MovieReview

Even in the context of Magneto elevating subway trains, X-Men: Dark Phoenix arrives with some heavy lifting to do. Not only does it land after another lit-up superhero and another franchise endgame: it also has to remedy writer/producer turned director Simon Kinberg’s earlier co-written riff on Chris Claremont’s comics saga, 2006’s brusque X-Men: The Last Stand. Atonement for 2016’s top-heavy X-Men: Apocalypse is another requirement. And, in addition, there’s the sizeable matter of concluding a 19-year film series, with its attendant emotional investments and crises on planet continuity.

Though Kinberg finds some canny ways to lighten that load to a manageable weight, the knock-on effect often feels frustratingly under-nourished. Dialogue, characters and themes alike frequently emerge half-realised, the cosmic scope of Claremont’s comic and the expansive dash of superior X-films whittled away. Despite some impressive set-pieces and committed showings from the (outgoing?)
X-Men: First Class crew, X-Men: Days of Future Past’s pop-art pizzazz and Logan’s aggressive emotional wallop are absent, resulting in an often blunt franchise full-stop that only intermittently takes flight.

Kinberg’s smarter move is to counter the ill-balanced stodge of The Last Stand and Apocalypse with a tighter focus on Jean Grey. We begin in 1975, where young Jean manifests a latent urge to change the channel on her parents’ car radio… One tragedy later, the power of bullet-point plotting ushers us to 1992, where James McAvoy’s Charles Xavier dispatches a mutant team to save a space shuttle’s crew from a solar-flare encounter. This (impressively mounted) gamble nearly kills Jean (Sophie Turner); she survives, only to discover a new, mysterious force inside her – a force that makes her a target for some body-snatching aliens.