Director: Simon Kinberg
Distributor: 20th Century Fox
Duration: 114 minutes
X-Men: Dark Phoenix (Blu-ray) – Movie Review
After X-Men: Apocalypse it became clear that Sophie Turner’s task in the coming movie would become increasingly difficult. The young actress, who gained a lot of popularity with her role in Game of Thrones, became the new Jean Grey and fans of the series will know that this character will eventually become the Phoenix. This brings us to the next installment of the series, namely X-Men: Dark Phoenix, which puts Jean Grey in the spotlight, as she learns to control her newly gained powers, having to decide if she will turn to the dark side, or keep her presence in the light.
The plot of the movie is actually quite simple. The movie will start off with the X-Men’s help being requested to save a space shuttle in distress. The shuttle has lost all its navigation functions due to what seems to be a solar flare. The team saves everyone on board, safe for one astronaut, who wasn’t in the main compartment. To leave no man behind, Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) has to go inside the shuttle to keep the structure intact. Sadly, she isn’t able to make it back to the team’s jet before the solar flare hits the shuttle. She then absorbs the power of the solar flare, only to find herself harnessing a new, fairly uncontrollable, power. Due to this, she becomes rather unstable, as all the walls Xavier (James McAvoy) put up in her mind, to save her from her past memories, come crumbling down. In the blink of an eye, she is tearing down what Xavier has done for the mutant population, by battling it out in the middle of a populated area, attacking police officers in the process. In the meantime, an alien force hits our Earth, in pursuit of the power Jean has been given.
The flow of the movie is a bit strange. You’ll have a rather slow opening, only to keep the momentum very slow until the action-packed finale. You can’t but help yourself feel like the director focused on all the wrong aspects of the movie. This is then confirmed by watching the lengthy making-of feature, where it’s all about sets, that are only used once, or special effects that are total shit, rather than focus on the story, the acting performances, the overall build-up of the movie, etc. You’ll have to keep awake until the action starts pouring through the cracks of the foundation of this latest X-Men movie, which is a terrible shame.
Acting performances of the movie are actually top-notch. James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, and Jennifer Lawrence probably have the most experience of all the cast members, and they do carry the movie for the most part. Other cast members were also introduced in the previous movies, and they also do a decent job, it’s still noticeable how big the differences between the cast members are. We have Evan Peters, who played an immensely funny Quicksilver in the previous movies, only to be kicked to the background, performing a minor role. In this movie, Sophie Turner is the main focus and truth be told, she might actually just be who drags the movie down. It’s not due to bad acting per se, she doesn’t radiate the same presence as Famke Jansen in the original trilogy, or even the comic book character, who has already changed her physique multiple times over the years. Can we call this bad casting? Not really. We just believe that a more ideal candidate could have been found, instead of riding on the success of someone’s stage presence in a popular TV-series.
The Blu-ray doesn’t come with too many special features, as you’ll only have deleted scenes, commentaries, theatrical trailers, a short snippet with Beast in the lead and the making-of feature. That being said, the making-of sequence is quite long, as it spans over an hour and twenty minutes, ranging from several different aspects of the movie, how scenes were constructed, how certain effects were done, etc. Overall you won’t be getting that much new information about the story, but it’s still fun to see that some effort was made to construct a lengthy feature about how the movie came to life.
Conclusion
X-Men: Dark Phoenix is a mediocre entry in the series and even though the previous movie, Apocalypse, wasn’t a stellar movie either, it made this reboot rather entertaining and showed promise. This new movie has a rather slow flow, some bland character choices and it doesn’t really know what it wants to achieve or do. If you loved the previous movies, you’ll get some entertainment out of this one, but we reckon you’d also feel like many things could have been handled differently in order to come up with a better end-product.
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