By Brett Blake Now that Disney has consumed the 20th Century Fox film studio, the road is paved for the fabled X-Men characters to eventually join the Marvel Cinematic Universe proper. Before that happens, though, we have one final X-Men tale from Fox, and despite the overwhelmingly bad response from the critical community, DARK PHOENIX is actually better and more tonally interesting than the very sour reaction would lead one to believe. Set in 1992, DARK PHOENIX finds the X-Men presiding over a relatively peaceful world that has embraced the existence of mutants. When a sinister alien force invades the body and mind of Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), the team’s powerful telepath, Professor Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and sometimes-ally, sometimes-enemy Erik Lehnsherr AKA Magneto (Michael Fassbender) must grapple with the implications of Jean’s extraordinary powers... which are spiraling out of her control and threaten not just the X-Men, but humanity itself. On a storytelling level, there are some compelling ideas, here. The way Jean’s situation divides the X-Men team and puts them internally at-odds provides some solid drama, as does the way in which the story presents a portrait of Professor X as an incredibly well-intentioned man, yes, but one who is not without flaw and significant blind spots. Tonally, DARK PHOENIX is not a breezy or lightweight lark; rather, it is attempting (often successfully, sometimes inartfully) to be a fairly emotionally mature look at what unfathomable power can do to a person. One thing the movie also does get very right is the way in which it presents the X-Men working together as a team, with all of their strange and fantastic abilities complementing and enhancing each other. The finale, which features the majority of the characters together in a single location and focused on a particular task, is arguably the best “team” fight sequence these movies have given us in a long time. Perhaps the single best element of the movie in my estimation is also the one that is proving to be quite divisive -- Sophie Turner’s performance as Jean. I have seen her work here decried by some as unconvincing and stiff, but I really don’t know what movie those people saw. Turner is great here, painting an extremely nuanced and finely-calibrated picture of what essentially amounts to a form of superhero mental illness. There’s a feeling of struggle that Turner brings to her Jean Grey, this sense that she is fighting with this force inside of her that she can’t control and which frightens her... but which also gives her almost unimaginable power that can easily seduce her. She puts quite a bit of range on display, as the role requires her to have rather pronounced mood swings of a sort, and she navigates that stuff very carefully and effectively. DARK PHOENIX is far (far!) from perfect, but when it works at its best, it works because of Sophie Turner selling the hell out of her character’s journey. McAvoy is also excellent, chewing through the quite dramatic meal that the story gives Xavier this time out. Fassbender’s always a strong presence, and he does his very best to deliver the script’s requirements of Magneto and Professor X going back and forth (again) over their worldviews; wisely, the story makes their conflict here primarily about what should be done with Jean, which gives that tension a more intimate and personal flavor, but even taking that into account, it does start to feel like we’ve been in this territory before. In terms of the rest of the cast, Jennifer Lawrence is still checked-out as Mystique (she hasn’t been invested in this role since 2014’s DAYS OF FUTURE PAST), but the filmmakers recognize this and have structured the story accordingly, so it’s not a glaring issue. Tye Sheridan as Cyclops, Jean’s concerned boyfriend, does get some effective and emotional material to play, but it almost feels as though he’s not focused on as much as one might expect. Nicholas Hoult, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Evan Peters, and Alexandra Shipp all get moments to shine (either in the action or the drama), and they acquit themselves just fine. As the mysterious villain who eventually emerges in the story, Jessica Chastain is given relatively little to work with; though she seems to be game, her material is by far the weakest element of the movie, and this stuff is the closest the movie comes to being objectively bad. I have never been the biggest X-Men comics fan, so changing source material storylines has never been a hurdle for me, but I know there are a lot of people out there who have wanted to see the Dark Phoenix story “done right” in the cinematic format after 2006’s X-MEN: THE LAST STAND cherry picked only a few small elements and more or less ignored everything else about the famed comic book story arc. So it’s unfortunate that I have to hesitantly report that DARK PHOENIX does this again; it is not in any way a faithful adaptation of the original story, instead choosing some very broad strokes components and doing its own thing (again). It’s kind of baffling, because one would have thought that the rationale for tackling Dark Phoenix again (only 13 years after it was already done once) was so that the tale could be more directly translated onto the screen from the comics. But nope! Another of the unquestionable highlights of the movie is its score from Hans Zimmer. It’s a “blender” score, with Zimmer dropping in bits and pieces from several of his previous works (there’s quite a bit of ANGELS & DEMONS, INTERSTELLAR, and DUNKIRK in here) but in just the right proportions and with just the correct amount of freshness added on top. It’s a propulsive, driving, and often ambient sort of musical soundscape that he creates, and it works very well. His central motif for Jean Grey underlines the emotion of the story effectively, too. Ultimately, there are definitely some “mixed bag” elements to be found in DARK PHOENIX, but I can’t deny I had a good time with this. There are much worse ways Fox’s X-Men series could have ended, and the quality of the performances - especially Sophie Turner’s - make it impossible to completely write this off.
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