‘Dark Phoenix’ Review: X-Men Franchise Burns Out With $200 Million Misfire That

[Final Dread, the Unquiet Earth, Ghostland, Armageddon]

‘Dark Phoenix’ Review: X-Men Franchise Burns Out With $200 Million Misfire That Has No Reason to Exist
Indiewire   
David Ehrlich
IndiewireJune 5, 2019

If “Dark Phoenix” feels like the nadir of 21st century blockbuster cinema, that’s not because it’s the worst film of its kind — hell, it’s not even the worst installment of its franchise — but rather because it might be the only $200 million tentpole that has no evident reason to exist. The movie industry is sustained by a silent contract between Hollywood and its audience, which stipulates studios and ticket buyers will both spend too much of their money to sit together in a room so dark that no one can see the line that separates art from commerce. The brazen needlessness of the twelfth film in the “X-Men” saga is nothing less (and nothing more) than a direct breach of that contract; it’s like watching a superhero movie with the lights on.

“Dark Phoenix” isn’t the first event-free event movie of the mega-franchise era, but this one is different — it’s a perfect storm of pointlessness. Not only does the movie fumble the baton pass between generations and fail to advance the series’ overarching story in any meaningful way, it also hardly seems to try. Not only does it botch the source material’s signature narrative arc, it also does everything in its power to flatten it out. Not only does it waste an excellent cast on a script that reduces all of its characters to basic constructs, it also puts them at the mercy of a first-time director who doesn’t even know how to make them look cool.

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Without question, however, the most damning thing about “Dark Phoenix” is that it feels like it’s exactly the film that 21st Century Fox (RIP) had in mind when they hired franchise screenwriter Simon Kinberg to step behind the camera: safe, insubstantial, and skirting the surface of powerful ideas that even the kid-friendly animated series was unafraid to tackle. Diluted blockbusters are a dime a dozen these days, and this one at least has the decency to clock in at less than two hours, but there’s something especially grim and epochal about watching an undead franchise try to force its way through a story that hinges on the prospect of resurrection.


“Dark Phoenix” starts with death, and it’s the first of many scenes that have the bad luck of being very similar to moments from other, better superhero movies from earlier this year. It’s 1975, and a young redheaded girl named Jean Grey is sitting in the backseat of her parents’ car and unconsciously changing the radio station with her psychic abilities (enjoy those two bars from “Werewolves of London,” because it’s all downhill from there). Faster than you can “Shazam!,” little Jean comes face to face with her powers and causes the fatal accident that will haunt her as an adult. As tiresome as it is to see yet another film that opens with a car wreck, Kinberg and his stunt/effects teams deserve credit for staging a crash that’s tactile without being indulgent, and scarring enough to shadow the rest of the plot.

When the action jumps forward to 1992, Jean (once again played by Queen in the North, Sophie Turner) has become one of the most dependable upperclassmen at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, where she continues to assist the academy’s eponymous headmaster (James McAvoy) in his lifelong campaign to establish a lasting harmony between powerful mutants and the masses who fear them. Things are going well! The X-Men have saved the world enough times for the public to see them as more of a necessity than a threat — the President even has a cute little “X” phone in the Oval Office — though Charles acknowledges that his kind are only “one bad day away from being the enemy again.” (“Dark Phoenix” broaches the historical idea of marginalized people being granted conditional privileges, but when that “bad day” eventually comes all conversation of internment camps is shunted to the deepest corners of the background.)

On a personal level, Jean also appears to be in a good place. For one thing, she’s growing closer to Scott Summers (Tye Sheridan), whose perpetual eye-laser burns extra hot for her; these two attractive twentysomethings don’t appear to have much in common beyond a big house and good cheekbones, but Kinberg’s script assumes that most people have seen enough of these movies to leave it at that. For another thing, Charles has used his cerebral superpowers to “scaffold” Jean’s broken psyche together, protecting her from the memory (or even the basic knowledge) of what she did to her parents as a child.

That sounds like a solid solution with no chance of going horribly wrong! Of course, even geniuses can be idiots, and there’s something ineffably human in the idea that one of the smartest people on the planet might still be liable to hurt someone he loves in a misguided effort to protect them from themselves. This critic is less willing to accept the fact that Charles gets so lost in his own simple metaphor that he forgets how scaffolding is — by definition — temporary.

Alas, “Dark Phoenix” has little interest in meaningfully interrogating the means of Charles’ mission. Kinberg doesn’t have the stomach to approach this as a story about a man trying to minimize a woman’s emotional experience, and so the professor’s questionable ethics are only relevant as a means of pissing off his most powerful student, whose memories come flooding back to her in a rotten torrent of decades-old rage when a dangerous space mission ends with Jean absorbing a raspberry swirl of cosmic gunk.

Instead of reckoning with the latent misogyny of Charles’ actions, Kinberg shoehorns in a cringe-tacular scene where Raven (once again played by an unapologetically bored Jennifer Lawrence) snaps at the unappreciative professor that he should consider calling them “X-Women.” Even though the entire climax of “Dark Phoenix” was reshot to avoid similarities with “Captain Marvel,” the two movies are still bound together by their shared insistence that girl power can be productively expressed through a series of empty postures. “My emotions make me strong!,” Jean declares, but dialogue like that doesn’t resonate when it’s spoken by a character who’s solely defined by her superpowers. What emotions is she talking about? We can only guess.

At least “Captain Marvel” boasted a compelling race of alien “villains” who complicated the drama instead of snuffing it out. The ominous energy “Dark Phoenix” collects in its first scenes begins to drain away as soon as a vagabond group of shapeshifting extraterrestrials come to Earth, borrow Jessica Chastain’s body, and — in an especially cruel touch — dye her eyebrows as white as her wig. (Did the galaxy learn nothing from the cosmetic atrocities of the first “Thor” movie?) Chastain is excellent as always, but her character is so underwritten that you’d be hard-pressed to remember its name. IMDB says it’s… Vuk? Why not. Whatever the case, the baddie is little more than a devil on Jean’s shoulder in the second act, and a convenient villain for her to fight in the third. Most of all, Vuk is a well-cast excuse to background Charles’ mind games in favor of some standard-issue alien blather about playing God.

Strangely enough, the reshot finale — set aboard a speeding military train — is the film’s only engaging action sequence, as Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee) gets an excellent kill and Magneto (Michael Fassbender, who’s definitely in this) has some fun with metal. It’s not enough to make up for the dull torpor of the previous fight scene, or the exceedingly silly bit where Fassbender and Turner have a telekinetic clench-off as they battle for mind control over a helicopter, but the last-minute spectacle is hard to take for granted in a movie that hasn’t offered a single memorable image until that point.

It’s not like any of the previous “X-Men” films Kinberg produced have done much to move the needle forward, but their best moments dared to insinuate these superheroes into the real world with a hint of the subversive power they’re intended to represent. Magneto and his half-naked minions flying into Auschwitz and destroying its memory remains one of the most dangerous and excitingly problematic events in any modern blockbuster because it transgresses the simple platitudes that superhero movies typically use to express a character’s trauma.

“Dark Phoenix,” on the other hand, is designed to avoid pushing any buttons. Or doing much of anything else, for that matter. It just sort of happens, and not even the movie itself seems to know why. “Dark Phoenix” promises that the X-Men will rise from the ashes — that Jean Grey will be reborn from her own pain — but there’s no use holding your breath for a miracle; this entire franchise feels like it’s already been interred.

Grade: D
21st Century Fox will release “Dark Phoenix” in theaters June 7.


https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/dark-phoenix-review-x-men-050010105.html

[Black Dog Sun, the End of the Ancient World, Antediluvian X]

First Dark Phoenix Reviews Suggest a Not-So-Stellar Finish For the X-Men Franchise
ROBERT WORKMANWEDNESDAY, JUNE 05, 2019
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First Dark Phoenix Reviews Suggest a Not-So-Stellar Finish For the X-Men Franchise
The final film in the X-Men franchise, Dark Phoenix, is set to open this Friday. Fans are hopeful that it will end on a high note, with the remaining heroes battling Jean Grey’s newfound “dark side.” Alas, the first reviews that have posted on Rotten Tomatoes suggest that they’re not going to get the ending they want.

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The critical consensus for the concluding chapter to the franchise sits at 15 percent, based on 41 reviews. That’s the lowest ranking in the movie series to date, even lower than the 37 percent for 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine. By comparison, X-Men: The Last Stand, which features another take on the Jean Grey/Dark Phoenix legacy, has a 58 percent ranking. In fact, many of Dark Phoenix’s reviews feature a comparison to Last Stand, with critics actually preferring that film.

Here are a few examples of the reviews we’ve seen for Dark Phoenix, noting its many problems:

First up is ComingSoon.net’s review of the film, giving it a 4.5 out of 10. Scott Chitwood, who usually loves the series, noted the following. “I’m a big X-Men fan, but I was disappointed by Dark Phoenix. I suppose it underlines that Hugh Jackman is the true MVP of the X-Men movies. But this misstep by Fox definitely makes me more eager to see how Marvel and Disney take the X-Men ball and run with it in the future.”

Related: Get Ready For Dark Phoenix With an X-Men Celebration Video
Katie Walsh of the Tribune News Service was way harsher with her 1.5 out of 4 review. “Dark Phoenix racks up a rap sheet of offenses (it doesn’t even look remotely like 1992!), but perhaps the worst is proving what X-Men Apocalypse started in its treatment of Oscar Isaac. Despite the caliber and talent of the actor, lackluster writing, directing and editing can warp a performance into something truly dreadful. Now that’s power.”

Don Kaye of Den of Geek noted Sophie Turner’s great acting in the film, but said the rest of the cast was unbalanced.  “At least she’s trying, which can’t be said for some of the other members of the cast. Jennifer Lawrence is all but checking her watch during her scenes as Mystique.” He concluded, though, that “the X-Men franchise, for now, goes out not with a grand finale, but a relentlessly mediocre entry that once again whiffs on one of the canon’s great stories.”

Entertainment Weekly, surprisingly enough, did find some positivity from the film. Leah Greenblatt noted, “You can’t keep a good X-Men down. or a bad one, really; 12 films into a nearly two-decade-old franchise, Dark Phoenix rises from the ashes of 2016’s silly, bloated X-Men Apocalypse — not a free bird, exactly, but better than what came before.”

Fans can judge Dark Phoenix for themselves when the film opens this weekend. Will you be seeing it in theaters, or waiting for it to arrive on home video? Let us know in the comments below!


Read more at https://www.superherohype.com/news/452181-first-dark-phoenix-reviews-suggest-a-not-so-stellar-finish-for-the-x-men-franchise#HxzrRS15v3x6fgTO.99

[Behold, I am Death, Destroyer of Worlds]

Dark Phoenix Director Compares Original Ending To Civil War
ROBERT WORKMANFRIDAY, JUNE 07, 2019
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Dark Phoenix Director Compares Original Ending To Civil War
Warning: There are spoilers ahead for X-Men: Dark Phoenix!

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X-Men: Dark Phoenix had its fair share of rewrites, even in the middle of shooting. Director and screenwriter Simon Kinberg recently spoke to Gizmodo about how he had to make changes to the ending of Dark Phoenix. Apparently, it was a little too close to another Marvel film –  Captain America: Civil War.

“My original ending didn’t have the entire X-Family together the way they are in the film now,” said Kinberg. “More than Captain Marvel, you could see a lot of Civil War in that ending. Usually, these big, huge action movies have the climactic moment in the third act. I loved the way that Civil War had its big action set piece where everyone’s facing off more towards the end of the second act rather than in the third, so that after that huge battle, you’re left with Winter Soldier, Captain America, and Iron Man.”

“It’s this telescoped down view of their raw emotions, and I loved how intimate that was,” continued Kinberg. “That’s what I was going for with Dark Phoenix’s ending even though it then might have looked like Captain Marvel for about two minutes.”

Related: Famke Janssen On Dark Phoenix and Her Possible Future With the X-Men
Dark Phoenix does have a few elements similar to Civil War. Midway through, Charles Xavier and Magneto are on opposite sides, divided over the fate of Jean Grey. But they eventually unite when the real threat emerges.

Thus far, Dark Phoenix has generated $5 million from Thursday night screenings, indicating it’s on its way to a potential $50 million opening weekend. That’s lower than the most recent X-Men movies, including Days of Future Past’s $90 million and Apocalypse’s $65 million from 2016.

Dark Phoenix is now in theaters. What do you think about the film’s current ending? Let us know in the comment section below.


Read more at https://www.superherohype.com/movies/452445-dark-phoenix-director-compares-original-ending-to-civil-war#VZD9xQahDRMwq1Aa.99

[Behold, I am Death, Destroyer of Worlds]

Stars Reveal Dark Phoenix Was Being Constantly Rewritten on Set
TUDOR LEONTEFRIDAY, JUNE 07, 2019
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Stars reveal Dark Phoenix was being constantly rewritten on set
We are just hours away from the official release of the last installment in the Fox’s X-Men franchise. As soon as Dark Phoenix hits the theaters, the mutants lead by Professor Xavier will come back to Marvel Studios. Speaking with Screen Rant, Dark Phoenix star Sophie Turner has revealed that director and writer Simon Kinberg was constantly rewriting movie’s screenplay on the set.

“Simon and I would sit down for two hours every day and just comb through each page of the script,” Turner said. “There was rewriting being done all the time.”

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RELATED – Famke Janssen on Dark Phoenix and Her Possible Future With the X-Men
In the same interview, fellow Dark Phoenix star Jessica Chastain said that Kinberg used to decide the movie’s direction overnight.

“You could have a conversation and something comes from that and then the next morning, Simon would show up to work and say, ‘hey, I wrote some pages that I think could be interesting for this direction we’re going,'” Chastain stated.

Now all that rests to see is how Simon Kinberg’s movie will perform at the box office. The early reviews, though, have been mainly bad.

The last installment to Fox’s X-Men film franchise opens in theaters June 7. What do you think about Turner’s and Chastain’s revelations? Let us know in the comments section below.


Read more at https://www.superherohype.com/news/452429-stars-reveal-dark-phoenix-was-being-constantly-rewritten-on-set#Eab0SdUHDMyzprXA.99