Well, this movie did not do anything for trying to convince me the X-Men movie franchise is a good thing. I used to like the X-Men movies until they did the whole new timeline thing and set things back in time, for the same reason I had problems with Avengers: Infinity War and the Terminator series, when you start going back and messing with timelines it gets messy and confusing. Let’s just focus on Dark Phoenix, it is set in 1992, mutants seems to be generally accepted by the world their is a direct line to Xavier’s desk from the White House and action figures of the X-Men. That phone I just mentioned rings at the beginning of the movie with the president calling on the X-Men to help the space shuttle Endeavor that has been hit with a solar flare, putting the crew at risk of their lives. The X-Jet takes off with its mutant crew and during the evacuation of the shuttle, Jean Gray (Sophie Turner) directly absorbs the solar flare which will give her powers she does not know how to control and putting an alien race on the planet hunting her down to get said power. It will be up to her mutant buddies led by Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) to shower Jean Grey with love and understanding while trying to keep her safe from the baddies.
For me this movie was just a mess, its obvious the franchise is showing its age and majority of these actors have moved on to bigger and better things, coming back some of them even on screen just look like they are thinking, I’m contracted to do another one of these, lets get this over with. Some of the visual effects are also not on par with what has become standard for summer blockbusters. This is definitely a female empowerment movie with Jean getting all this power that is new to her and not knowing how to yield it, there is even a line early on in the movie that goes something like, looks like the women are always saving the men around here lately they should rename us the X-Women. While that’s all well and good and I’m down for some strong female hero’s the problem is Sophie Turner is not the strong one to pull this off, I saw more potential with Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) in this having that ability to command the screen for such a task. Same thing my issue with Captain Marvel, I think there is some great character potential there, I’m just not sold on Brie Larson, she’s an amazing actress I just don’t get this strong persona from her like say Sigourney Weaver or Linda Hamilton who are action women. Pushing aside from the female side of things, their are some laughable moments in the dialogue that are funny for the wrong reasons, at this point in superhero movies it is why are we stooping to dialogue like this. I think what we get here is Simon Kinberg is the director it’s his first feature film directing debut with not much directing experience before, where he has done more producing in his past with hit or miss movies in that filmography. It feels that Fox wanted to make this and went up to him, you like these films right, want to direct? Then it’s a fan making a over cliched superhero movie and making in his mind what a superhero movie should be.
Final thoughts, it’s a mess of a movie, I love many of these actors: Sophie Turner, Jennifer Lawrence, James McAvoy, Nicholas Hault, Michael Fassbender and Jessica Chastain (notice I didn’t even touch on her alien role in this; its bad). I mean look at that list and its just a few of the names in this and I see many movies and know they are all much better than what this script and movie gave them to work with. Loyal fans of the franchise will of course go see it, anyone else wait until DVD release to rent it. For me the franchise just needs to stop now and give some time to pass. With Disney holding the rights to the X-Men who knows what we will begin to see now will we see a reboot of things, for me I’m not a comic follower by any means, but, I feel there are more individual mutant characters that we can focus on. I would not mind seeing some standalone character films, just don’t do like the MCU and try to tie them all together, get some good standalone superhero one and done films. C.
