So I sat down to watch… X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019)

Oh boy. Where to even start?

I guess I’ll start as I usually do, with a confession. I really like the X-Men, ever since I saw that cartoon opening in the early 1990s, I’ve been fascinated by their stories. Some of said stories are among my favorite in anything, and I like most of their movies. The first two from the early 00s were brilliant for their time -though probably don’t hold up all that great- and First Class and Days of Future Past were fantastic. X-Men: The Last Stand was a bad film that I still managed to watch twice in the movies, and I even liked Apocalypse. There, I said it.

This doesn’t count as a movie, and you know it.

X-Men: The Last Stand was full of cringe-worthy and “hey look kids, memes!” moments, and it had a plot that made little sense -like why did Jean ever kill Cyclops and off-screen at that? But it was watchable, and still had at least one memorable scene of Wolverine telling Jean he loves her right before he kills her. Still, it was a bad take on one of the most iconic X-Men stories.

This newer take, it’s not just bad. Bad can be fun. It’s bad and boring.

So when it comes to talking about Dark Phoenix, I guess I should start at the beginning. At the end of X-Men: Apocalypse we saw that Jean Grey had hidden powers that even she didn’t know, and she was strong enough to take out the world’s strongest mutant. Then Dark Phoenix comes along and it’s like that never happened. Still, we start with the same Phoenix story from the comic books where the X-Men need to go to outer space, and this time they have to do so in order to satiate Xavier’s ego. Cool, so we’re tying the original Phoenix origin saga with the 2000s version of Xavier who’s bit of a prick. I can dig that.

I just love this panel.

Then Jean goes all Phoenix-y because of her interaction with something, which kinda looked like a broken cosmic egg though I doubt that was a nod to the pre-Socratics, despite the fact that she already had her Phoenix powers in the previous movie. Whatever George, it’s a comic book movie, stop over-analyzing everything.

Following that Jean finds out what we already knew, Prof X is a douche and he lied to her about what happened to her parents and how she was responsible for killing them because drama. I guess going with the “Prof X has the hots for Jean” is too creepy for the big screen. Jean throws a hissy fit, tells Prof X he’s not her real dad, then goes over to Magneto’s discount Genosha and asks if she can crash on his couch.

If it seems that I’m skipping out on large chunks of the movie, it’s because it’s frankly so goddamn forgettable. Nothing really interesting happens for large chunks of the movie. A movie about a godlike being that has come to Earth, latching on to a young girl that’s trying to control it despite her flawed human nature. How can you make that boring?

Oh, at some point Jean kills Mystique by accident because having the powers of the Phoenix apparently means that you forget you’re a telekinetic. Of course that makes sense.

This is also the only ””””evil”””” act that Jean commits in the ENTIRE MOVIE. Why even call the movie “Dark” Phoenix? In The Last Stand she murders both her lover and her father figure in cold blood, in the comic books she destroys an entire planet just for kicks. What does the embodiment of the evil laying inside all humans do in her eponymous movie? She accidentally kills a teammate that she never shared more than 10 words in 3 movies with. Compelling storytelling, I wonder what they’ll come up with next.

Then the American army shows up at Maggie Neato’s makeshift Genosha because reasons, and try to bully the man who controls all metals with their metal bullets. Make it stop, somebody make it stop.

Props if you’re one of the five people that still remember this.

Forgot to mention that while we’re watching Dark Phoenix, somebody’s remaking Invasion of the Body Snatchers in the background, but nobody really cares since the only person that takes up any screen time in it is Jessica Chastain. The snatchers also mention that they’re after the Phoenix force themselves because apparently we’re doing a crossover episode. Little Shop of Horrors/Spider-Man: Kraven’s Last Hunt anyone?

The twists keep on coming, as these beings are shown to be super-strong and super-smart, and they’d better be if they plan to control the power that fuels creation in the entire universe. They call humans primitive, but surely they mean us lowly Homo Sapiens, right? Not our offshoot, Homo Superior, surely they know of all the many and powerful mutants that live on Earth. Yeah, they can’t be that dumb nor the screenwriters phoning it in that bad, right? Keep the faith, George.

Maybe they could just challenge her to a best of 5 set.

Buuuut… after the X-Men and Magneto’s Crew of Unnamed Mutants featuring Rastafari Omega Red catch up with Jeannie, that’s when things get hilarious. Get this: Jean Grey, the Phoenix, disappears for the entire last third of the movie. Her movie! She’s not in it. She literally doesn’t show up again until the very last minutes.

So what we’re left of in the climax of the movie is how America’s Army of Redshirts teams up with Magneto’s uncanny army of mutant Redshirts, in order to take on a seemingly-endless army of body snatching Redshirts. I just love low-stake situations in my superhero movies! Also, did the body snatchers steal the Dothraki’s cloning machine? Because damn.

Then somebody reminds Sophie Turner that she’s the protagonist of the movie and she wakes up from her plot-induced coma, at which point she uses her clearly-defined space magic powers to send Jessica Chastain back to her Veronica Mars days. She follows that by boldly declaring that she doesn’t want to be part of the X-Men anymore, she’ll watch them from above. Above the walls of Winterfell, I guess.

The movie ends with the X-Men chilling at their version of Disneyland (there has to be a name for this), with the Phoenix soaring high above them. No joke, a guy at the movie theater I was in laughed HARD at this scene, and I can’t say I blame him. Thanks to him, I realized what a bad movie I was watching.

Because, damnit, I wanted to like this movie. It’s the last X-Men movie we’re gonna get from their stand-alone universe, who knows what kind of version we’ll get in the mainline Marvel Cinematic Universe one. Marvel’s X-Men books haven’t been good in a decade. This was their last hurrah, it should have been a love letter to the franchise that started it all back in 2000.

But all we got was a shit sandwich. With stale shit.

There’s a reason people love The Dark Phoenix Saga. There’s a reason I love it, and here is where I’ll share that with you. It’s a story about Apotheosis. About humans having access to the divine, squaring the circle and all that. It’s about what could happen if a human being were given access to unlimited power.

Jean Grey is a fundamentally good person, despite the ambiguity suggested by her last name. Even during the post-modern era of the comic books where mostly everyone got a darker side to them, Jean Grey remained that fundamentally decent person she’s always been.

But she’s still human, and when she gets access to the powers of the Phoenix, that is too much for her to handle, too confusing to control. She needed someone to help her with this, to guide her, but no one around her could relate to her plight, no one else could understand what she was going through. So she inevitably loses control; she goes from being the Phoenix, a symbol of life and hope, to the Dark Phoenix, a symbol of hatred and death.

She even took 4th-wall-breaking to the next level.

When she does eventually descent into madness and evil, she doesn’t just twirl her mustache and starts speaking in an accent, it happens because she is taken advantage by others, evil people. She gives in because they are the only ones who claim they can help her, and she felt that very human need to belong. She is confused, and flawed, as we all are, and she succumbs to her worst instincts, her worst fears. This doesn’t happen over a few panels, she doesn’t simply hear her doorbell ring and go apeshit. It happens slowly, gradually, and it’s heartbreaking to see this happen to your favorite character, but it feels completely understandable and justified.

The same thing would probably happen to all of us were we in a similar situation. But we can’t help Jean, nobody can. All we can do is watch and slowly turn the pages, knowing that nothing good can happen. And that is why this is such a good story.

Maybe one day we’ll get a good version of this story on the silver screen. Or maybe we won’t. Who knows? We’ll always have the original, at least.

Yes, I’m still bitter about Game of Thrones, how could you tell?