'Dark Phoenix' Is Undoubtedly the Worst 'X-Men' Movie Ever

When it was announced that Disney was acquiring Fox, it immediately made Dark Phoenix, which was in production then, meaningless.  It didn’t matter anymore since X-Men is going to be rebooted for the Marvel Cinematic Universe anyway.  Most fans (me included) were already looking forward to that, and just wanted to get it over with Dark Phoenix already.

Thus, from the get go, Dark Phoenix had this going against it.  With the status of being Fox’s last X-Men installment (as far as the series is concerned.  Spin-offs don’t count; New Mutants is still slated for next year) forced upon it, it couldn’t afford to be mediocre or even just good.  In order to be relevant and overcome that general sentiment of apathy that the Disney-Fox merger set for it, it needed to leave a mark – to be unforgettable.

And it indeed succeeded in being unforgettable – in distinguishing itself from all of the other movies in the franchise.  But for all the wrong reasons.  Dark Phoenix leaves a lasting mark by being the worst X-Men movie ever made.

I’m not exaggerating. Dark Phoenix is worse than X-Men: The Last Stand, a movie that according to the consensus had botched up the job of adapting the “Dark Phoenix Saga” (for the record, despite its problems, I still find several things to enjoy about The Last Stand.  I don’t like it, but I don’t hate it either) – which is the very same classic comic book storyline that Dark Phoenix is obviously based on.  And, yep, it’s also worse than the X-Men Origins: Wolverine – which, prior to Dark Phoenix, was widely considered as the worst X-Men movie.

Now, I thought it was apparent from the trailers that this movie was going to be bad.  Still, even if I didn’t really care for it, I’ve been a fan of this franchise nonetheless – after all, it was the one which jumpstarted two decades ago the superhero blockbuster cinema as we now know it – and so, I had my fingers crossed, hoping that the trailers were just bad and that it would turn out being great and would end the Fox X-Men series with a bang.  Unfortunately, the actual film is in fact way worse than what the trailers made it to be.

Heck, Dark Phoenix is the worst superhero film I’ve seen since the last Fantastic Four movie.

The writing is atrocious – yielding boring characterizations, a plot that’s all over the place, and some of the cringiest dialogue of the year.  In addition, the sloppiness of its efforts to display basic continuity with the previous films is bothersome.  Now, I recognize that the X-Men film series has always been plagued by major continuity errors and inconsistencies, but in the past, it got around the worse of them by delivering generally interesting narratives in exchange for these offenses – most of the time.  The contradictions in Dark Phoenix, however, are Transformers-level crap.  For example, early in the movie, Jean Gray (Sophie Turner) acquires the Phoenix Force (depicted in this movie as a Green Lantern Parallax-esque cosmic cloud… why?) during a space rescue mission.  But wait a minute… didn’t she go full Phoenix already against Apocalypse in the climax of X-Men: Apocalypse?  Other notable contradictions are out-of-character choices that the characters make just because.

It’s also unable to distract the audience from these problems by throwing dazzling spectacles at them – for it has none to throw.  It’s an ugly movie.  The special effects are dull, the production design is substandard, the cinematography is bland, and the action is unimaginative.  Dark Phoenix seriously looks like a low-budget knock-off at times.  One would immediately realize the movie’s lack of aesthetic and visual appeal once the X-Men costumes are seen.  After showing off distinctive 90’s-era costumes at the end of Apocalypse, the team reverts back to matching uniforms (based on Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s early 2000s comic book run) – which would have been fine, if they aren’t so noticeably ill-fitting.

If this movie has one redeeming factor, it would be the performances.  Not that the performances as a whole were great, but because they were so bad that they became hilarious at some point.  I feel that only James McAvoy delivered a genuinely compelling performance in this film.  Meanwhile, it seemed like the rest of the cast – aware that the Disney-Fox merger made this film worthless and recognizing that the script on hand was garbage – checked out, proceeding to deliver laughable, half-assed performances.  Most notable of all was Jessica Chastain’s.  Between her performance in this movie and her performance in The Huntsman: Winter’s War, she has definitely earned the title of “Queen of Entertainingly Bad Acting.”  But the scene which made me laugh the hardest was the one where Magneto and Jean Gray were wrestling for control of a chopper, as Michael Fassbender looked utterly ridiculous during the whole thing.  I also busted my gut laughing with Kodi Smit-McPhee’s depiction of Nightcrawler going berserk.

So, that’s that.  The Fox’s X-Men series has finally come to a close.  Of course, it’s sad that Dark Phoenix couldn’t give it a strong finish.  But, honestly, it’s hard to be upset about it when what we can now look forward to in the future is the debut – at long last! – of the greatest superhero team of all time in the MCU.