically confused note. Even as what was clearly meant as a “next issue” in a continuing series, the reattempt at dramatizing the Dark Phoenix Saga is failed by its visual and structural adherence to X-Men films past. Singer’s aesthetic in the 2000 film was more apologist than celebratory, with its black leather uniforms and shadowy third act. The originating trilogy took a team book and retrofitted it into a solo star-making turn for Hugh Jackman, giving the barest of glimpses at its true ensemble nature. After six whole films, Dark Phoenix inherits that aesthetic and stands as a testament to a cinematic relic, refusing to evolve its style, presentation or characterization.
The X-Men films have always been action movies disguised as comic-book movies, and now they must give way to a new modern Marvel era. Only due to the strength of the performances of McAvoy, Lawrence, Fassbender, Hoult and Turner does Dark Phoenix – and the X-Men franchise as a whole – avoid whimpering to its end. But it sure could have used one hell of a bang.
Rating: 2.5/5 stars ⭐⭐½
ABOUT TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX’S AND MARVEL’S DARK PHOENIX
This is the story of one of the X-Men’s most beloved characters, Jean Grey, as she evolves into the iconic DARK PHOENIX. During a life-threatening rescue mission in space, Jean is hit by a cosmic force that transforms her into one of the most powerful mutants of all. Wrestling with this increasingly unstable power as well as her own personal demons, Jean spirals out of control, tearing the X-Men family apart and threatening to destroy the very fabric of our planet. The film is the most intense and emotional X-Men movie ever made. It is the culmination of 20 years of X-Men movies, as the family of mutants that we’ve come to know and love must face their most devastating enemy yet — one of their own.
Dark Phoenix is written and directed by Simon Kinberg, produced by Simon Kinberg, p.g.a., Hutch Parker, p.g.a., Lauren Shuler Donner, and Todd Hallowell, and stars James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, Sophie Turner, Tye Sheridan, Alexandra Shipp, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Evan Peters, and Jessica Chastain.
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Dark Phoenix is in theaters June 7, 2019 in 3D, 2D, Dolby Cinema and IMAX with a run-time of 114 minutes, and is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action including some gunplay, disturbing images, and brief strong language.
