Dark Phoenix is in theaters. It’s very not good. Most of you aren’t going to see it. I don’t blame you. It’s a contractual obligation superhero movie which substitutes the over-the-top goofiness of Apocalypse for a far somber, character-driven tone. However, I’d rather remember Apocalypse as the final X-Men film over this joyless, self-important affair.
Soon enough, the actors responsible for it will make their final appearances on their endless PR tour. They’ll finally be freed to retreat back to their lives where they can drop the act that this movie was anything other than a disaster of endless delays and reshoots born out of a need to paper over a terrible script and unimaginative direction. Years from now, the X-Men will return in some form, and we’ll move on to our third cinematic versions of Professor Charles Xavier and Magneto and, sadly, our second version of Wolverine. Dark Phoenix will be but a distant memory by that point.
Not for Simon Kinberg, the film’s writer-director-producer. The son of a film professor, Kinberg joined the X-Men franchise with The Last Stand and stuck around to produce Deadpool, Logan, Deadpool 2, and The New Mutants and write the scripts for First Class, Days of Future Past, and Apocalypse. That last one just about broke him. Literally.
Shortly after production, Kinberg came down with a severe flu and was sidelined for an entire month, during which time he lost 15 pounds. He thought he was going to die. An experience like that tends to opens a person’s eyes to the changes they need to make in their life. For example, when the Ike Perlmutter-run version Marvel Studios done Jon Favreau dirty on Iron Man 2 and his rebound fling with Cowboys & Aliens left him feeling empty, he disappeared into himself and came back with a deeply personal movie, Chef, about a father and son reconnecting by going into the food truck business together.
Kingberg tried to do that. As an uber-producer masterminding the X-Men universe and helping out with the Star Wars universe as well, he realized he was spreading himself too thin. Maybe it was time to take a break and make a passion project, something that won’t make him a nickel but will nourish his soul.
Instead, he made Dark Phoenix. Not only that, he decided it would be his directorial debut.
“The truth is I find myself in the movies,” he told Ben Fitz in The Big Picture. “I’m not writing them on an assembly line. My brain is always living in these stories, even when I think I may die from the flu.”
When he sat down to brainstorm ideas for a passion project, the themes he wanted to explore – love and loss, pain, jealousy, anger – all seemed like they belonged in a Dark Phoenix movie, never mind the fact that the story has already been done twice in the past 30 years, first on X-Men: The Animated Series and then in The Last Stand. His passion project was to finally get the damn story right and make up for Last Stand.
There’s more to it for him than that, though. Kinberg’s marriage of 14-years fell apart during the production of Days of Future Past and turned his two kids into children of divorce. Dark Phoenix gives the impression he’s still working through that. That’s why the film largely plays like a repentant father apologizing to his wayward daughter.
The entire story bends itself around Xavier (James McAvoy) suffering the consequences of the lies he told an 8-year-old Jean Grey to protect her. She (Sophie Turner) discovers the truth 17 years later – I won’t spoil the specifics of what he lied to her about, but I will say this particular twist needed to be stronger. At the same time, she loses control of her newly supercharged powers, meaning the entire planet might just pay for Xavier’s sins. That is, of course, unless he has yet another lovely speech about hope and love in his back pocket, which is kind of his specialty, so much so that Kinberg’s script hangs a lantern on it.
The emotional climax of the story – and insert spoiler warning here – pulls from the Days of Future Past playbook and involves Xavier and Jean using their psychic powers to talk to one another in a peaceful place inside their minds while carnage surrounds their physical bodies. In this psychic setting, Jean reverts back to being the 8-year-old girl we met in the opening scene and Xavier compassionately makes the case that everything he ever did for her was born out of love and a desire to protect her. While not literally her father, this man who helped raise this girl from the age of 8 is pretty much a parent dropping his best “I tried my best, I made mistakes, can you ever forgive me?” speech.
In a film which lacks imagination, urgency, or the sense that anyone on screen truly wanted to be there, this emotional climax feels like Kinberg working through some stuff.
But film studios aren’t usually in the business of turning $200 million blockbusters into therapy sessions. Such films demand spectacle and lots of shit blowing up. As a first-time director, this is where you’d most expect Kinberg to struggle, and you’d be right. He may have been the one to write those older movies, but Bryan Singer and Matthew Vaughn are the ones who directed them.
Their capacity for staging superhero action set pieces is far superior to Kinberg’s, who orchestrates several of them so awkwardly you’ll be forgiven if you laugh out loud. I swear you can almost still see the safety harness on the actors anytime they fly or levitate. Don’t get me started on when Sophie Turner and Michael Fassbender take turns just standing there and awkwardly gesturing their hands at the CGI helicopter they’re meant to be controlling with their minds.
Kinberg’s not much better at extracting any emotion out of the performances. Jennifer Lawrence, as she did in Apocalypse, gives as transparent a DGAF performance as as you’ll ever see and most everyone either follows her lead or just doesn’t have nearly enough to do in the script to stand out. Sophie Turner, whose very actorly preparation reportedly included 6 months of studying/observing schizophrenia patients at mental hospitals, does at least give it her all. However, the script loses track of the female empowerment message it’s trying to send in this story which is ultimately about a woman learning to embrace her own emotions.
If none of it is enough to convince you Kinberg was probably in over his head on Dark Phoenix, did I forget to mention his surprising Rocky IV tendency to keep flashing back to earlier scenes in the movie, as if audiences need fresh reminders every 25 minutes? Because that’s a thing that happens.
Mercifully, though, Dark Phoenix does eventually end. There’s no post-credits scene meaning you can leave right away, which is how I imagine most of the actors ended their days on set during principal photography two years ago.
I described much of the behind the scenes personal drama before in an article last year when the first Dark Phoenix trailer was released. That was back when the film was supposed to come out in February 2019. It got delayed. Obviously. That wasn’t the first time either. All told, Dark Phoenix was pushed back a total of 7 months, during which time its budget ballooned. They had to reshoot their ending because what they originally came up with was apparently far too similar to Captain Marvel’s ending, particular the usage of the shapeshifting aliens called the Skrulls.
That’s how X-Men, the longest running superhero movie franchise, closes things out – being forced to reshoot an ending because a newer, far more popular superhero movie had some of the same ideas as them. That feels right, actually. As another superhero franchise once put it, you either die the hero or live long enough to become the villain. The third option is you simply live long enough to see yourself become obsolete and passed over by the competition. Dark Phoenix, despite Kinberg putting a lot of himself into the story, is exactly that kind of whimper.
THE BOTTOM LINE
They should have stopped after Days of Future Past, but they really, really should have stopped after Apocalypse.
We Minored in Film 
Saw the trailer, read some articles and thought, hmm, maybe there’s something in here I would still like, maybe I should watch it, give it a try—that’s what marketing could do to people. Mind you, thinking about Endgame now, I thought the plot surrounding about the snap and 2nd snap is really problematic. Very problematic. One Forbes article even mentioned as Tony Stark as both MCU’s greatest hero and villain. But I digress.
Have you read about that Matthew Vaughn interview, like he said that DOFP was supposed to be the third movie? And he was planning to cast Tom Hardy as the new Wolverine? Wow, that would have been awesome, man! But the Fox guys wanted to do the time travel right away. DOFP as the third movie would have been nice.
Yeah, I saw the Matthew Vaughn quotes. I actually don’t like the idea of recasting a young Wolverine with Tom Hardy and then having the old Jackman version meet the Hardy version in Days of Future Past. Now, maybe if X-Men: Origins-Wolverine didn’t exist you could do that, but after Fox had already made an entire origin movie establishing that at a certain point Wolverine stops aging it would have just been confusing to then see a 1970s version of him played by Tom Hardy. Plus, Days of Future Past, as it ended up being constructed, needs Wolverine to act as the bridge between the original cast and First Class cast.
That all being said, I agree with his original plan to save DOFP to be their third film. Fox rushed to that storyline because Avengers had just made a billion off of the team-up concept. Plus, First Class had set franchise lows at the box office. They could have ignored that and put their faith in the filmmaker and gathered talent, hoping for a Batman Begins – Dark Knight kind of springboard from underseen but beloved first film to breakout second film. Instead, they rushed to DOFP and kind of screwed over the First Class in the process. It does suck that Lawrence, McAvoy, and Fassbender only truly got the one movie together before they either had to make room for the original cast (as in DOFP) or reached a point where they were mostly just there to fulfill a contract (as in Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix). However, I actually quite like DOFP, rushed as it may have been. It’s only Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix that truly disappointed me.
Both of those, of course, came after Logan, and that film does feel even more like the true swan song of this whole universe. It’s the one they’ll remember long after they’ve forgotten Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix.
I think this is kind of a relief. Now let’s take a break and then Marvel can reboot the franchise properly. And do it right this time around.
“Relief” is probably the right word for it. I have to believe that everyone involved in this film has to be relieved that it’s finally done and over with. This thing they made two years ago and then had to come back and partially remake a year later and then had to come back and promote another year later is finally behind them. They can move on, and we’re all moving on with them, waiting for the inevitable moment that this all just get rebooted and folded into the MCU.
Yeah, but I hope it won’t be soon. Because the longer the wait, the less the resistance will be.
Was finally able to see this and I thought it’s a fairly decent movie—though probably not a “decent” comic book movie if you’re going to put it against this Marvel standard or expectations (e.g., epic final battle, witty one liners).
So I read or re-read your review and find myself disagreeing on most of your complaints about the movie. While I’m not saying it is good or very good and that it’s also lacking (e.g., the villains), I thought your BTS knowledge colors your take on the movie.
“The emotional climax of the story – and insert spoiler warning here – pulls from the Days of Future Past playbook and involves Xavier and Jean using their psychic powers to talk to one another in a peaceful place inside their minds while carnage surrounds their physical bodies.”
– I didn’t read that much X-Men comics, but this is trope used a lot in the X-Men cartoons as well. So, I don’t think the movie is recycling anything from the past movies, if that’s your point.
“That is, of course, unless he has yet another lovely speech about hope and love in his back pocket, which is kind of his specialty, so much so that Kinberg’s script hangs a lantern on it.”
– This one I agree. But still, for me, it works within the context of the story. This one actually does better than The Last Stand’s “there’s no other way but to kill Jean”.
“In a film which lacks imagination, urgency, or the sense that anyone on screen truly wanted to be there, this emotional climax feels like Kinberg working through some stuff.”
– I’d agree the movie could use more imagination esp. the fight scenes but “urgency, or the sense that anyone on screen truly wanted to be there”? How could you say that? No one knows then that this was gonna suck, right? These people being professional, I thought they all did fine. I thought the cast except for the actress playing Storm did OK, especially Hoult, Fassbender, and Turner. Never got the impression that Mc Avoy or Lawrence were phoning it in.
“Their capacity for staging superhero action set pieces is far superior to Kinberg’s, who orchestrates several of them so awkwardly…”
– I agree on this one. But I could forgive the lousy fights if there’s something emotional going on in that fight—I’m referring to the tension between Xavier and Mystique early on and then between Xavier, Magneto and Beast and when the two finally changed their minds in the third act.
“Don’t get me started on when Sophie Turner and Michael Fassbender take turns just standing there and awkwardly gesturing their hands at the CGI helicopter they’re meant to be controlling with their minds.”
– Don’t think this is a valid gripe. Magneto has been doing that in most movies. Wanda as well in Avengers movies. I thought Kinberg was able to build up suspense in most of confrontations in the movie.
“did I forget to mention his surprising Rocky IV tendency to keep flashing back to earlier scenes in the movie, as if audiences need fresh reminders every 25 minutes? Because that’s a thing that happens.”
– If you’re referring to Jean’s car accident, the movie didn’t replayed more than necessary. It was replayed when Xavier read her mind because it was there that she found out about her father. And then when she confronted her father, she learned that he was afraid of her while she was probably wondering if his father hated her or if he forgave her. I thought it needs to be replayed because she’s basically reading people’s minds. It was more effective than characters explaining themselves through dialogue, especially if one character can actually read minds.
All in all, I thought it was OK, the pacing, the story, the emotional bits were there. There were some suspense as well even though the fight scenes were nothing special. I cringed on the “X-women” bit. The villains were forgettable and I thought Chastain was wasted in the movie. I’m not sure how faithful to the source the animated Dark Phoenix Saga was and while this movie was not better than that, it is actually OK in its own way–though maybe not as a final franchise movie.
I liked it better than Apocalypse and definitely a lot better than the one where a half-naked Logan finally gets “intimate” with Jean Grey. Lolz