Probably nothing is more important to mention about this movie than the fact that it’s becoming increasingly obvious that Sophie Turner starred in this role in order to slap Conan O’Brien in the face:
The entire marketing campaign leading up to its wide release would suggest that Dark Phoenix is a trainwreck, a remake of a really bad movie made by the SAME DIRECTOR 13 years ago that no one was expecting or asking for, that got shoved back four months from a quiet, sleepy release date in November of 2018 just before Oscar season with no real competitors because of a need for reshoots on account of the script was bad and then because it apparently so generic that it copied entire scenes from other superhero movies put out at the same time by its parent company (there’s another insane element to the delay of this film’s release where James Cameron kicked it into the jaws of summer in order to protect his project Alita that I find so cruel it’s almost funny). Director Kinberg admits that the end of Dark Phoenix looked a whole lot like Captain America: Winter Soldier in the way that the mutants had were pitted against one another, but also like Captain Marvel in the way the space scenes (and in the maybe clever future connection to the Marvel universe, but equally just lazily written shapeshifting Skrull-esque villains), but also a lot like Infinity Wars with her mini Snappening, which just leads you to wonder if they were conscious of how much their film looked like it had stayed up for an all-nighter and then just cribbed off of every Marvel movie made in the last eighteen months, why didn’t they change it?
The Hollywood Reporter also talks about how this film was never meant to be a summer blockbuster, but doesn’t mention it in the form of autopsy or eulogy for the film that could have been. It talks about Dark Phoenix as a film with humbler stakes, smaller scope, a corrective to the disaster of Apocalypse. Friend says that Apocalypse clumsily tried to phoenix Jean Gray in the final boss fight, which everyone promptly forgets in order to make this movie even possible. Matthew Vaughn, who’s been making the rounds for some of his future projects while the shitstorm of criticism for this film really ramps up, pulled back the curtain a little on the reboot in order to show what could have been, his alternate story boarding of the franchise, his desire to recast Wolverine for a younger actor, quaint notes for an innocent time before X-Men had crossed the point of no return.
I can see the merits of both sides on the film. Much, much smarter people embrace the (un)canny legacy of the Dark Phoenix storyline and its retelling as an icon of female empowerment. At the same time, the ensemble cast feels at once past due and also distractingly new. Turner is only in her second film in the franchise, whereas Lawrence, Fassbender, and MacAvoy have been in three or four, right? The effect is one of the unrequited familiarity of a distant relative comforting the orphaned child of the recently deceased at a funeral. Jean and Cyclops have a budding romance, but we’ve only really seen their chemistry over the span of about fifteen or twenty minutes before he–rudely–asks her to “Come back to me” like a wayward dog. Mystique gamely chides Prof X, “the women are always saving the men around here,” which leads one to momentarily wonder if that’s actually true or just what an X-Woman is supposed to say in 2019 to get a rise out of the Sad Puppies who are going to shitpost about this movie no matter what because it dares to tell a story from a woman’s perspective.
Most of my issues with the film are a lot pettier than the content or the sulfurous blotch this leaves on the franchise for the foreseeable future until enough time has passed and Disney can resurrect a new cast of young actors for an inevitable third crack at the Phoenix story at some point in the next two or three years. There’s a weirdly large amount of dialogue devoted to whether or not someone can read your mind: “I can’t read her mind now,” “turn up the power on my mind reading machine,” “she’s blocking my ability to read her mind,” “I didn’t need to read your mind,” “you’re not the only one who can read minds,” you get the point. And for a movie whose original intentions were to dramatize teenage angst about being queer, the sexuality of these stories is pretty hetero. Practically every man and woman is paired off. At times it seems like maybe there are too few women to fight over, so dudes magnanimously share one instead. Never thought something could make you nostalgic for anything Bryan Singer has ever done, but… no still no.
Rest assured this will thankfully not hurt Turner’s chances at staring in other movies. If anything, Vanity Fair says, this is probably proof positive that she’s safely laid claim to her throne as a (questionably) bankable movie star. But in terms of a final end to the X-Men franchise’s decades-long run, it’s not really a worthy contender, nor did it ever bill itself to be so. I remember watching the first X-Men movies with my dad when I was a kid. They were the kind of film that my brothers refused to see with us which made them movies that we saw together when he had time off from work or I was back from college. This franchise is actually the only one that I associate with my dad, because by the time that Marvel was in phase 2 or 3, I was long gone from my folks’ place and we were no longer synchronized as far as movies go. Watching this with my dad was a bittersweet end of an era, but not altogether unpleasant. It didn’t have the epic finality of other superhero phases, but it never really claimed to seek that level of fame. It’s strange to think about the random steps that end up defining the movies that make up your childhood, so I know that not everyone will enjoy this one, but if you’re of a certain age, and you remember your dad taking you to those first few films with Hallie Berry with all the cheesy special effects, it might bring some solace to return to this film to say goodbye.
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