Like the mutants the franchise is built upon, Fox’s X-Men films have developed and honed in a superpower that’s only gotten more powerful with time: squandering megawatt talent and boiling its rich array characters into one-note simulacra of their previous selves from earlier films.
Each film has been progressively worse, from the peak that is First Class (2011), to the fun-but-faulty Days of Future Past (2014), to the downright dismal Apocalypse (2016).
Dark Phoenix is the fourth (and final) movie in the series, hatched atop the disappointing bones of its predecessors. And it’s the worst of the bunch, a continuation of the franchise’s swan dive into joyless mediocrity, while managing to destroy any affection one might have for Marvel’s merry mutants.
Written and directed by Simon Kinberg, Dark Phoenix is Fox’s second attempt at telling the story of Jean Grey and the destructive cosmic force known as the Phoenix. The Jean Grey and the Phoenix saga is significant as one of only five or so X-Men stories that Fox has shown interest in adapting onscreen, and the only one that doesn’t directly center on the big-name male heroes, like Wolverine, Professor Charles Xavier, or Magneto.
Dark Phoenix’s iteration of the Jean Grey story doesn’t deviate much from the version Kinberg wrote in the criminally horrendous X-Men: The Last Stand (2006): Jean Grey is special. Jean Grey is powerful. Jean Grey becomes too powerful and too unstable for this world, and the X-Men must turn on one of their own.
The central problem with Dark Phoenix, not unlike The Last Stand, is that it forgets that Grey turning into the Phoenix isn’t just her story alone. It’s also a story about her fellow X-Men.
Being a family is the nerve stem of the X-Men, and when you don’t have that nailed down, there’s no emotional investment in watching the Phoenix destroying anything and everything. None of the other characters has a discernible personality or motivation beyond reacting to Jean Grey (Sophie Turner); that’s a disservice to the colorful cast of characters that make up this superhero troupe, and an impediment to the storytelling.
Add to that a bunch of jumbled fight scenes that look like they were spat out of a food processor, a dodgy, cringe-inducing script, and Turner struggling with an American accent, and you have a mess that not even a talented acting triumvirate like Jennifer Lawrence, James McAvoy, and Michael Fassbender can save.
Dark Phoenix feels like it was created to put the X-Men out of their misery
The Phoenix Saga is the most recognizable X-Men arc, sitting in the pantheon of superhero stories alongside the death of Uncle Ben in Spider-Man and the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents in a Gotham City alley.
From its beginning in the 1980s comic books created by Chris Claremont and John Byrne, the saga has come to life in the 1990s animated series, teased in the X-men: Evolutions animated series, riffed on in the Wolverine and the X-Men animated series, and brought to the big screen in X-Men: The Last Stand. It was most recently teased in X-Men: Apocalypse, Dark Phoenix’s predecessor.
At this point, the story of the already formidable telepath and telekinetic mutant Jean Grey obtaining uncontrollable and immense power from a cosmic force is not going to take any X-Men fan by surprise. Dark Phoenix won’t surprise you if you’ve already seen Jean Grey turn into the Phoenix and then die multiple times.
Dark Phoenix does make attempts to tweak the story in a couple of favorable ways, at least.
The X-Men, helmed by Raven/Mystique (Lawrence) and Charles Xavier (McAvoy), have basically become America’s on-call superhero team. They — the team includes Storm (Alexandra Shipp), Cyclops (Tye Sheridan), Quicksilver (Evan Peters), Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee), and Beast (Nicholas Hoult) — have a special line to the president and first-responders when it comes to the most dire of situations. A specific mission launches the X-Men to space, where, of course, a cosmic force (which is not called the Phoenix in this movie) and Jean merge as one.
The original comic book version of the story also involves a space mission, but it characterizes the cosmic power as an entity known as the Phoenix Force. There’s a complex plot involving mind control and psychic dueling that eventually results in Jean Grey being deemed an intergalactic threat. A lot of this is cut or subbed out to make the story easier to understand. Those alterations also end up leaving parts of the story groundless.
Dark Phoenix’s lone point of intrigue comes from Raven wondering if Charles is maybe enjoying the X-Men’s fame and admiration the X-Men a little too much. Because they’re national heroes now, the X-Men have made the world better for all mutants, who are increasingly seen as good people.
Charles’s ultimate goal is for humans and mutants to co-exist peacefully, and having the X-Men save the world gets him one step closer to that vision. And Charles knows that one bad mutant will paint them all as terrorists, and that the flipside is that one or two or five good mutants can make all mutants seem good.
Raven doesn’t believe the X-Men shouldn’t be risking their lives for this vision, though. Watching the space mission, with Jean absorbing the full cosmic force and surviving in space when any other person would die, really emboldens Raven to voice her discontent.
Lawrence gives a spirited performance, surely someone told her ahead of time that this is the end of her contract. She’s tapped into Katniss Everdeen-levels of defiant, skeptical of Charles’s motives.
And Raven actually offers a nifty riff on Charles’s leadership: a man so focused on making the world a better place that he’s lost sight of the human lives, human lives that are supposed to be his family and friends, at risk.
But this thoughtfulness goes sideways and scampers out the door at around 20 minutes into the movie, when Jean can no longer contain the power that she’s absorbed. All the attention then shifts toward that.
It’s at this point that Dark Phoenix turns into something resembling a 5-year-old smashing around their favorite action figures. Jean makes a few things crash and boom. The X-Men wonder if she’s bad. She’s bad, they all decide. They realize they have to stop her. Magneto, their enemy who is in the midst of building a mutant commune somewhere, even agrees that she needs to be stopped.
Also on Jean’s trail is a shape-shifting alien race, led by a creature named Vuk (Chastain). Vuk and her fellow aliens believe that Jean can bring their planet back to life. It’s not entirely clear how this group of aliens know that Jean is capable of creation when all that her cosmic force has shown is destruction. Nor is it clear who Jessica Chastain wronged to be forced into this movie and not in something better, like Captain Marvel.
Nevertheless, Chastain is here with a personality that is just platinum-bleached hair and a stiff robot voice. It’s a sad situation for all involved.
The struggle between Xavier’s mutants and Vuk’s posse leads to some goofy spectacles in which Charles puts a couple fingers to his head to signal that he’s doing telepathy. Magneto bends his legs and looks like he’s pulling an imaginary jump rope taut to signal that he’s manipulating metal. And the rest X-Men zip around in two jumbled, chaotic fight scenes, zapping those aliens with lightning, teleporting them around the place, and smashing them with ruby red concussive optic beams.
Fans of the franchise may notice that super speed isn’t involved in these fights, but that’s not an oversight on my end: Quicksilver is completely forgotten about after the first act of the movie. He’s injured, I guess? I have no idea.
The X-Men, who this movie is supposedly about, are really nothing more than their powers here, and when they’re not fighting, they may as well not matter.
Storm, a character with a rich history that involves being a worshipped as a weather-wielding goddess in Africa, is just around to tell us in a couple lines that, yes, Jean is bad. Cyclops, who will one day become the leader of the X-Men in the series’ canon, exists only to be sad because Jean is bad. Nightcrawler is blue and German and teleports; he concurs with Storm and Cyclops that Jean is bad in a German accent.
There is no explanation, not even from Vuk and the aliens who have been studying this force for a long time, of why Jean’s cosmic force cares about carnal pleasure or desire or anger or wrath or how it even knows human emotions, but it does.
Even Jean understands she’s the bad guy, but she goes around saying several times that she’s can’t control “it” — reminding us in case we forgot or get sidetracked.
Unlike the comic books and several better versions of this story (including the campy animated series), the movie doesn’t try to grapple with the saga’s larger ideas of women’s empowerment being seen as “hysterical” or humanity’s appetite for violence and punishment, nor is it particularly concerned with how this particular story could easily be an allegory for a family dealing with the repercussions of abuse and the violations of trust.
Instead, by just focusing on the light show and the powers (which really aren’t all that visually impressive), Dark Phoenix undercuts the biggest emotional moment of the story. Jean’s ultimate sacrifice at the end of the film (again, like every other iteration of this story) ultimately feels a little hollow without having forged any real connections with the other characters (save for human Eeyore, Cyclops).
At the beginning of the film, Lawrence’s Raven asks if it’s time for her “to move on” from the X-Men. She tries to reason with Hank (a.k.a. Beast), telling him that they could do something better. She thinks that maybe there’s more to life than going through fruitless missions. Dark Phoenix made me wish the people who made this movie would have taken that advice.