Review of Dark Phoenix (2019) by Mattyice — 09 Jun 2019

This movie is not nearly as bad as people are making it out to be. Nonetheless, it is still a mediocre film compared to both other superhero films and the rest of the 20th Century Fox X-Men films. While Fassbender and Turner give pretty solid performances, most other performances come off as either boring like Hoult and McAvoy's or just bad like Lawrence and Chastain's. The scale and world of this film is exceptionally small too, which is just not acceptable in an age of cinematic universes with great scale and worlds. The writing is hit or miss as well, like most of the other Simon Kinberg-written X-Men films. The action sequences are pretty good (with the redone third act train sequence being surprisingly great) and at the very least the story flows well. However, it is also humorless without enough substance to back up the lack of humor found in darker superhero movies like the Dark Knight and Logan. Finally, a big problem is the fact that it screws up the timeline. Outside of the pointless, nonsensical generation-hopping, the film totally disregards the final timeline set up in Days of Future past creating massive plot holes (although honestly it doesn't matter much now that this franchise is ending).

Overall, the X-Men franchise deserved to end with either Logan or Days of Future Past (with the adventures with these X-Men happening between First Class and Days of Future Past without decade hopping to avoid age issues). It certainly didn't deserve this and it is sad to see the longest running superhero franchise see a bittersweet end.