Thursday, June 13, 2019

Dark Phoenix - Movie Review


Starring James McAvoy, Sophie Turner, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, Jessica Chastain, Tye Sheridan, Evan Peters, Alexandra Shipp and Kodi Smit-McPhee.
Written & Directed by Simon Kinberg.

★★½ 

We’ve had three X-Men movies, three Wolverine movies, and this is the fourth X-Men First Class movie. Between this and Apocalypse, it’s a good argument for the franchise to hibernate for a few years and come back rebooted in the MCU.

Why is this movie retreading the plot from X-Men: The Last Stand? For one, I’d argue it was the worst movie of all of them so they wanted to retell this story right. For another, the events of Days of Future Past screwed up the timeline, so the events of the Patrick Stewart trilogy wouldn’t have happened that way in this timeline.

I did find it strange this movie takes place in 1992. That means it’s been 29 years since McAvoy, Fassbender, Lawrence, etc. were in X-Men: First Class, and there’s no effort to age them accordingly. Oh well.

So how is it? Well, for starters, maybe the producers thought Sophie Turner’s big from Game of Thrones so it’d pay off to make her the star of the show. But this means other, more famous actors take a back seat to her in the action. Jennifer Lawrence seems like she’d rather be anywhere else than doing another one of these movies. Michael Fassbender doesn’t show up until a good 45 minutes in (but when he does show up, the movie is better for it.)

I liked it a little more than X-Men: Apocalypse. The third act final battles are more satisfying, especially the part on the train. But ultimately I’m glad this was the last outing.

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