Dark Phoenix: The Franchise is Already Dead!

I’ve done it I think I’ve seen the worst movie ever made! And that’s not hyperbole. Dark Phoenix was a complete shit show. I’ve never been a huge fan of any of the x-men movies aside from Logan, which kind of isn’t your typical x-men movie. But I kind of liked X-Men: First Class. The younger cast was interesting, and the story was compelling and it set up for a good franchise. But the movies kept getting worse finally culminating in the last big fuck you that is Dark Phoenix.

Dark Phoenix serves as the end of the X-Men franchise as we’ve come to know it. This will be the last film made outside of the umbrella of the Disney corporate machine, which is probably a good thing. It definitely feels like the film was written with that sentiment in mind because there didn’t seem to be too much effort put into it. The movie just assumes you’ve seen the other films in the series. They don’t bother with names or character development you’re just supposed to know who they are. I don’t necessarily mind that if the plot is good but this movie forgoes both. It was like watching a little kid play with his X-Men action figures and smashing the toys together.

Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) is a telekinetic and canonically one of the most powerful mutants in the x-men universe. In the movie she gets hit by a cosmic power when the team is tasked with rescuing astronauts from space; really the only bit that follows the comic even remotely. Jean survives but the entity causes her to go into uncontrollable fits of rage. Then some random aliens show up because they want to use the power inside Jean to revive their race or something. Nothing is explained and none of it really matters. The movie just jumps from set piece to set piece with no real urgency or logic. There is one point when Quicksilver (Evan Peters) just disappears from the film completely only to reappear at the very end to admonish a student for running in the halls by saying “slow down…safety first” before smirking. Get it? Quicksilver is known for super speed but he is telling the kid to slow down. GET IT? Thinking back, I guess he was hurt so badly in a fight and had to recover but that was never explicitly mentioned. The movie is full of these types of moments when things happen and me as the viewer in hindsight will try to make it make sense. It’s just bad and boring story telling. The dark phoenix story line has a lot of potential but the writer probably didn’t bother reading past the first few panels of the comic.

The movie also has a solid cast with James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender, and Jessica Chastain but none of them seemed to care. For the original cast of X-Men: First Class it felt like the actors were doing the movie out of a contractual obligation. All the scenes felt like something out of an SNL skit; there was a lot of hokey delivery for an already poorly written script. This was especially true for any scene between Jean and Scott Summer (Tye Sheridan). Sheridan and Turner have zero chemistry; every time the two of them were on screen together I cringed internally. That cringy feeling just kind of lingered through the entire movie as it dragged its corpse to the climax.

TL; DR. Hopefully this Phoenix will never rise again. Not even going to justify it with a score.