When I walked into this movie I was not anticipating it being finale to this generation of X-Men movies and I did not figure out that it was until the film was just about over. Aside from my not following closely any of the press regarding this series I think a major reason why I had this experience seeing Dark Phoenix is because the movie really has no consistent idea of what it wants to be.
There are moments when Dark Phoenix attempts to shock us with Avengers: Endgame style character deaths and then their are moments where it tries to act self-aware with its tongue held firmly in cheek. At the beginning of the movie as the X-Men are about to undergo a mission in space one of them quips, “So we are doing space missions now?” as if the filmmakers are telling us, “Yeah we know this is a mindless action movie; we know what it is we are peddling.” But the tongue never stays in cheek long enough before we are being subjected to more melodrama.
During the mission in space Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) is hit with a mass of radiation that makes her stronger and uninhibited. This becomes a problem for the X-Men and soon Jean leaves them and joins a bad crowd of aliens who are secretly seeking the power that is inside her.
The motivation of the alien bad guys in Dark Phoenix is extremely foggy and unclear and they are one of the most frustrating aspects of this movie. In Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame we have a main villain who had been teased throughout the series in previous films and his motivation and intentions are laid out extremely clearly and consistently throughout.
In Dark Phoenix, the X-Men series’s own attempt at an outing; however, the villains are a group of aliens who are never clearly identified, who were never seen before in a previous installment, and whose reasons for why they are doing what they are doing is never adequately or logically explained.
All we know is that the radiation that penetrated Jean Grey was a universe creating spark that destroyed the aliens’ homeworld and ever since they have been tracking it down in the hopes of someday controlling it.
Why, though? What possessed the aliens into thinking that they could control it or that it was something that could be used at all? And why do they intend to use it to wipe out all life on planet Earth? Everything about these people is nonsensical and I get the feeling that the audience is expected to be acquainted with the comics and source material to even understand the adaptation. Which, to me, is an example of bad screenwriting.
As a standalone X-Men movie Dark Phoenix is sadly pretty average ranking in quality with the likes of X-Men 3 and X-Men: Apocalypse; lacking the depth or scale of say Logan or Days of Future Past. But as a finale that is supposed to mark the end of an era of X-Men cinematic stories Dark Phoenix is an incredible disappointment. It does not have any of the scale or thoughtfulness of the more recent Avengers outing which is a damned shame considering that it was usually the X-Men films that had more thoughtfulness and depth compared to the overall Avengers MCU series.
As the superhero genre becomes more assembly line in its yearly production methods and as the quality of the films begin to dip it becomes apparent to me that in a few years the genre is going to end up on a hiatus. It is going to go the way of the western: popular once; but now no longer in high demand. And I think disappointments like Dark Phoenix is going to play a role in this.
Maybe it is time for Hollywood to consider making some more westerns.
2 Stars
Perspectives on Film 