Dark Phoenix

*WARNING SPOILERS*

Seen 6/13/19

Well Fox's last X-men entry is finally here. It's been a crazy run of movies; some great, some not so great (here's looking at you X-Men origins). When Fox started this new run of "prequels" I was pretty on board. X-men First Class started the run really strong and to this day it is in my top 3 of all the X-men movies. However I felt the quality of these prequels have gone down hill movie after movie and Dark Phoenix is definitely the bottom of that hill. 

The movie starts off with a flash back to when Jean Grey first gets her powers, basic scene of tragedy and loss. Then goes to a scene of a really encouraging Charles Xavier talking to young Jean. That was the best part of the movie, reminding the audience that James McAvoy is one of the best actors out there right now. 

The rest of the movie from there on out was just a snooze fest with so many problems.

If you’ve read any other of my posts you should know by now that I enjoy when a movies gives me characters to care about. I think character arcs, relationships and just the overall development of a character is super important. This movie does not deliver on any of that. Every single character in the movie feels like they have no purpose.  Then there are the characters that just seemed under used. A character like Magneto, doesn’t get much screen time, barely shows off his powers and overall seems just forced in to the movie. There is a moment towards the end of the movie where Magneto goes from a villain role to a hero role out based off a throw away line of dialogue and it just seemed really odd. Then of course Jennifer Lawrence had another “phone in” performance as Mystique. You could tell she just did not care to do that role, which is a shame because Jennifer Lawrence has shown she can be a great actress (go watch Silver Linings Playbook if you don’t believe me). 

The dialogue of the movie was a mixture of several bad elements. Some of the dialogue was predictable and cliché, things are said like “ I can’t fix you because you’re not broken”. Then there are just the cringe lines of dialogue like Cyclops saying to Jean “ Come back to me, remember you said you would always come back to me” when trying to reason with her. Overall the dialogue was just lazy and bad and definitely didn’t help make this movie any better.  

Then there is the story of the movie. I honestly couldn’t really even tell you what the main story of the movie was. It seems like it was supposed to be a Jean Grey story but everything is so jumbled and its just not solid at all. Jean gets the Phoenix Force (which its not even call it that in the movie) in the first 15 minutes and then Jean kind of just struggles to understand what is happening to her. She does a couple of bad things and then sacrifices herself at the end of the movie. To me it wasn’t enough to justify the title of “Dark Phoenix”, there wasn’t anything “dark” about this movie other than the action scenes.

Speaking of which, the action pieces in the movie were O.K at best. Again some of the scenes were just dark, some of the scenes were too chaotic to understand what was going on, and then some of the scenes just seemed pointless. There was one cool scene, towards the end, where Storm uses her lighting ability to take out some of the bad guys ( which were these random, not really explained, aliens) and little moments like that were scattered through out the whole end action piece.  However it was not enough to be great.

Overall I was super underwhelmed by this movie. For the most part it was just boring. I was glad that I have the AMC A-list and could see this as one of my movies for the week and didn’t have to spend actual money on it. As always I think people should see it and make their own opinion. However, if you are thinking of seeing this one in theaters I would suggest saving your money and waiting to watch it when its on a streaming site. Now that Disney owns 20th Century Fox I would bet this movie will be on Disney+ when it does come out on digital.