X-Men Dark Phoenix Review

X-Men: Dark Phoenix is the last movie in the X-Men franchise from 20th Century Fox studios and it looks like they gave their all in this movie trying to make it the biggest movie of this franchise. They even had to reshoot the entire third act of the movie in trying to make the ending different from another superhero movie. But has that affected the movie? Let me say that certainly have made this the biggest movie of this franchise, but is it the best?

The best movie of this franchise is still X-Men: First Class and that too by a long way. You people will tell me that Logan is the best movie of the franchise. But I have considered that movie and all the other Wolverine movies to belong to the Wolverine Franchise.  Thus X-Men: First Class is the best movie of the X-Men franchise. But does that mean that this is a bad movie. It’s certainly not a good movie.

Let’s see what’s good and bad about the movie. The best thing about the movie is Sophie Turner who plays Jean Grey. She is fabulous as Jean Grey. Another good thing going for the movie is that the plot is better than that of the last Dark Phoenix story, X-Men: The Last Stand, though in itself the plot has not been developed very well. While the story of Jean Grey has been developed to some extent, but it still lacks elements that explain why her character behaves in the way that she does after she absorbs the huge amount of energy. There are also some new characters like that of Jessica Chastain who have not been developed very well and thus the audience does not react towards the villainous ambitions of the character in the same way as they should have. And since she is the main villain in the movie, this plot point not being well developed makes the movie look weak. It’s a shame.

Another point of contention in the movie is that the plot of the movie was publicised as X-Men vs Dark Phoenix. But this element is not very well showcased and in some parts it ends up being Professor Xavier vs Magneto, which we have seen multiple times in the past. And even this angle has not been developed very well to have any effect of the audience. Thus the movie lets down audience's expectations by teasing something that is hardly there in the movie. These plot shortcomings stop the movie from being very enjoyable. However the visual effects and action are good in certain parts, which somewhat save the movie.

The most noticeable performance in the movie is that of Sophie Turner. Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy have also done good jobs while the other actors including Jennifer Lawrence and Nicholas Hoult have just about done their jobs. Nothing spectacular about them. Not too much of a loss for the movie as we have learnt not to expect too much acting skills in these kind of movies. However I must say that Jessica Chastain, who is the main villain, does not exude any villainy and thus seems miscast.

The director of this movie, Simon Kinberg, had written some of the earlier X-Men movies like Days of Future Past, X-Men Apocalypse and even The Last Stand, which was the Dark Phoenix storlyine. It would have been better if someone else had been given the opportunity to write this movie as it appears that he has tried to make this movie very different than the previous one and in that effort has not been able to do justice to the script. The poor writing has creeped into his direction and the movie does not seem to provide anything new compared to the other run of the mill X-Men movies.

So overall while the movie is not good you can still enjoy watching all the action. All the X-Men fans should go ahead and watch this movie before they get drafted into the MCU.

Rating - 2.5 / 5

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