[Editorial] The Good And The Bad Of X-Men's Dark Phoenix

Title - Dark Phoenix
Studio - 20th Century Fox
Starring - James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Sophie Turner, Jessica Chastain, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, Alexandra Shipp, Tye Sheridan, Codie Smit-McPhee, Evan Peters
Writer - Simon Kinberg
Director - Simon Kinberg
Release - 7 June 2019

Having only brought in USD 33 million in the US, but doing considerably better overseas with a total of over USD 139 million worldwide as of this writing. The movie will barely breakeven by the time it ends its run.

I don't believe Fox greenlit this with the aim of ending the X-saga with a bang like Avengers: Endgame. And I believe with the impending sale of the studio at the time of the "greenlit", Fox gave a well-deserved chance to Simon Kinberg who has been with this franchise since 2006, with a hand in most of the X-movies including the Deadpool franchise and all the TV series like "Legion".

Hence, Dark Phoenix was always going to be just another episode in the franchise, and not the closure that many expected it to be.

While this is definitely one of the weakest X-movie, but it isn't as bad as what people like to make it out to be. It's easy to hate on this movie, and to write headlines like "Worse than The Last Stand". While movies are all subjective, I think that's a bit of a stretch. There were really good stuff in here among the bad. Let's take a look.


The Good:

- Acting for most of the cast, great. Especially James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender who owned these roles.

- Phoenix's hair moved on their own, a beautiful depiction from the comic books brought to life.

- Cyclops' worried look was like lifted from the comic book pages - great.

- The action sequences, including just posing with hands reaching out, were all very well shot. The first fight between X-Men and Jean Grey was fantastic, especially how Jean took out Quicksilver.

- Every conversation between Xavier and Jean, especially with young Jean where it ended with, "You're not broken." This is a testament to Kinberg's understanding of what the X-Men's core is all about.

- Every conversation between Magneto and Jean, especially that painful answer to, "Whose blood is that?"

- The psychological attack when Jean forced Xavier to walk up the stairs, turning Xavier's desire into a nightmare.

- The score by Hans Zimmer was hauntingly beautiful.

- This movie had the best Nightcrawler action scene!

- The final act with the train sequence was actually very good, showing all the good guys letting loose.


The Bad:

- No continuity between Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix, like the ending of Apocalypse where Jean already showed her Phoenix potential.

- D'Bari race was very vague. Apart from Jessica Chastain's Vuk, everyone else had no presence or motivation except for being fodder for fight scenes. With how invulnerable this race was, they could have easily killed many and not have to takeover the train in the third act.

- Re-shoots and re-writes were obvious. The D'Bari felt like a last-minute addition into the storyline. Jean sitting by the dumpster felt like a jump between scenes - There should be another scene where she destroyed the second community as reported in the news.

- When Storm was summoning lightning on the train, Alexandra Shipp should have taken notes from Fassbender and Sophie Turner in terms of acting.

- The studio continues to be afraid of putting in more notable mutants from the comic books, especially when this was the last movie and Magneto was leading a group of mutants which could easily be the Brotherhood on their own island, which could have been Genosha from the comics. Instead, we had a new character Ariki, who we didn't even care if he survived or not in the end.

- The studio still have no idea what to do with Quicksilver, once again writing him off very quickly.

- We didn't get a team-up battle between members of the X-Men with the bad guys. The fight scenes were all very separate.


Ultimately, the movie suffered from not having a strong enough or experienced enough director; and the troubling reports of Marvel stepping in after Disney bought Fox, forcing Kinberg to change the ending because it was too close to Captain Marvel. Because the report of the original script that was just out yesterday sounded better than what we got.