Talk about going out with a whimper. With Disney’s recent acquisition of Fox, Dark Phoenix marks the end of Fox’s run of (mostly) successful X-Men movies. Yes, technically The New Mutants is still scheduled for release next year, but it’s already had its release date pushed back multiple times, so we’ll see. But that’s beyond the point. For all intents and purposes, Dark Phoenix is the series’ culmination. And this is not the way you want to go out.
It’s not even so much that it’s a bad movie; it’s more so simply a pointless movie. The paper-thin plot that does exist starts with an X-Men rescue mission in space. The team saves the astronauts but not before Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) takes a blast from an unknown cosmic force. The huge increase in cosmic energy amplifies her powers while awakening a previously untapped darkness buried inside her mind. As Jean struggles to control her new powers, disaster and violence follow her everywhere she goes.
And that’s…pretty much it. There’s some other nonsense with the rest of the X-Men team, including a tragic event that was stupidly revealed in the trailer, draining it of all emotional weight. There’s the Jessica Chastain-led alien race, D’Bari, who have a history with the Phoenix Force and are tracking Jean in an effort to control her and, by extension, the Phoenix Force. But that entire storyline went nowhere and Jessica Chastain was completely wasted.
You would think that with so little time spent with the other characters that the movie would focus more on Jean’s story and her character development. But you would be wrong. Instead it flits back and forth between Jean and the other characters, never giving full weight to anybody. Any character development that happened in prior movies was stopped dead in its tracks like a Thwomp in Mario.
So we have no emotional investment in the supporting characters and the main character’s arc is woefully underexplained. That’s not exactly the recipe for an engaging movie. That being said, I don’t like being completely negative, and there is some good in Dark Phoenix. This won’t be what you would call an inspired list of positives, but we’ll take what we can get.
- Some of the fights kick serious ass (but other times are bogged down by atrocious CGI)
- Evan Peters as Quicksilver is a highlight of the movie (but sadly he’s barely in it, with only a handful of small, quick lines)
- Decent to good acting all around, though not quite what you would hope or expect from this crew of heavy hitters
- Not as much of a mess as Apocalypse
- Is definitely not X-Men Origins: Wolverine
If that’s all the good that can be said about Dark Phoenix, perhaps Erik Lehnsherr said it best himself, “You’re always sorry, Charles. And there’s always a speech. But nobody cares anymore.”
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