Dark Phoenix

It's a shame to see the Fox era X-Men movie franchise go out with so little fanfare.

That 2000 X-Men film was a BIG deal. It was not the first comic book movie, but it was the one that kicked off the genre as a big time tentpole. And in 2000 we were still 5 years from Nolan's Batman films and 8 years from the dawn of the MCU. We got Spiderman, but X-Men was kind of the #1 show for a while.

And here is my dirty little secret:

I have liked every single movie in this franchise.

Yes, even the first Wolverine movie. It's not a great movie(the side characters largely suck), and is my least favorite of the bunch, but it's hardly awful. It's like a 6 out of 10.

I also really REALLY liked X-Men: The Last Stand (*pause for fanboy rage*). It has a few issues, but I have never understood the hate that movie gets. But that hate, followed by that Wolverine movie, led the franchise to get rebooted with First Class, and that 2nd era of X films closes now with Dark Phoenix.

And it tells the same overarching story as The Last Stand, as once again Jean Grey becomes the Phoenix and has to be stopped, or saved.

Dark Phoenix is both an inferior film to X3, and a superior telling of that Phoenix story. It's more focused on just Jean, whereas X3 had the mutant cure story and a bunch of other subplots.

This movie kind of got screwed in production. They had to do a ton of reshoots after the 3rd act was almost identical to Captain Marvel (the villains here are basically Skrulls, and when Jean goes full Phoenix it's basically Carol going binary). And the deal with Disney wrapped up during production, kind of rendering the film meaningless in a way. This film doesn't exactly wrap things up like Endgame. It doesn't really tease any future stories either.

But that new 3rd act here is actually quite good. It's one of the better set pieces in an X film. They really use the characters powers to great effect, especially Nightcrawler.

I also thought the marketing kind of let the film down. Sophie Turner won't be winning any awards for this movie, but she is a lot better than the trailers indicated she'd be. Her trailer lines were embarrassingly wooden and bland, but most of those takes and lines were not even in the movie. She's no Famke Janssen, but she's fine.

And McAvoy and Fassbender are solid of course. Jennifer Lawrence(whose fate was needlessly given away in one trailer) is good. Nicholas Hoult is very good.

The villains, led by Jessica Chastain, are not very good. It's never even clear what their purpose is.

I would rank this movie probably 2nd from the bottom in the franchise, but it's not bad. That bar has just been raised so high by the MCU. And yeah I'm sure that in a few years the MCU will re-introduce these characters, and maybe lead to the best X-Men films yet.

But this franchise still gave us some of the very best superhero films of the 2000s. It deserves more respect.