Dark Phoenix review: the X-Men deserved a better ending - Polygon

Just before Team Magneto and Team Professor X duke it out in the streets of New York, both factions pursuing the Phoenix-empowered Jean Grey, Xavier begs his old friend to call off the hunt. Fighting won’t solve anything. Blood doesn’t need to be spilled. Mutants need to come together, for the future’s sake. It’s a classic X-Men movie reprise, to which Magneto delivers a frank response.

“There’s always a speech ... and nobody cares.”

He said it, not me.

Dark Phoenix is yet another speech. It’s less a disaster, as word of reshoots and calendar-hopping signaled to devotees, than a let down. Pegged in the post-Avengers: Endgame weeks as the “final battle” of 20th Century Fox’s X-men franchise, the film brings Xavier and his band of crime-fighting mutants to their bleakest moment, dealing with trauma inflicted on one of their own by one of their own. Secrets are unraveled, foes become allies in showdowns between friends, and a series known in the last decade for colorful, comic book camp takes a psychological turn that would shatter expectations if the characters contained even an ounce of depth beyond their genes. In the end, a story about treating “others” as people can’t find a human element for its core characters, 12 movies in.

[Ed. note: the following contains light plot spoilers for Dark Phoenix]

From writer-director Simon Kinberg (who takes another crack at the Phoenix saga after adapting it for 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand), Dark Phoenix barely acknowledges the existence of X-Men: Apocalypse as it jumps ahead to the year 1992, a time when mutants and the powerless are living in harmony and the X-Men are celebrated as heroes. So much so that when a nasty space cloud threatens NASA’s Endeavor mission, the president himself rings Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) on the Oval Office X-Phone to request the team’s assistance. Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) questions the professor’s judgment: At what point is launching a bunch of twenty-somethings into space child endangerment? Xavier brushes off the condescension: Helping the un-mutated is the only way to find acceptance.

Dark Phoenix tugs at these existential questions in a way the movies haven’t since First Class, and, in the space-set rescue mission that kicks off the movie, mines true spectacle from the inquisition. Mystique knows this is wrong, but she caves, allowing Nightcrawler to jump aboard the ship, Quicksilver to gather the astronauts, Cyclops to patch up the hull of the shuttle (with an energy beam periscope!), and Jean Grey to eventually sacrifice herself to keep the crafts from rupturing under the bombardment of a nasty space cloud. The scene is dangerous, and makes Mystique’s case without endlessly pontificating on the X-Men’s core metaphor. But for most of the movie, we get just that.

There’s always a speech ... and nobody cares.

We experience most of Dark Phoenix through the eyes of a transformed Jean. Through Kinberg’s lens, the alien entity wrapped around the telepath’s genetic makeup becomes a form of empowerment. Phoenix Jean knows what she wants: alcohol, sex, and for Charles Xavier to get out of her goddamn head. The gender politics are messy, but intriguing. There’s enough innuendo in the movie that one could read Jean’s awakening as a carnal evolution that the men in her life aren’t comfortable with. Jean worries about hurting people she loves, then hurts people she loves. Charles doesn’t handle himself well when confronted by his overbearing relationship with his foster student. The movie morphs into chamber drama as the professor drinks his 18th whiskey in a two-hour movie. On-the-nose dialogue and clunky action plotting rip the promising, existential exoskeleton right out from under the movie’s skin. The end credits roll over a husk of what could have been.

dark phoenix - x-men cast sophie turner and jessica chastain

The highs of Dark Phoenix, and pretty much every X-Men movie, come from the cast, who bend overwrought material to their will. Sophie Turner and Michael Fassbender, technically playing a 62-year-old Magneto, spend a large chunk of the movie hand-gesturing at CG objects. They’re masters at it, with Fassbender delivering a top-five metal-crunching moment in the movie’s climactic set piece. McAvoy clearly tastes the meat of the movie’s opening 30 minutes, delivering those notorious X-speeches in the face of Nicholas Hoult’s Beast, who finally gets to lock horns with his leader.

Lawrence is clearly the “nobody” of Magneto’s battle-ready diss. She sleepwalks through a fourquel that could use her female energy to complicate Jean’s arc, and flexes a contractual superpower over the logic of when we would and wouldn’t see Mystique in full makeup. It’s one of the highest-profile DGAF performances of all time.

On the opposite end of the investment spectrum is Jessica Chastain, as a villain who wants Jean’s nasty space cloud energy so that she can [literally every villain plot], who’s stunted not by personal energy — she nails the Terminator run — but by a patchwork script and a commitment to Hal 9000 monotone. Chastain deserves Fassbender-level wickedness, or at least the Power Rangers wackiness of Oscar Issac in Apocalypse. Instead, her character Vux feels as faceless as her army of CG goons that Storm uses for target practice.

Thanks to the reboot-inverting Days of Future Past, Dark Phoenix wraps up a single continuity that began with 2000’s X-Men. At least on paper. The major flaw in this grimdark tale of identity and sacrifice is that no character carries with them the baggage of the previous installment. The X-verse doesn’t need to be an interwoven narrative like the MCU, but to invest in the Professor X/Magneto/Jean narrative is to understand how each of them got here (see: Logan). Dark Phoenix, which contains multiple flashbacks to scenes earlier in the movie, builds only on itself, when implicitly promising to culminate a 20-year journey.

But Magneto is wrong: people still care about the X-Men, but the people running the show didn’t care about them enough to make this moment momentous.

But he’s right about the speeches.

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