Dark Phoenix
Directed by: Simon Kinberg
Written by: Simon Kinberg
Starring: Sophie Turner, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, Jessica Chastain, Jennifer Lawrence, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Alexandra Shipp, Evan Peters, Scott Shepherd, Andrew Stehlin, Kota Eberhardt, Ato Essandoh, Summer Fontana, Hannah Anderson
Action/Adventure/Sci-Fi - 113 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 5 June 2019
Written by: Simon Kinberg
Starring: Sophie Turner, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, Jessica Chastain, Jennifer Lawrence, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Alexandra Shipp, Evan Peters, Scott Shepherd, Andrew Stehlin, Kota Eberhardt, Ato Essandoh, Summer Fontana, Hannah Anderson
Action/Adventure/Sci-Fi - 113 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 5 June 2019
Dark Phoenix opens with a Jean Grey voiceover, “Are we destined to a fate beyond our control? Or can we evolve, become something…more?” Nobody will very much care if concrete answers address these questions or not, but consider it a frame for long time X-men writer/producer and first time director Simon Kinberg to shape his story around. This is not the first X-Men film to tackle Jean Grey’s comic book arc from mutant on the verge of a nervous breakdown into a more celestial being, and I am now more than convinced she is a character who will never make a very compelling cinematic subject. Jean Grey is supposed to be beyond powerful, a rival to Professor Xavier in pure cerebral output, but she never does anything worth watching. She always breaks. Dark Phoenix is not unique in its failure to thrill fans with Jean Grey’s theatrics, it is merely another attempt to do so - and like all the rest - you'll forget about it in a moment.
There are so many X-Men films now with so many competing timelines, one can be forgiven for stumbling over who belongs where and when. Dark Phoenix occurs in a world where the first three X-Men films never happened, X-Men: Days of Future Past reset the clock. In this particular 1992, the X-Men are beloved by regular humans who celebrate them as superheroes. While rescuing imperiled astronauts, Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), ingests an alien substance and brings it back to Earth with her. The foreign matter exponentially increases Jean’s mental and physical powers which is both a catalyst to unleash deliberately buried memories which will tear Jean apart from the inside and it will widen schisms beginning to fester among the X-Men team and with their figurehead, Professor Charles Xavier (James McAvoy, Glass).
There are so many X-Men films now with so many competing timelines, one can be forgiven for stumbling over who belongs where and when. Dark Phoenix occurs in a world where the first three X-Men films never happened, X-Men: Days of Future Past reset the clock. In this particular 1992, the X-Men are beloved by regular humans who celebrate them as superheroes. While rescuing imperiled astronauts, Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), ingests an alien substance and brings it back to Earth with her. The foreign matter exponentially increases Jean’s mental and physical powers which is both a catalyst to unleash deliberately buried memories which will tear Jean apart from the inside and it will widen schisms beginning to fester among the X-Men team and with their figurehead, Professor Charles Xavier (James McAvoy, Glass).
Mystique, now known as Raven (Jennifer Lawrence, Red Sparrow), chafes under what she considers to be Xavier’s vainglorious attitude. He is on magazine covers, enjoys being feted at galas, and maintains a telephone on his desk which is a direct line to the Oval Office. Xavier says mutants enjoy peace and an accepted status in the world because the X-Men risk their lives to save humans. Raven argues it is the team risking their lives while the Professor remains cloistered in awards and speeches safe behind the lines. Urging her boyfriend, Dr. Hank McCoy (Nicholas Hoult, The Favourite), to leave the X-Men mansion and start over somewhere new, Raven says, “It’s not our lives we’re living, it’s his.”
Time for new beginnings runs out when Jean Grey is once again unable to control the bubbling power within and inflicts irreparable collateral damage upon her teammates. Lines are drawn. Vendettas are sworn. Old characters considered tucked away, notably Eric Lehnsherr aka Magneto (Michael Fassbender, Song to Song), resurrect, and a new villain, an alien being (Jessica Chastain, The Zookeeper's Wife) chasing the nameless power subsumed by Jean Grey, emerge to ensure required action scenes, but all the fuss coalesces into a mundane shrug. In a script misfire, nobody acknowledges Jean Grey absorbed a floating cosmic cloud, which would most likely explain her erratic behavior. Instead, they treat her as an impulsive schizophrenic off her medication. Where is the, “Let us try and get it out of her” discussion? Perhaps it would interfere with more slapdash action sequences.
Kinberg wants to examine deeper questions such as when do you give up on someone you love and when do you keep fighting for them, because you know deep down, she’s still in there. Unfortunately, the black and white battle lines he creates obscures any honest examination of this rhetoric and it disappears behind banal helicopter explosions and even a subway car being elevated from under a city street and into a house. These visual effects extravaganzas also remind me of a habitual problem I have when various mutants fight each other in this franchise. Some of them are so powerful, they should not succumb to true combat with others. Storm (Alexandra Shipp, Straight Outta Compton) shoots lightning bolts from her palms and can summon the wrath of tornados and hurricanes; yet, here she struggles with a gentleman who can whip around his dreadlocks and slap someone across the face with them. The incongruities are absurd.
Furthermore, Chastain’s villain is paper thin. She leads a race of aliens whose world was destroyed and now wants to use the space power cloud thing to take over Earth. We learn nothing else. All motivations, back story, plans, how they got here - it’s all an empty, vacuous shell. Chastain’s creature has been on screen before, even recently. She’s Agent Smith in The Matrix trilogy; she is Thanos from the Avengers. Human beings are a disease, a cancer which must be dealt with. Yawn. It’s all plot mechanics to build up to more booms and pows. At least these fireballs break up the relentless melodrama emanating from Jean Grey. The “I don’t belong anywhere” and “Nobody understands me” schtick was already exploited back in 2003. It’s stale as is most of Dark Phoenix which will appear and disappear in our movie memories as fast as Nightcrawler can teleport across a room. However, a big point in Dark Phoenix’s favor, and one I urge all fans of movie music to take note of, is Hans Zimmer’s soaring, engaging score. He created an accompaniment which far outshines the subject matter it supports. Not matching the film and even calling attention to itself is usually a musical sin in films, but in this case, it’s something to hold onto as you whether the content on screen with complete indifference.
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