X-Men Dark Phoenix

X-MEN: DARK PHOENIX is meant to be the ENDGAME for Fox’s X-MEN franchise, as Disney/Marvel are poised to takeover. And what’s that gonna consist of? I just can’t stand the thought of another reboot. Please, just start over with new X-Men. We’re good with the 2 sets of X-Men core characters – young and mature, and up until this movie, they pretty much dovetailed nicely so that you didn’t have a problem with the stories or casting of the 2nd set of movies (First Class, Days of Future Past, Apocalypse) negating the stories of the 1st set of Movies (X-men, X-Men United and X-men Last Stand) but here’s where things go horribly wrong!

For some ungodly reason, Simon Kinberg, who makes his feature directing debut after years as a series writer and producer, decides to re-do the basic plot of Last Stand with Dark Phoenix, both featuring super powerful, telekinetic Jean Grey (first played by Famke Janssen, now by Game of Thrones’ Sophie Turner) losing control, going to the darkside and destroying her best buds and fellow X-Men.

One of the major problems with doing this is you’ve destroyed the very crucial triangle between Jean Grey, Cyclops and Wolverine, the latter of which, is not in this movie at all, and he shouldn’t be, if you want the movies to line up between these character’s younger selves and their older selves, which is when Wolverine reluctantly becomes an X-Men.

Also, the end of Last Stand leaves almost everyone dead; in Dark Phoenix, they kill just enough to ruin the future of the original movies… I could go on, but instead let’s talk about how cliched most of the dialogue was in this movie. I’ve never been pulled out of an X-men flick before thinking about trite dialogue. I think it really messed Turner up too, as I loved her deadpan deliver in Game of Thrones, but as Jean Grey, it was just dead.

I hate to be all gloom and doom, the opening sequence is good, the US is in favor of mutants at this point and call on them to go into space and assist some Astronauts whose ship is rendered useless after coming in contact with some mysterious solar flares. Mystique (JLaw) crisply directs the team into action, as Beast (Nicholas Hoult) pilots their ship, Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and Quicksilver (Evan Peters ) teleport to the NASA craft to retrieve the crew.  Jean was to hold off the entity but instead must absorbs the solar flare, resulting in her metamorphosis as The Phoenix.

And the very last scene is also good, as we all love the chemistry between Prof X (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender).

If Dark Phoenix were a standalone Summer Blockbuster, it would be good enough, but as a farewell to beloved characters and the actors who play them, it fell far short of the bar set by Marvel’s Endgame.

T&T the Large Association of Movie Blogs (aka the LAMb) rating: 2 outta 5