Film-Review: I Did Not "Hate" X-Men Dark Phoenix, But ... (Minor Spoilers Ahead)

#DarkPhoenix was not a "train-wreck" as folks have said it to be, but the reality is, it had already derailed a few movies ago, and quite frankly has been careening along the edges of the cliff since, precariously so, kept on dried land by nostalgia to the first two movies, as far as I had been concerned. And with this last film under the FOX banner, just toppled itself quietly down said side of cliff, and no one cared if it went down in flames, or exploded like the shit-storm in space promised adventures would look like at the beginning of the movie. It was just not worth the invested emotions anymore.

I did not "hate" it, I just got tired of it.


Featured in the clip directly below - in full SPOILER-mode - is the train-attack & final scene, where the promise of the X-MEN and their powers manifest, where Nightcrawler showed us a glimpse of how visceral the character could have been, where the action over-shadowed every else that had gone on before - which quite frankly was utterly fine and welcomed (in my book), because they were simply beyond the "whining", and to me personally had been a bug-bear at the back of my mind, when their mutant powers had always soon to be "surface-level" on the silver screen, but not "destructive" as I remembered their comicbook counterpart was/is ...



I suppose at the end of the day, all the movies failed to address my own expectations of what I felt they "could" be, rather than being able to accept them for what I had seen on screen, being a verocious reader back in my day.

But to be fair, I tried ... I tried to look beyond the comics (calling it "graphic novels" does not elevate the source, the "source" is already MAGNIFICENT, IMHO), but alas I found it wanting. I look back at XMEN 1 and X2, and miss the days of wonder and awe, actually, now replaced by "mutant-fatigue", milking the "outsider"-status like they knew what it meant. What made them unique and special before, leaves them being whiney and self-important at the end. LOGAN was whiney too, I admit, but it dripped pathos and sentimentality, deepening the "human"-divide, and took the time to laugh at itself (the X-Men comicbook sequences were GOLD), and gave me - a normal, frail and flawed "human being" - able to identify with the emotions, the heartache, and shed tears without the need or assistance of super-hero spandex. What the viewer received, was the emotions they had invested into the characters thru its various films and impressions of the mutant, I felt.

#DarkPhoenix failed to inspire, or give aspiration to the viewers, and all we received in return at the end, was "regret".

It's okay if you do not agree with me, is not worth spending the time arguing over as well. There's the Honest Trailer to watch, and buyables on Amazon, so enjoy :)


Comparatively, I happened to watch the 2018 documentary "Chris Claremont's X-Men" (Watch/Buy here on Amazon) at nearly the same time actually right after Dark Phoenix, back-to-back, and enjoyed it immensely, as it spoke directly to my comicbook geek-boy inside of me, and wondered where that had all went with Dark Phoenix closing up the celluloid chapter ... but perhaps it was as what had "happened" to Claremont, when it stopped being a tale of "humans and mutants", and easily became a property to be commercialised and hawked-off with multiple foil covers, much like the mutiple costumesd X-Men standing around, waiting for their turn to showcase their powers, and their failures, which perhaps understandably was what the Xavier Insititue did not teach: "working together as a team".