After a 10 minute warm-up, giving a bit of a backstory, an exciting early development occurs where the X-Men are persuaded by the POTUS to take an unsafe outer-space voyage in their own plane to investigate and rescue the crew of a mysteriously stopped shuttle mission where all communications strangely died.
After this, the movie dwindles into one big gritty drama fest with very little action. Massively underplaying the potential of the movie based on the awesome core concept that’s scarcely even a significant factor in the minute-by-minute script of this movie.
Quite a contrast with X-Men: Apocalyse, which builds up nicely and ends on a high – this movie attempts to start on a high then forgets all about it and bores us with way too much cheap emotional stuff. Then when there is action, it’s generally good X-Men fighting other good X-Men without thinking too much about it. What on earth kind of mindset is this movie trying to fester in our children? A lack of thought process, a lack of cohesive mindset, and a tendency to fight violently with good friends for the pettiest of reasons, it seems.
Arguably the best scene of the movie comes 90 minutes in, when the X-Men team finally decide to work together against the aliens, after the humans finally decide to let the captive X-Men free after most of their men have been killed by the aliens. I guess that’s the silver lining to the dark grey cloud that pretty much covers this entire movie. This scene then morphs into the grand finale battle between Jean Grey (played by Sophie Turner these days) and the leader of the aliens, after a bit of an emo-fest of a telepathic chat between Grey and Xavier. The grand finale battle itself is a bit of a girl-power fest too – it even goes so far as to debate the power of being emotional. I would have liked to see some better tai chi postures, to add a touch of realism to the fight scenes which are all about projecting energy, which to the trained eye look quite silly due to being full of typical rookie mistakes like bending the hand back too far when doing a pushing action which to the untrained looks like extra powerful posturing but to the trained eye is just a very weak way to direct energy and is a potential broken wrist. The final fight scene ends with a big explosion where nobody knows what happened to either one of them. This, followed by 5 minutes of common drama, make the grand finale somewhat anticlimactic and the entire movie significantly weaker than X-Men: Apocalypse, and one of the weakest X-Men movies of all time – possibly the worst one. I’m going to rate it Bang Average considering it’s got some pretty good bits to it, but even that may be being a bit generous since it’s 2 hours long and the good bits are few and far between, and what’s between is really quite bad so keep the fast-forward button handy especially if you’ve seen this movie before.
It’s tempting to liken the disappointment of this movie, with the disappointment of Avengers: Endgame from the same year, since both followed on from the cast and storyline of a much better movie beforehand. In the case of Endgame, it was a poor “part 2” to the much better Avengers: Infinity Wars (“part 1”), and in the case of Dark Phoenix, it was a poor continuation of storyline from the much better X-Men: Apocalypse where Sophie Turner’s character Phoenix / Jean Grey showed her true power to save the day at the end.
