Set one’s X-pectations low and each day be reborn. Here we have the sequel to 2016’s Apocalypse, Dark Phoenix, the 12th and all-but-officially-announced final film in Fox’s X-Men franchise. If you aren’t heading in completely devoid of all hope for Simon Kinberg’s X-movie being anything more than simply being better than Brett Ratner’s Last Stand or the aforementioned, nearly winked out of existence by its X-ecrable nature Apocalypse—to be anything more than a mainline X-Men corrective not directed by a seX criminal—you will get exactly what you knew in your heart you would get. If you value this X-perience at one (1) movie ticket, then you will find a neutral sort of satisfaction here. Sometimes one must have confidence one is correct. It helps push us from one day to the neXt.
In Dark Phoenix, Simon Kinberg again attempts—having co-penned Ratner’s 2006 garbage fire with Zac Penn, which first cast Famke Janssen as the hero in crisis—to adapt the 1980 comic book saga by Chris Claremont and John Byrne into a single film with little to no emotional scaffolding assembled by previous entries. Though ultra-uncanny teen telepath Jean Gray (Sophie Turner, fifth-billed as the titular character) disintegrated Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac) back in the ’80s, now in 1992, Jean’s powers are still largely unquantifiable, meaning that over the ten years between films, Professor Xavier (James McAvoy) hasn’t made significant strides in helping his star pupil get her shit together. Granted, that’s a long process, anyone coming to terms with their metaphorical puberty, but for a franchise concerned with time travel and alternate timelines and merging the initial films with the post-First Class cast in a post-MCU cinematic world, Dark Phoenix fails spectacularly to grasp anything chronological.
Ostensibly set in the early ’90s, no aspect of the film, not its tone or art direction or language or music (except for a party scene introducing Dazzler, and even then it sounds more mid-2000s Apple commercial than anything), anchors Dark Phoenix in that era. Beast (Nicholas Hoult) and Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) should both look much older than just south of 30. Magneto (early-40s Michael Fassbender), a child during the Holocaust, should not look like Michael Fassbender, separated only by eight years from the original 2000 X-Men Magneto, played by Ian McKellen, who looks his age. No one looks their age; Dark Phoenix, unlike its predecessors, strands the audience, unstuck in time.
Which isn’t to suggest a fight scene calibrated to No Doubt, but to remember that at least Apocalypse had Turner in a perm. In fact, Kinberg can’t seem to find any way to incorporate the ’90s into his story, so he jettisons all sense of time passed altogether. Which doesn’t matter—none of this matters—except that the X-Men franchise has derived, like the MCU and the DCEU, so much of its sense of scale, its epic nature, from getting the audience to feel just how many decades and civilizations its universe spans. Instead, Kinberg, apparently doing his best to right previous monsters’ wrongs within a comics universe about which he obviously cares deeply, cuts the bloat of past installments down to one, making Dark Phoenix as hyper-focused as possible on Jean’s story. Unfortunately, the only ’90s-friendly aspect of the film is how it treats its ersatz protagonist: as the vessel through which the men in her life get to explore the darker sides of their superpowered nature.
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