Dark Phoenix - This Beleaguered Movie is Really Decent

[labingi]

Poor Dark Phoenix: it's been getting bad press for two years or something, sucking up internet vitriol at Sophie Turner and franchise fatigue, general concerns that it would be another X3-like flop, rumors of a troubled production, etc. It may well also have suffered neglect from studios knowing this would be the last in the franchise and having some interest in not having it generate enthusiastic buzz for more.

Still, the second trailer was pretty good--and I went in with moderate-to-no expectations. It was a good movie! Not the best but pretty good. I think my personal ranking in terms of quality would be thus (best to worst):

* Logan
* 1st X-Men
* X-Men First Class (not technically this good but scoring high for me by way of heart)
* X-2
* Days of Future Past
* Dark Phoenix
* The Wolverine (the Japan One)
* Apocalypse
* Wolverine (#1)
* X-3 (X-Men Last Stand)

What are your rankings?

For me, Dark Phoenix is about in the middle. Spoiler free pros and cons follow, just cut for length:

The Good
* It cares about the characters' relationships with each other for the first time since First Class, and has a nice awareness of the range of deep and loving relationships the characters are involved in: friend, sibling, parent-child, romantic, colleague, etc.

* Good acting, yes, even Sophie Turner, who quite impressed me as not-Sansa. I'm not crazy about her casting, but she did just fine. Really.

* It hits the beats of a basic Dark Phoenix story much better than X-3; in fact, it takes many of the same themes and actually uses them and doesn't make them all about Wolverine angsting. (In this respect, it partly fulfills my desire to see the X-3 version of the story retold better.)

* Fairly low emphasis on "bad guys," though they're there, and higher emphasis on the different personalities we know coming together and interacting.

* FX: pretty good. I'm notoriously hard on CGI, but I liked these myself.

The Bad
* Paint-by-the-numbers character conflict and arcs. If the script were about 20% more obvious, it would be every Pixar film where the hero learns a valuable lesson. As it is, this is much ameliorated by good acting, especially from James McAvoy. Indeed, several times really uninspired lines like "I know we've had our differences" were sold by various good actors.

* Uninspired script (actual lines) in general. This is pervasive in Hollywood today, but it stood out to me here. A lot of the lines were almost like placeholders waiting for non-clichéd dialogue to be inserted.

* Just not enough time in 2 hours to tell a Dark Phoenix story, especially with a large ensemble cast, and this showed in a rapid flight through plot points and, again, the canned character conflicts and resolutions. (Not bad ideas, just somewhat rushed and fake in execution.)

The "I Wish"
* I wish they'd just age the dang characters! At least give Erik white hair.

* I wish there had been some sense (even a throwaway line) of what the relationship between Erik and Peter and father and son is at this point.

* I wish Raven had been played with more nuance--well, not just her, but she stuck out to me.

All in all, I'm sorry it's gotten such a bad rap and will probably fail at the box office. It's a decent film to pull out of a lot of forces working against it.

Comments

[king_arthurs_muse]

Same! I liked it a lot more than I'd thought I would. My all time favorite is First Class and then the OG X-Men film, but this is a solid entry into the series.

[quaint_twilight]

I haven’t seen Dark Phoenix yet but I’ve always felt like it was a mistake not to develop the Charles/Erik storyline further after First Class, especially with actors like McAvoy and Fassbender. They had such fantastic chemistry. Logan is also my favorite in the franchise but I would rank First Class over the first X-men (also because of the feels).

[labingi]

Sorry for a late reply. Yes, I quite agree. Experientially, First Class is the one I enjoy most, though the scripting is weak in some ways (second half). And I think, to a lesser degree, Dark Phoenix is in that category for me. The overall script is not that strong but it gets the core of the characters as people who love each other, and Days of Future Past, though technically a very good movie, had only flashes of that. Apocalypse had none, seemed to actively avoid anything that would suggest characters had relationships with each other. It's a nice attempt at a late-in-the-day course correction for character development, and it's worth having been made if only for that reason.

[tropicsbear]

It wasn't spectacular, but it was definitely not as bad as the internet reactions made it out to be.

[labingi]

Absolutely. Poor film is getting hate from so many quarters. One odd one seems to be spillover hate at Disney (Last Jedi), even though Dark Phoenix is a pre-Disney acquisition film. Weird.

[bookwyrme]

I think this comes from the feeling that this was developed while the sale was under discussion & that meant less attention was paid to its development or marketing. Thus, Disney is blamed as an active distraction from the work.

There's also a sense of anger that the storyline, one people have invested in, won't be continued, that the X-Men will be absorbed into the Marvel universe with no reference to the prior films. There's no "next" for the Phoenix, no "next" for the school, or for that never-ending argument Xavier & Magneto have.

For people who don't like the movie, there's an understandable frustration that their beloved storyline ended on a downer note with no followup to redeem it or override the memory.

I've not watched any of the films since First Class, so I'm not sure how possible it would be to absorb these films into the Marvel universe and make them an acknowledged "past," even if not referred to a lot.

[labingi]

All excellent points. As far as I know (haven't kept up with all the details), it seems like Disney's next plans for the X-Men involve exploring characters who were not used (or not much) in the previous movieverse, and I think that's a good idea. While they may not be as popular overall in X-Men canon, audiences probably do need a break from Wolverine, Xavier, and Magneto, in particular, all portrayed by various beloved actors who can't really be feasibly replaced until there have been some "down" years for attachment to them to be less immediate.

For myself, I'm prepared to let my X-Men fannishness sleep for a while. Maybe something will grab me in ten years or so. (I wanted to like Legion, but it just ended up being big on spectacle and short on story for me, and I feel like it decided to change/not explore all the parts of David's story that are most interesting in the comics. This isn't really a complaint about canonicity but rather just telling a good story.)

I do actually recommend Dark Phoenix, though, if you like First Class. It really is the character-oriented sequel to First Class. One could almost skip the other two (or just read a brief summary or make up some details) and jump right into Dark Phoenix as a continuation of the Charles-Erik-Raven story (with lots of Jean, of course).