X-men: Dark Phoenix - A Review
Originally Posted: Jun 5, 2019
“We could’ve had it all
Rolling in the deep
You had my heart inside your hand
But you played it with a beating”
-Adele “Rolling in the Deep
I don’t believe in kicking someone when they are down. It’s not fun, it doesn’t make me feel any better about my life, and I don’t get any sort of satisfaction. But I will kick the shit out of this movie.
X-men: Dark Phoenix was a production marred in trouble from the start. The previous film X-men: Apocolypse did not do so well, with a Rotten Tomatoes score of just 47% from critics and 65% from fans. It seems like people will be divided on this movie as well. The recent Fox/Disney merger means that this will probably be the last of the on-screen depictions of anyone called a mutant after 2020’s New Mutants movie. It’s bittersweet. On one hand, I’m grateful that these movies are finally coming to an end, (they were low quality, with unintelligible plotlines and poor character development) but I’m sorry to see it end like this. Worse than being a bad movie, the movie is just boring. It’s nothing. It’s neither entertaining nor devoid of action. It’s characters that you know and love and care nothing about. It’s not engaging or endearing. The movie just is.
Growing up in the early 90’s I loved the X-men. I watched the television show religiously and used my chore money to buy comics. While I wasn’t always 100% on the storyline or the time jumps, I was still very invested in the characters. The X-men were representative of how I felt, weird, misunderstood, and physically alienated from my peers. They were outsiders, who despite not being accepted by society, did what was right. When it was announced that there would be movies I was stoked, I was there opening day and to me the first X-men movie was great. Then the inevitable sequels happened and the quality varied. It never felt like anyone got the characters just right. Bryan Singer, the director of X-men, X2, and Apocolypse, put in his own experience of being a queer man as an allegory for being a mutant and it worked. Being a mutant is much like being queer in that it’s something you’re born with, many try to suppress it to fit in and face rejection when they cannot. But the other films were not as clever. They rejected some of the best elements of the comic book and focused heavily on a core group of characters, mostly Wolverine. The personal lives of the rest of the team are criminally underwritten and by this, the twelfth movie in the franchise, I care less about them now than in the first movie.
The ensemble cast of the X-men is what makes the series. Seeing the way that these often broken, often scarred characters learn to love and care for each other, through conflicts and affairs, is part of the appeal. Dark Phoenix skips over all of those things and plants the watcher right in the middle of relationships. Jean and Scott and horny teens who are all over each other which feels jarring. A fan of the films knows their relationship history but there is no chemistry between them in the movie. Storm, in the most offensive scene, is relegated to dispensing ice at a party. Storm, a character in the comics who has been first or second in command of the team for decades and one of the worlds most powerful mutants, is wasted, again. Storm has always been wasted in this franchise. Given little to do, little to contribute, little dialogue and even littlier character development. I think the most interesting thing that Storm has done in any of the 12 films was kiss Wolverine in Days of Future Past, other than that she’s light-skinned scenery. It’s frustrating to watch as a fan of Storm. When I was a kid there were only 3 black women I saw on TV, Storm in X-men the animated series, Whoopi Goldberg in Star Trek and Aisha in the Power Rangers, so she means a lot to me. I watched these films, carrying disappointment after disappointment, at Storm’s depiction. In this final film, all attempts to make her seem like an equal member of the team are abandoned.
The movie can ultimately be summed up similarly; disappointing. It’s during the 3rd act that you understand the nature of the reshoots that had to take place last year, the movie parallels Captain Marvel almost beat by beat. The bad guys are a shape-shifting group of aliens looking for a power source that will help them find a new home, chillingly led by Jessica Chastain, in a role I would have liked to see in a better movie. If it’s possible to feel awkward for a movie, I feel it. The villans are stripped of their backstory and there is no impetus to sympathize or malign them. At a certain point, it’s revealed that Chastain can absorb the powers of the Phoenix which negates the tension of the first half of the movie.
By the end of the movie, I was praying for release or hoping for a fun cameo to lift the mood during the noticeable absence of Quicksilver. There wasn’t even a Stan Lee easter egg that I could find, which is the ultimate sign of a film that doesn’t understand its roots. I didn’t care for the characters, good or bad and the stakes were non-existent. Ultimately, this movie left me depressed. I was grateful for it to be over, like watching a beloved pet be put to sleep after suffering from a lengthy illness. I just wanted it to end hoping in a few years time when the Marvel/Disney/Fox merger is complete, Kevin Feige can reboot it with purpose, direction, and care. Next year is the final X-men franchise addition, New Mutants, which also is having its own set of problems. I can only hope that the powers-who-be can take a good hard look at what the X-men are really about and make the appropriate course corrections. I have no doubt that in better hands this material could make incredible movies. To paraphrase a scene in the movie, a pen is just a tool, it can be used to help or hurt, it all depends on who is holding it. I hope the next person who holds the X-men’s pen is here to help, and not hurt.
