Look, I know we’re all here to talk about Dark Phoenix, the newest entry in the X-Men film franchise, but I also wanna talk about the series as a whole, how we got to where we’ve gotten to, and why it’s all seemed pretty unimpressive for the most part. Come, dance with me, won’t you?
Back in 2000, the first X-Men was really good, especially for the time, though it’s certainly showing its age these days. In translating a flashy, colorful comic series to film (in the hopes of being taken seriously by a wider audience than just existing fans), director Bryan Singer took a decidedly grounded approach to things, dulling down the costumes to a more realistic set of black leather outfits and grounding the narrative in the relatable Rogue and a star-making turn from Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. The casting was damn solid, with Jackman leading the way, followed by Patrick Stewart as the only person one would think of playing Professor Xavier, Sir Ian McKellan as an appropriately elderly Magneto (he was a concentration camp survivor, after all, he’s gonna be a bit up there in age), the massive Tyler Mane as Sabretooth, soon-to-be-Oscar-laureate Halle Berry as Storm, and a fairly strong turn from Anna Paquin as Rogue. Sure, Ray Park was wasted as Toad, Rebecca Romijn was given nothing to do as Mystique but traipse about mostly nude, and James Marsden had precious little presence as Cyclops (though, in fairness, the character barely has much of a personality, so maybe he hit the nail perfectly, eh?), so things weren’t exactly perfect, but it was a damn fine start. Three years later, X2 would improve on the formula, bringing some darkness and depth to the nascent franchise.
Then things got decidedly derailed, as Brett Ratner took the reigns for the third entry, The Last Stand, which tried to squeeze far too much story (the Dark Phoenix Saga, out of nowhere, and one of the many plots the comic series has seen of a “cure” for mutations being discovered and shopped around, among the various minor character arcs) into a space with precious little skill at the helm. The film was a damned joke, one that still stands as the franchise’s weakest entry, and that’s a franchise that includes the next offering, X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Meant to be the first in a side series of prequels chronicling the, well, origins of the key members of the cast, this film succeeded only at showing why such an idea was terrible: they tried to once again do too much with little in the way of ability, and they frankly shat upon the source material and characters (I mean, seriously, they cast Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool, the “merc with a mouth” (fancy that, eh?), and proceed to literally sew his fucking mouth shut!) as they did so. The film was a terrible mess, something the series just couldn’t handle again. We wouldn’t see another X-Men film for a couple years, and when the franchise returned, it was rebooted in the form of First Class.
We got a new cast, another strong one: James McAvoy takes over as a young Xavier, Michael Goddamn Fassbender is a young Magneto, and Romijn is replaced by up-and-coming Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique (still, strangely, a pivotal piece of the ensemble puzzle, for reasons that have never been made apparent to me), all of them handled by the able directorial hands of Matthew Vaughn. Now, the film itself isn’t all that great, but it was strong enough to cleanse our collective palates from the malingering bitterness of the previous entries. Then came another Wolverine solo flick (titled, appropriately enough, The Wolverine), and it was definitely better than the last time Logan went on his own (I liked it more than most, feeling the third act wasn’t nearly as devastating as consensus holds). Then there was Days of Future Past, an ambitious follow-up to First Class that mostly succeeded, if a bit forgettably so. A pattern was beginning to emerge, with new movies coming out embracing the key stories of the comics while leaving very little in the way of memorable filmmaking when all was said and done.
Cue Apocalypse. Such a larger-than-life character and story, the film was likely destined to fail, and, boy-howdy, did it ever! Apocalypse was a terrible mess, suffering not from packing too much into too small a box, but rather the opposite, trying to stretch out a threadbare idea into something it simply couldn’t truly aspire to be. It began to be clear that the cast – particularly Lawrence – were growing tired of their roles, and the writers simply couldn’t properly adapt the stories as needed. Still, profit was being made, and Fox didn’t want to give up the goat on their precious IP (this was just prior to the buy-out, mind you, so such concerns still made sense), so press on they did. The two Deadpool films helped round things out a bit and provided some great levity to an all-too-serious series, and Logan was well-received by pretty much everyone but me (I mean, it wasn’t bad, I just didn’t care for the flick as a whole), but these were side missions, we needed to keep pressing on with the trunk. Enter Dark Phoenix.
The newer, younger cast continues to carry the torch here, with increased participation from Sophie Turner as Jean Grey and Tye Sheridan as Cyclops, not to mention the addition of the all-around awesome Jessica Chastain as a nameless villain. The story is essentially the same Dark Phoenix narrative we keep getting, wherein Jean Grey is suddenly and surprisingly possessed by an extraterrestrial force (known to us as the Phoenix Force, though that moniker is given to the apparently death-cheating Jean, a change I don’t really mind too much), which causes all sorts of havoc with her Xavier-tampered mind. The focus here, though, is on Xavier’s meddling and the bonds of family and friendship, rather than the cosmic source of the power itself, the traditional narrative center (apart from the garbage that was The Last Stand, o’ course).
Now, I will say that this is what The Last Stand wished it had been and should have been. There’s plenty to like here, including some mostly solid visual effects, some very nice (and welcome) ensemble battle scenes, and some heartening character-rounding with Xavier, Hank McCoy (gotta give, I love Kelsey Grammar, but Nick Holt is certainly holding it down as the young Beast), Jean Grey, and even Magneto to a degree. Seriously, every time Jean just up and lifts off, straight into the sky with nary a word, sound, or directional vector, it’s a mild delight I likely shouldn’t be taking (but try and stop me, you savages!). There’s also a definite focus to the narrative, something The Last Stand just couldn’t get right, allowing a smooth storytelling process for the most part.
But that focus is also one of the film’s major deficiencies. The thing about the Dark Phoenix saga is that it’s just part of a longer narrative arc, one that begins with Jean Grey obtaining the Phoenix force and being changed by it and coming to grips with it, and then the entity and the power it grants warps Jean into malevolence, causing extraterrestrial forces to get interested in the affair. It’s a whole thing that begins as a minor space opera, moves into a plateau of personal drama, and then blasts into wild space opera. Unfortunately, that’s just too much for studios these days (at least the ‘90s cartoon gave us at least one multi-part storyline), so I guess we’re always gonna be stuck with a single, over-stuffed film concerning the whole Phoenix affair. It’s the dramatic scope of the story that contributed to The Last Stand coming out so damned crowded and meaningless, but it also shows how very empty Dark Phoenix ultimately feels, and this in turn blasts a spotlight on the writers’ altering of the X-mythos over the course of this current reboot cycle.
Indeed, this shift in ideology is made brutally apparent from the get-go: rather than the normie world hating and fearing the power of mutants (highly understandable, given the massive threats from Magneto and Apocalypse in the previous outings), the X-Men are now apparently the US government’s go-to get-it-done group, complete with the Batman-esque direct line to the president. They’re sent into space to save some astronauts – their mission went mysteriously awry – which provides the perfect opportunity for Jean to absorb what is later sorta identified as the Phoenix Force (never by that name, mind you). Throughout the film, the team’s tenuous status as presidential lackeys is shown to be symbolic of the shaky peace between mutants and normies, one that could disintegrate at a moment’s notice, thanks to the actions of even just one wayward asshat. The racial parallels that founded the franchise back in the ‘60s have evolved to this point, which is nice to see, honestly, but the way things are portrayed continues to feed into the Hollywood-propagated narrative that racial issues are mostly the product of individual actors, rather than systems of prejudice (though it is nice that such systems are at least mentioned here, even if only in reference to said bad actors). The Martin Luther King/Malcolm X philosophical dichotomy seemingly embodied by Xavier and Magneto, respectively, is still mostly in play here, and the leaders’ shortcomings are continually laid bare, which is also nice to see. No plan is perfect in such an imperfect world, kids. But the messages from this intellectual area are often watered down, given the backseat to harshly clichéd interpersonal drama (though, admittedly, this is pretty realistic when you stop and think about it).
Speaking of, this is where the Phoenix Saga has never really worked outside of the comics. Be it the ‘90s cartoon, The Last Stand, or Dark Phoenix, we’re never really given much to work with when it comes to Jean Grey. She’s usually portrayed as a powerful psychic, occasionally considered more powerful than even Xavier (though their relative statuses often fluctuate, depending on the story being told), but more often than not she tends to be shoved into the background, and her relationship with Cyclops is given primacy in her character. I often remember the cartoon version of Jean jumping into the action, only to faint or something from the strain – and then get up and fuck some shit up in the end; the same could be said of Famke Janssen’s portrayal in the original trilogy, though here her position as one of the vertices of a love triangle with Cyclops and Wolverine was played up even more (I always hated this narrative device in the comics, as it did nothing but sew minor high school drama every now and again, and it barely gets the screen time to do even that in the movies). We get very little in the way of build-up to the Phoenix situation, and this includes learning pretty much anything of value about Jean. She’s such a non-entity that the Phoenix Sagas tend to come off as the writers throwing her a bone, letting her do something for once. It’s no different here, as I remember very little about Turner’s turn as Jean from Apocalypse, and she only gets one through-line here: she was separated from her parents in a car accident when she was a child, which resulted in her being taken in by Xavier, who tried to shield her from her trauma by essentially creating mental blocks within her. Is this why she’s such a non-character most of the time, her brain is just too walled-off to give us anything? Regardless, she just sort of comes forward here, gets some power, acts (understandably) like a betrayed kid when she learns the truth about her upbringing, and then throws a temper tantrum fueled by a massive cosmic power. It’s hard for us to give much of a shit, because we barely know her. If this had happened to even Beast or Mystique (the latter benefitting from the out-of-nowhere emphasis placed upon her by the writers to this point), it would have held so much more weight, ‘cause we’ve been with these characters, felt with them, fought with them. Jean, on the other hand, may as well have been Dazzler, who also shows up at one point in this film (please, Marvel, stop trying to make Dazzler happen all the time, she’s never been interesting), for all we know of either of them.
This problem is exacerbated by Chastain’s appearance in the film. She’s some random person taken over by some extraterrestrial force looking to take possession of the Phoenix Force. As far as I know, she’s never given a name throughout the film (though I’ve seen her credited as “Vuk”, I swear I never heard an appellation tossed her way), and her motivations are meek at best, so it makes nothing but sense that she gets under Jean’s skin by simply dangling the power she now wields in front of her, not unlike giving a child soldier an AK and saying “Here, now you have a solution to your problems, do something with the knife”. This creature is so devoid of character that it pains me to see Chastain trying as hard as she normally does to bring her portrayal some dignity; she deserves better. I thought maybe, given her look, that she would be Emma Frost, and we’d maybe get some minor Hellfire Club action, but fuck the source material at this point, we just need to get things over with. Chastain is a mere spark plug for Jean, yet given great unearned importance out of nowhere, not unlike Jean herself. There’s so little to hold onto in terms of characters here that we’re forced to get more invested in the interpersonal garbage this time out, like the inane love triangle between Xavier, Magneto, and Mystique (spare me), the need of the filmmakers to work around Jennifer Lawrence’s desire to leave the franchise for greener pastures, and the ideological rifts between Xavier and Magneto, as well as within Xavier’s own camp. And, sadly, these bits are just as superficially written as the Phoenix portions, so nothing winds up working in the end. Writer/director Simon Kinberg’s distinct lack of visual style exacerbates things, shining a light on the lifelessness of the script and making the fairly quick runtime feel decidedly dull throughout (I’ve never missed the minor flair of Bryan Singer so much in my life).
Dark Phoenix is the unfortunate consequence of a mishandled cinematic franchise that, frankly put, has not lived up to the promise of its source material. The character of Jean Grey continues to be neglected and brushed aside until it’s time for her to become Phoenix, by which point no one cares enough for the story to work. Any of the related interpersonal stuff, particularly between Jean and Cyclops, is rendered mostly meaningless and ineffective, as we’ve hardly spent any quality time with the characters (usually Cyclops is at least given some lip service, but this cycle has kinda relegated him to the sidelines in favor of Beast and Mystique) – shit, when goddamn Quicksilver is considered more rounded and interesting a character, you know you have a problem. It’s not really the fault of Dark Pheonix and its cast and crew that it ultimately fails, but it does little to overcome the systemic issues that brought its failure about – a sort of parallel to the film’s story, no? It’s not a bad film, really, and it certainly benefits from being a competent version of The Last Stand, but there’s nothing there to truly praise, either. All of the honed tools are wasted (particularly the excellent cast), little of consequence really happens (no spoilers here, though I did hint at it earlier…), and it looks as though we’re just coasting along until Disney’s purchase of Fox finally allows Marvel to add the X-Men into the greater cinematic universe they’ve hitherto cultivated. It was no surprise for me that the film underperformed, being beaten out by a similarly lackluster sequel (even the marketing for The Secret Life of Pets 2 hasn’t been invested in succeeding), ‘cause we’ve had no reason to expect anything but disappointment from this franchise since the early years of the previous decade. The film is better than its current box office performance is suggesting, but, then again, I can’t praise it very much myself, I can’t muster much in the way of energy, the film provides precious little impetus therefor, so, I dunno, maybe it’s all as it should be. I shake my head as I type that, given my personal history with the X-franchise over the years, but that’s the situation that exists these days.
See the film if you want or don’t, it hardly matters: It’s short enough that the time investment is minimal, and it’s superficial and empty enough for the mental investment to be similarly minimal. So long as your expectations are low, you’re unlikely to be disappointed in the long run. I’m gonna go and watch the cartoon, finally make use of the DVDs that have sat on my shelf for years, see if it holds up at all. Later, taters.
Allusions of Grandeur 