#dark phoenix

The core problem is that nobody is likeable. People are understandable, maybe, but nobody is likeable. Jean is one of the most sympathetic because none of this is really her fault, but she does not handle things well. She doesn’t communicate at all with her boyfriend, refuses to take responsibility for any of the problems she causes, even if she is under duress, and goes to Magneto to get advice after she just killed his best friend. Also, Jean is under duress! The only reason she’s dangerous is because she’s experiencing the trauma of killing her parents for the first time because Xavier blocked those emotions off, and almost all the bad things she does happen when she gets sensory overload. Like, her fighting the military guys and torturing Magneto and Xavier isn’t great, but they are kinda trying to kill her. She’s both evil and the victim, which is a weird-ass dichotomy that the film never reconciles. You’re supposed to feel bad for her, but also she clearly crosses the line at several points.

Then there’s Xavier. This movie goes the route of making him a jerk again, which is annoying. It mainly does this by having him block Jean’s trauma of her father abandoning her after she killed their mother, and this gives Jean sensory overload when it comes back all at once in the present. Everything is kinda his fault due to this, and it takes him way too long to admit it. It makes him unsympathetic when he’s supposed to be the hero. However, his big critic is Mystique, who also comes across as unsympathetic. She blames Xavier for putting the X-Men in danger just to save humanity, when the X-Men being heroes is the only thing keeping mutantkind in humanity’s good graces. As soon as one thing goes wrong, Xavier is excommunicated from the government after 10 years of heroism, which means that Xavier was right about putting the X-Men in danger. Jean is unsympathetic, Xavier is unsympathetic, and Mystique is unsympathetic, which means the most sympathetic one is Magneto. He’s chilling on his own mutant haven island, and only emerges to kill Jean after she killed Mystique. However, she killed Mystique by accident, so Magneto isn’t super sympathetic either. Who am I supposed to root for? Cyclops? He has no personality outside of being Jean’s boyfriend and Xavier’s lackey. Him, Storm, and Nightcrawler all just feel like Xavier’s henchmen in the same way that the two random mutants Magneto takes with him to fight Jean feel like henchmen. Nobody is likeable, so all the big moral dilemmas just fall flat on their face because I don’t care. I don’t want anybody to win, I just want these people to get over themselves and stop fighting.

To the film’s credit, the final battle is pretty good. Everybody gets their shit together to fight the aliens that want to use Jean to destroy the world (yes that’s the plot), and the action is very intense. Nightcrawler gets to kick ass, Storm gets to obliterate a bunch of people, and Magneto gets to crush a train car. Also, the scene prior to the finale of Jean making Xavier walk is appropriately horrifying. The actual ending to the battle is kinda lame because Jean just sacrifices herself to make the villain explode, but at least the big battle leading up to that is cool. The problem is that aside from the final battle, there’s basically no other action sequences. There’s the intro scene, the very brief scene where Jean mauls the X-Men and kills Mystique, and the two part final battle, the first of which is cool only because of how much the individual fights intersect. Xavier’s henchmen fight Magneto’s henchmen, and it actually feels like a proper 4v4 instead of 4 1v1s.

The lack of action sequences is even more disappointing because the special effects department goes all out for the powers. The Phoenix effects are awesome, and I love how Jean’s skin cracks and her hair flows with power when she loses control. Nightcrawler’s teleportation is awesome, as are the effects for Magneto. The makeup is also still on point, with both Beast and Nightcrawler looking really good. If the film made better use of these powers, it could at least have some merit as a spectacle film, but it doesn’t.

As an X-Men movie, this film is even worse than it is standalone. Mainly, it just does not treat the X-Men well. This is primarily because of the aforementioned asshole-ification of Xavier and Mystique, but Mystique’s death is also incredibly lame. She dies trying to talk Jean down, and only makes things worse. It’s cool that Mystique goes out trying to be a hero, but she accomplishes nothing, so it feels like a disappointing end for the tritagonist of this new set of movies. Oh and Quicksilver gets hospitalized in the same fight where Mystique dies, so we’re left with Cyclops, Storm, and Nightcrawler as our three X-Men, and none of them feel like people. They all have better characterization in Apocalypse somehow, and that movie gives no fucks.

The plot, too, hates the X-Men. They’ve been international heroes for 10 years after stopping Apocalypse, then the president rescinds their status after Jean goes rogue and attacks some cops. All that progress, gone for no reason, and this is never rectified. It’s barely even part of the story, except to have the X-Men get kidnapped (again) and to make Xavier look like more of a jerk. The movie ends with Xavier quitting and Beast taking over as the X-Men rebuild, but for what. This is the last X-Men movie, and it ends with the X-Men destroyed and mutantkind in a worse place than it was two movies ago. Like Last Stand, the franchise ends with mutants losing their battle for equality.