Review - X-Men: Dark Phoenix

X-Men: Dark Phoenix is the newest (and probably last) X-Men film from Fox which, don't worry, is more to do with being bought by Disney than the fact that it's pretty bad. The plot is familiar to anyone unfortunate enough to have seen The Last Stand, as it's about Jean Grey becoming "The Phoenix" again. She gets some super duper powers from a solar flare (powers which, according to the last film, she's had all along but Fox don't want you to remember that) and becomes a powerful and maybe sinister force, eventually being manipulated by some evil alien lady. The rest of the X-Men don't like this because they are good guys and they want their hot redhead back because... I think just because they're the good guys and that's what they want, it isn't explained well at all. The entire story is very impressive, in that it is both utterly cookie cutter and still impossible to follow. You've seen it all before but there is an utter lack of motivation to characters that confuses the whole film. Like I said, impressive stuff. It revolutionises story telling in the same kind of way that Memento did, only in the opposite direction.

Acting wise is... tricky. The day before I saw the film, I saw a photo of the cast from the premiere and was really impressed at how many talented young actors (as in, people who are only about a decade older than me) are in this film, many of whom I'd say I'm a fan of. And yet between them, they're all pretty crap. In the title role is Sophie Turner, an actress who I've only actually seen in Apocalypse before this. She seems to be a solid actress, people love her in Game of Thrones but clearly, she hasn't got much to work with here and comes across as kind of naff. Her love interest Tye Sheridan is even worse. Him I have seen in a few other things but in blockbusters, he always comes across horribly, this being no exception. I'll start rapid firing this a bit, speed this whole thing up. Fassbender and McAvoy are always great as Magneto and Xavier but this is the weakest they've been yet, Jennifer Lawrence very clearly doesn't want to be in this film (I kept spotting moments where a body double was probably used) and Jessica Chastain is a really bad villain because of her choice to deliver all her lines in a monotone. It's a helluva waste of a helluva cast, good job X-Men.

Primarily, Dark Phoenix is an action movie and so I should discuss the action. It is also not great, although maybe it's the best thing about the film. As a $200 million film, the action does look pretty solid, with the CGI rarely looking bad, although for that level of money "rarely looking bad" is not the level you want. Sadly though, these decent effects are used for largely forgettable action sequences. They are nothing more than scenes in which things happen on sets that the actors were paid to be on that day. Maybe a helicopter will crash. Maybe a subway train will come up from the ground. Maybe it will end with a character flying up into the sky, by which I mean it will, because it always does. To the films credit, there is one sequence at the end on a train that is pretty solid, it's just that the stakes were utterly irrelevant, which may sound a little odd. On the one hand, you don't want  every film to have the ridiculous stakes of something like Endgame but equally, some stakes are still required. Stakes are raised throughout, sure, but even after the death of a major character, I felt nothing. It's hard to describe why it is I felt that but everything felt inconsequential. Not much happened for most of the time but even when it did, I was just a void. I had been worn down into utter, utter submission.

There's one last thing I want to talk about with Dark Phoenix because it feels like such a big theme that has been utterly bungled in the making of the film and that is the feminism/empowerment aspect. Before I get into it, obviously, it should be mentioned that I'm a dude. I go to a really good Uni that teaches a lot of ways of reading media in great depth but feminism is still something that I can only ever experience and discuss as an outsider, so feel free to ignore my opinion. With that said, let's get on with it. The main way the film deals with female power is through gaslighting (if you haven't heard of it, google it). Throughout, Jean is told what she can't do, what she shouldn't do, what she is not strong enough to handle. This is all reinforced by the villain, except that being the villain, she's wrong. In the end, Jean shouldn't have let her power get out of hand and thus, the metaphor is ruined. The day would have just been saved if the woman had stayed in her place. Even worse (and this is technically a spoiler so feel free to skip ahead) is that in the end, she flies up into the sky to explode because by trying to do her own thing, she could end up making the boy she likes disintegrate. She saves the day because she likes a boy and while I get that feminism doesn't have to be a thing of rejecting any sexuality, the way I interpret it is centralising your inner worth through yourself. So the one thing the film had going for it, the thing that most of the cast have been pushing throughout all of the press junkets, is poorly handled. To call it marketplace feminism is offensive to feminism and marketplaces.

So yeah, the film nobody asked for is pretty bad but at least it's the last one Fox will get to make for the foreseeable future. It is all competently made but utterly forgettable and boring for it. It is in the lower echelons of a franchise that has always had a fairly spotty hit rate. Can't say I really cared for it at all and so I give it a