BEFORE: See, now I just knew that all roads would lead me here, but that's largely because I'd planned it that way. I really watched this one back in June, but it shared so many actors in common with this year's horror films - so did "New Mutants" but that failed to get released on time, for like the third time. So "Dark Phoenix" became a horror film (for my purposes) in addition to being a superhero film - hey, an evil entity from beyond our solar system takes over a hero's body, that's a sci-fi invasion film at least, bordering on horror, maybe? OK, so it's a bit of a stretch. I'm doing what I have to do to keep my chain going, and I've only got 10 films to go!
To be fair and give the film a second chance even, I also re-watched it on the plane ride back from Las Vegas. I re-watched "Avengers: Endgame" on the way there, and this on the way back. Plus the plane had the first four episodes from season 1 of "Arrested Development", so I may finish binging that show off Netflix during my down time in November.
I had a lot of choices with this linking - I could have linked from "Dark Places", or "The Scout's Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse" or others, but in the end, after switching things around a bit, Kodi Smit-McPhee carries over from "Alpha".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "X-Men: Apocalypse" (Movie #2,425)
THE PLOT: Jean Grey begins to develop incredible powers that corrupt her and turn her into a Dark Phoenix, forcing the X-Men to decide if the life of a team member is worth more than all of humanity.
AFTER: This is one of those cases where you have to wonder if this film was just doomed from the start, or was originally made with good intentions, only some bad story choices cauesd the court of public opinion to turn against it, and from then on there was no putting the monster back in the box. First off, this was always ever going to be the LAST X-Men movie in the Fox franchise, so a lot of actors' contracts were set to expire, then the rights to the characters were going to revert back to Marvel/Disney and THEN Disney ended up buying of all of Fox's film assets ANYWAY, so there was never going to be another sequel to "X-Men: First Class". (For the record, "Days of Future Past" was really like "X-Men: Second Class", "Apocalypse" would have been "Third Class", making "Dark Phoenix" essentially "Fourth Class". Seems about right.)
Next came the decision to adapt (for the second time) the 1980's "Dark Phoenix" storyline from the comic books, which seems like a bad idea from the get-go. Sure, it's a classic storyline, but how is it going to work as a movie? One of the original (in the comics, anyway) X-Men gets taken over by a cosmic force and becomes a villain, she battles the X-Men, she eats an entire planet of aliens (umm - wait, what?) and then she puts on a black corset and joins the Hellfire Club. OK, that last bit wasn't the influence of the Phoenix Force, I think it was a villain called Mastermind messing with her head. Or maybe she just wanted to get her freak on. (Alternate title for that storyline: Fifty Shades of Jean Grey)
Then (again, in the comics), she and the other X-Men were transported to another galaxy, home of the Shi'ar Empire, to put her on trial for killing all the people on that planet, which she did because it, umm, made her feel good? See, there are massive, massive story problems here, with a good character doing bad things, and then somehow it's just not her fault. But it should be, right? So in a rare moment of clarity she regains control and fires a conveniently placed laser gun at herself, committing cosmic suicide. YAY? OK, X-Men, justice has been served, you're free to go.
Only that wasn't the end of the story - it never is where comic book writers are concerned. Another writer's going to come along in 6 months or a year and bring that character back if he wants to - so another writer said, Wait, maybe Dark Phoenix wasn't Jean Grey after all, maybe Jean Grey "died" from the radiation in space while saving the shuttle astronauts, and the cosmic Phoenix force put her body in a cocoon to heal, and made a clone body that it could walk around in, pretending to be Jean Grey, and continuing to do its cosmic naughty things. Umm, OK, that's great, but then it doesn't really explain what part of the Phoenix saw the need to sacrifice itself, if Jean Grey wasn't in there at all.
Since then, it's been a series of ups and downs for Jean Grey, since she came back from the not-quite-dead. She went back to her on-again, off-again relationship with Cyclops, only then he sort of (psychically?) cheated on her, and then she died again. Then she came back from the dead again, I think with the help of the Phoenix power, only then Cyclops died. Since no comic book writer apparently knows enough about long-term relationships to get these two back together, that's just the way it's going to be. At this exact moment in the comics, Cyclops is alive again, but Jean and most of the X-Men are in a simulacrum alternate reality created by Legion (or maybe the character X-Man, it's hard to tell.) So maybe these crazy kids are just never going to get back on the same page, if they're not alive or around at the same time. C'est la vie.
Anyway, it's a bad idea to adapt this 80's storyline into a movie - they even tried it once before, with "X-Men: The Last Stand", the worst X-Men movie ever, thanks to director Brett Ratner's help. In that film, the Phoenix force resurrected Jean Grey. who had died in the previous film, though it somehow also killed Cyclops in the process (see what I mean about these two?) and then it forced her to destroy her childhood home, and then spend the rest of the movie standing still and staring blankly off into space. Plus there were a bunch of other mutants introduced in that film that were then given exactly nothing to do.
So Mistake #1 was choosing to re-do the Phoenix storyline, which also involves creating a partial re-make of "The Last Stand". Mistake #2 was removing the word "X-Men" from the title of the film - how are viewers supposed to know this is part of the X-Men franchise without that? Who's Dark Phoenix, for that matter, who's Phoenix? It's a lot to take in with the title, there's no explanation available, no way to even connect this film with the very popular X-franchise. This whole thing is starting to seem like a series of badly-made decisions, each one worse than the last. Then came the delays in the release date - this film completed shooting in October 2017, and in March 2018 the release date was changed to November, and then to February 2019. That's not usually a good sign. Re-shoots were needed, and it seems the whole third act of the film wasn't working and needed to be changed. More bad signs, and then a final delay in the release date from February to June of 2019.
By this time, it's likely that the well had been poisoned, since we all knew that the story didn't work at one time, that re-shoots were needed, and the release date was pushed back three times - why, because the film is just that GOOD? Unlikely. And then I have to go and see it, with all that in mind, and TRY to judge it objectively? Yeah, good luck with that.
Now that I've seen it, it does really feel like one bad decision after another, at least from a story perspective. Killing off characters isn't something that should be done lightly, but here it feels like they needed to get rid of the actors who definitely, under no circumstances, wanted to make another one of these films. (Hint - the ones who got really super-famous...) Then there are so many story elements that go absolutely nowhere - Magneto has an island called Genosha where he runs a community for mutants that don't fit in with human society, and that's a MAJOR story element in some X-Men books, only here it's just a "Eh, whatever" throwaway side-plot.
They go back to when Jean Grey's psychic powers manifested themselves, which should have been a defining moment in her life. Her parents died, she was brought to the attention of Charles Xavier, he took her in as his first student and helped her use her powers responsibly and effectively. Only then later the movie tells us that's not what happened at all. She did a bad thing when she was just a small girl, and instead of helping her deal with that, he put up walls and barriers and I think even a spare bathroom in her brain, so that she'd never have to deal with the truth. Sure, stamp it down, there's absolutely no way that decision could come back and haunt you someday. Sweep it all under the carpet, if you can't see it, it's not there. What could possibly go wrong?
This has always been the problem with the X-Men movies, lack of consistency. Wolverine is good, no wait, he's out of control, and that's bad. He can heal himself, only now he can't. Magneto is the most evil villain in the world. No, wait, he's Charles Xavier's friend and he helped form the original X-Men. Wait, Apocalypse is here and Magneto is now evil again. Make up your god damned minds! Mystique is also a very bad mutant. No, wait, she was Xavier's childhood friend and now she's on the side of the good guys. (It gets even worse in the comic books, good luck figuring out if Sabretooth is a hero or a villain this week. Same goes for Juggernaut, White Queen, Pyro and Angel/Archangel.)
But even so, getting all the X-Men together to fight Dark Phoenix is still a bad, bad idea. At least in "Civil War" the Avengers were split into two factions, both of which thought they were right. As Phoenix, Jean wants to do bad things BECAUSE they are bad. She wants to hurt people because it "feels good". How am I supposed to like or even understand that character? Who am I rooting for here? OK, so they gave me a bunch of aliens who are trying to get hold of the Phoenix power, but it's a case of too little, too late.
Plus, the whole nature of these aliens (D'Bari?) doesn't make any sense. The Phoenix force, at some point, destroyed their whole planet. OK, then how did these 10 or 20 D'Bari survive? Were they off-planet at the time? It's unclear. Then they were supposedly hovering in the background while the Phoenix force played a game of spin-the-bottle with the space shuttle. If they want the Phoenix force, why didn't they take control of it then? They had plenty of time before the X-Men showed up. Oh, wait, for some reason Jean Grey was the perfect vessel to absorb the Phoenix force - why? Was this another one of her mutant powers, the ability to absorb space clouds that are really fire-based aliens? If there's something unique or special about Jean Grey that allowed her to host this alien force, then why did the D'Bari later try to take it from her? You just said, she's the only one that can host it, so why try to get it out of her and into one of the D'Bari? Things are just not adding up here.
The latest news (again, I'm pretending to have written this in June) is that Disney has bought up most of the assets of Fox, except for the highly profitable propaganda division, so the rights to the X-Men are now back with Disney/Marvel, leading to the possibility that the X-Men universe could merge with the Avengers one (MCU) the way that the Spider-Man franchise eventually did. But it's not going to happen overnight - they still have the "New Mutants" X-Men spin-off that was supposed to be released in spring 2019 that got delayed until October 2019 that then got delayed until 2020. And it may be years before they decide that it's time to reboot and recast the X-Men.
UPDATE: Then at Comic-Con in July, Marvel unveiled its slate of movies and TV shows for the next couple of years, called "Phase IV", which includes the sequels to "Doctor Strange", another "Thor" film, new films "Blade", "The Eternals", "Shang-Chi", and a bunch of TV shows centered on Hawkeye, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and the Vision and Scarlet Witch. So the X-Men are, by not being mentioned, clearly on the back burner. And if you're at all upset that Marvel's put your favorite character in limbo while they promote the characters that THEY want to promote, then welcome to my world. That's what it means to be a comic-book fan - while you wait for Marvel to make a new comic book or movie with your personal favorites, you may have to endure a period where the company doesn't care about YOUR needs, they've got an entirely different agenda. And who can say what's driving them - demographics, analysis of the marketplace, or maybe throwing a dart at a board? Because often it doesn't seem like they're out to tell the BEST stories that they can. I don't give a damn about the Eternals, just like I didn't care about the Inhumans, but they made the Inhumans into a TV show anyway, and it was terrible. You just have to wait for them to fail with their new terrible characters before they (eventually) get back to telling decent stories with the older and better ones. Everything in the proper time period, we hope.
NITPICK POINT: We're STILL not going to address the fact that in the comic books, Mystique is Nightcrawler's mother? It totally works with the timeline if you allow that she began a relationship with Azazel (who could also teleport) shortly after "X-Men: First Class", and gave birth a few years later. Well, OK, it doesn't really work because "First Class" was set in 1962, and "Dark Phoenix" is set in 1992, and Nightcrawler's not close to 30 years old, but NONE of the characters have aged properly through the decades. Still, with Mystique and Nightcrawler on the same frickin' team, why isn't their relationship mentioned in any way?
Also starring James McAvoy (last heard in "Sherlock Gnomes"), Michael Fassbender (last seen in "Alien: Covenant"), Jennifer Lawrence (last seen in "Mother!"), Nicholas Hoult (last seen in "Dark Places"), Tye Sheridan (ditto), Sophie Turner (last seen in "X-Men: Apocalypse"), Alexandra Shipp (last seen in "Deadpool 2"), Evan Peters (ditto), Jessica Chastain (last seen in "Life Itself"), Ato Essandoh (last seen in "Nights in Rodanthe"), Kota Eberhardt, Andrew Stehlin (last seen in "Ghost in the Shell"), Scott Shepherd (last seen in "Norman"), Hannah Anderson, Brian D'Arcy James (last seen in "Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House"), Lamar Johnson (last seen in "The Hate U Give"), Halston Sage (last seen in "Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse"), Summer Fontana, with a cameo from Chris Claremont (last seen in "X-Men: Days of Future Past")
RATING: 6 out of 10 weaponized hair braids (seriously?)
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